Adobe Audition, SoundSlides, iMovie, Avid, Quicktime, Word, Excel, iPhoto, and Garageband were all involved in the making of my project. Some experiences were better than others, and several times I was ready to throw everything out of a window.
I am pleased with my interactive map of California to go with my story on union wars. It’s an important element in my package that illustrates the scope of the civil war rocking the Service Employees International Union, the largest and fastest growning union in North America. Unions are a foreign subject for many readers, so I was relieved when a colleague suggested I check out Dipity.com, which lets users create an interactive timeline. This timelime, coupled with the map, brings new depth to my text and audio stories. I can bring readers deeper into context in a way that’s educational, insightful and, dare I say… fun.
Who has ever used a perfect piece of software or web application, free or not? This year, for various News21 purposes, we opted to test Ning as our social network/proect management/distance learning collaborative space. From the first three years of News21, the four incubators used BaseCamp to limited success and adoption. In the new era, with eight incubators, we needed something that helped in our efforts at online learning (
You might be wondering what exactly is going on in the photo above. Simply put, this is an image that I took to use as my notes as I build the Energy Challenge portion of our site. At a deeper level, this image is a diagram of the structure of the model-view-controller (MVC) PHP framework I am using for the Energy Challenge. This MVC utilizes the Smarty template system to display the actual Web pages.