Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Second free Social Media Surgery for Birmingham voluntary organisations

Published
by
Antonio
on November 28, 2008
in Events and Technology
. 1 Comment

As the post title implies, last night was the second social media surgery for Birmingham based Voluntary Organisations. The first was originally part of Blog Action Day 2008.

Jon Bounds at the Social Media Surgery

There were many people there and enough talented social media experts to help them with their needs. After a few technical issues I helped Zayneb get to grips how to use social media tools. Like many people she had heard about Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress etc but didn’t really know how to effectively use them.

I think that one of the main results of today, as well as introducing people to social media, is that we connected them to a network of people who can help make the experience of using social media a great one.

Open Of Course

Published
by
Antonio
on November 21, 2008
in Resources and Technology
. 0 Comments

For the individual looking to learn about how to use software or even learn a language I recommend the Open Of Course website. What’s great about the tutorials on this website is that they’re completely free. What you essentially have are complete courses on a particular topic that are free to use. Another similar website is FLOSS Manuals.

I think what both of these websites lack are downloadable lesson plans. Although these tutorials are great for individuals it’d be great if they could be adapted to teach lots of people at a time. I may have a go at writing some so that the whole community can benefit from open source

Using Pencil

Published
by
Antonio
on November 4, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I recently finished doing a series of animation workshops. For this we were using Macs and lots of preinstalled software. As an experiment we decided to try out Pencil for doing digital drawings. Here’s what the website has to say about it:

Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.

Picture drawn in PencilI’d stumbled across Pencil earlier in the year when I was trying to find other similar software. What I like about Pencil is a drawing tool is that everything you create is in vectors and the interface is simple and easy to use. The children using the software picked it up quite quickly without much assistance. Another user tried using it in the classroom with great success.

On the other hand Pencil does have its shortcomings. There’s no file format so you have to open files via the program’s interface. It is beta software so there’s always a few bugs to iron out. I think the biggest hurdle to overcome is .jpg export. At the moment I’m getting a few errors and instead have to export to .png.

If you’re looking for a free/open source solution for doing simple animations you could definitely give Pencil a try. If you’re after something just to do drawings try Inkscape instead.