Efurbishment Ltd is proud to have helped Teachers TV win first prize in the web division of the 2007 Japan Prize. This “International Educational Programme Contest was established by NHK in 1965 with aims of contributing to the advancement of educational programs around the world and the promotion of international understanding and cooperation.”
From the Jury comments:
The winning website Teachers TV gives this generation of teachers an online & on-air world that helps them stay cutting edge in their classroom which in turn helps them understand the online world their students are immersed in.
The jury found this site for teachers contains a wealth of information delivered in a refreshingly simple interface. The site architecture, including the overall organization of the content, internal and external cross-linking allows the users to find needed information effectively with multiple entry points. Teachers TV allows teachers to share best practices of teaching and to utilize over 2,000 videos and ancillary materials. This site allows teachers to create an extensive online community through comments, feedback, and rating in order to share best practices. The Teachers TV Associates program allows 700 teachers to play an ongoing role in development of the site, having dialogue with the site producers. Beginner teachers can watch videos that role model classroom techniques and then post feedback on whether it actually works for them while older teachers can use this site to update their current teaching practices.
The challenges for teachers going into the digital age are enormous - not only do teachers need their own awareness raised with regards to the web but they all need to easily access the digital tools that help create an online community of their own. Teachers TV gives an educator easy access to videos, podcasts, RSS, and social network tools. These are the tools used everyday by their students and when a teacher logs on and uses Teachers TV they can access an online site whose depth and wealth is outstanding and yet simple and easy to use. For that reason we are pleased to present them the 2007 Japan Prize Web Award to Teachers TV.
If you're a company or organisation thinking about switching from Windows to Linux, http://www.linuxwins.com/ may have something for you. This regularly updated blog documents successful switches including the French Parliament, HSBC bank and schools in Japan, Russia or California.
Efurbishment is pleased to have helped Teachers TV win a 'Highly Commended' award in the Government and Information category of the 2006 BIMAs (British Interactive Media Association awards). The Teachers' TV website was also shortlisted in the Education and Training category.
The Teachers TV website was selected as a finalist in the 2006 Japan Prize. This “International Educational Programme Contest was established by NHK in 1965 with aims of contributing to the advancement of educational programs around the world and the promotion of international understanding and cooperation.”
Why do I think Drupal is worthy of the Packt Open Source Content Management System Award?
“Excellent feature set, clever code, great community. Drupal is a modular solution with a large, active community providing modules for almost any web content problem. Drupal’s taxonomy system makes easy the management of large amounts of multi-faceted content. Taxonomy driven RSS comes as standard. Community features are a breeze. Throw in a bit of AJAX and you have a very solid platform for your Web 2.0 applications.”
Efurbishment provided technical consultancy and some implementation services to Rocket-Media Ltd as they re-implemented RUDI (the Resource for Urban Design Information). RUDI offers over 5000 pages and images to its large subscription only user base. The site went live last week. Congratulations!
The following are notes from a session by Douglas Bowman, the first speaker at Webstock 2006. My note-taking rambles somewhat, but as Doug finished speaking I was left wondering "when is a standard not a standard?" Doug presented an interesting idea that raises more questions than it answers (e.g. Should these common practice class names/ids be translated between languages? Should sites offer a patterns discovery service?):
Doug and others (e.g. John Allsopp) have analysed the markup of a number of web sites. In some cases they observed a tendency for interface developers to use consistent identifiers and class names in similar page regions (“header”, “footer” etc.). In other cases there are marked disparities.
Doug suggests there may be value in a distillation of best practices; the derivation of a common approach to markup; a semantic web with a lower case “s”. As demonstrated by CSS Zen Garden, a regularised approach to markup need not constrain the designer. The approach could lead to more efficient deployments and the enabling of user created stylesheets. He sees benefits for:
- Developers: consistency, interoperability, time-saving
- Vendors: reliable targets, possibilities for customisation and autogeneration
- Users: skinnable applications, user stylesheets
Borrowing from Christopher Alexander's work in A Pattern Language, and from Java patterns, Doug proposes the identification of various commonly used patterns:
- Site patterns: blog, wiki, academic site, store, application, etc.
- Page patterns: contact, news, map, results, etc.
- Module patterns: profile, entries, archive list, etc.
- Interaction patterns: drag + drop, expand/collapse, inline edit, etc.
Doug identifies a gap between page and module patterns. Doug recommended the O'Reilly book Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell, and noted the resources available on webpatterns.org, lukew.com, SixApart, and the Yahoo! Developer Network (“action patterns”).
Doug stressed that this common approach must be neither prescriptive, nor limiting. He has no intention of producing a standard for use in validating documents. He visualised the distillation process as a de-centralised collaboration: asking questions, seeking answers, documenting, sharing and learning.To avoid starting too early down the wrong track, Doug defined four principles:
- Start simple
- Identify common patterns
- Re-use popular taxonomy
- Enable global participation
[Doug went on to hint at the possibilities of microformats such as hcard, hcalendar and XOXO, noting the value of these coupled with a Firefox plugin such as Tails]
There's an interesting article by Nate Koechley over on the Yahoo Developer Network entitled [weblink:45/27]. Nate proposes a "broader and more reasonable" definition of support, where a graduated model of browser compliance encourages web developers to support all browsers.
Efurbishment is pleased to have helped Victoria Real (now part of Endemol UK) win “Best Public Sector Service” award for the Teachers TV website at the 2006 Revolution Magazine Awards. The ceremony was held in the Grosvenor Hotel, Park Lane, London on March 17th: a great night out celebrating with the VR team.
Today I was granted access to the Drupal contributors' CVS repository. This permission enables Efurbishment to actively participate in the future development of Drupal. I intend to start by adding 'prettification' of email archives to the mailhandler module. Following that I'd like extend the modules offering integration with [weblink:34/25] and [weblink:34/26]. Thanks Dries!
