Testing out blogging with euforic, April 2008

our staff training

2008-04-21T18:18:00.001+02:00

Looks like word. Uses italics.

Adding in a video

equalinrights' upcoming e-discussions

2008-04-11T16:18:00.007+02:00

During April-June 2008, equalinrights will host a new e-discussion series on human rights-based development (HRBD). It would be terrific to have some new colleagues from the euforic training join us for these discussions!

Here's the information (also on our website), send an email to my colleague Joanne Coysh at coysh@equalinrights.org for more information or to register.

Discussion Topic	Overview	Facilitator	Date

Child Rights Programming	Strategies to adopt a (child) rights based approach in organizations. The aim of this discussion would be to share experiences of those who took the challenge and what lessons they learnt from the challenge. There is also need to find out the precondition for success and the suggestions that can be made to colleagues in other organisation to get on board and influence the culture.	Wout Visser, War Child	15 April

The Law and Human Rights Based Development (HRBD)	While the law should be used as an instrument of the people, it is rarely used as such. The complex legal language and inaccessible mechanisms mean that it is often out of reach for communities demanding justice. The is discussion aims to bring together development and human rights practitioners, lawyers and non-lawyers to consider the ways and means to enable people to integrate the law into their everyday work, as a tool to raise awareness of rights, to support calls for accountability, to use existing mechanisms and to call for reform to make legal forums participatory and accessible allowing justice for all.	Joanne Coysh, Equalinrights	29 April

Innovative methodologies for Human Rights Learning	Many practitioners have called for consideration of alternate methodologies for human rights learning, their components and effectiveness, and identification of common elements necessary for HRL. This discussion is to provide a forum where participants can share their knowledge, experiences and information about practices and research where innovative methodologies for learning and action have been implemented.	Emma Sydenham Equalinrights	13 May

Connecting micro upstream work to macro level advocacy processes	Human rights are being taken up in diverse and creative ways at the local level: however often the underlying causes of the problems are, at least partially, elsewhere. How can we ensure that human rights priorities, action and outcomes at the local level feeds into and influences national, regional and international advocacy processes for change? How can local voices better participate in and influence the process to ensure their fundamental needs are on the agenda and redressed? This forum will draw on participant’s experiences and ideas on these issues, and explore how we can contribute more effectively to this.	Joanne Coysh, Equalinrights	20 May

Subscribing to the blog

2008-04-11T14:47:00.000+02:00

Just confirmed my email subscription to the blog, but going further into the settings for subscriptions in FeedBurner, I realise that I'll get one daily update. So, I'll have to check my gmail account late to check that it's worked.

Working with feeds

2008-04-11T14:18:00.000+02:00

This afternoon, during the second day of the workshop, we are working with feeds. I've just added some widgets to my blog through FeedBurner. One widget allows people to subscribe to the feed of my blog (for example, by adding it to their iGoogle page). The other widget allows people to susbscribe by email to the feed; each time I update the blog, subscribers receive an email update.

I've subscribed meganlbrown14@gmail to the blog to test this out. So here goes...let see if I get an update in my gmail account after this post is published!

Here's the video

2008-04-11T09:21:00.000+02:00

Subscribing to the blog

2008-04-11T05:24:00.003+02:00

http://blip.tv/file/815582

2008-04-10T17:07:00.000+02:00

I'm live on the world wide web! Check out this link: http://blip.tv/file/815582

Jo from IDS, another workshop participant, recorded me speaking about my experience with wikis (and I've got a clip of her on the same topic!). During the afternoon coffee break, a few volunteers tested out how to make short videos using digital cameras, put the video files onto a laptop, do some quick editing in Windows Movie Maker, and finally upload the clip to a sharing site (in this case to euforic's "channel" on blip.tv).

I plan to embed the video in this blog, but at the moment get this message:

The Show Player only works with videos that are in the Flash video format. This episode hasn't been converted to Flash yet.

So, to be continued...

a gmail account for equalinrights

2008-04-10T16:55:00.000+02:00

I checked and equalinrights@gmail.com is available. Wondering if we should grab it while we can and then explore if/how to use it later on?

Creating multimedia content for your blog

2008-04-10T14:53:00.000+02:00

On a PC, Windows Movie Maker will do the trick. (This is what I used to edit down the video of the 4th October event...it was pretty user friendly, though of course I was working on existing video material, not creating one from scratch). If equalinrights made a short video from an event, we could edit it in WMM, adding different effects, titles, background audio, etc.

You need a flash player to view a video, differences from basic to advanced. Micromedia Flash is the minimum, though of course connection speed affects how easily people can watch it. But at this point, we're talking about recording with any digital camera and the result can be put on local drives, CD/DVD, memory stick, etc.

Is there a limit on length and/or size, as with YouTube? Check about this later...

Initial answer from Chris and Pier:
Blogger doesn't actually host the videos. So it depends on the limits of the hosting site, eg, YouTube, Google Video (good for longer videos, etc.)

Blip.TV is another option. Free with registration. Better than YouTube in the sense that YouTube can seem very basic, level of sophistication not necessarily very high. Blip.TV is used by more advanced video makers. And they do a good job in promoting your content. Quality is higher, no "YouTube" watermark either.

http://bloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/

2008-04-10T14:51:00.001+02:00

Adding in other kinds of content, editing the blog layout

2008-04-10T14:41:00.000+02:00

Just added in a feed, on the upper right hand side of the blog (that's where it showed up automatically). There were problems with some feeds, but the one the group tried out earlier today on Zimbabwe from the Flikr site worked.

Now I've removed it and instead added a feed from Eldis on ICT for Development. More useful, since that's the general topic of this workshop.

Adding a document

2008-04-10T14:32:00.000+02:00

I'm wondering if I can add in a document...But we are moving on to editing options for now.

Perhaps I'll post again later today.

talking about equalinrights

2008-04-10T14:04:00.000+02:00

A little bit about where I'm coming from...

I work for equalinrights, an NGO that initiates, facilitates and documents learning processes for upstream realisation of human rights in collaboration with human rights and development practitioners.

Utimately, we want to help people living in poverty and exclusion be able to better organise, strategise and act to assert their human rights. Our work helps build the capacity of practitioners, and ultimately communities, to translate human rights concepts into action for positive social change.

Since the practitioners we work with are pretty spread out geographically, we've been researching different free, online tools to use. We're already using Dgroups and skype, and have been testing out wikis and shared calendars, but there are lots of others out there.

So, I'm going to try to embed equalinrights' logo into the post. All I seem to have is our "watermark" version of the logo...actually, the old version, extracted from the website...

Ah, much better! Emma has sent me the file for the new logo via skype. So now I have updated this post.

2nd post of the day

2008-04-10T13:55:00.000+02:00

This morning we worked with RSS feeds. This was great for me, since this was one of the Web 2.0 tools that was most mysterious to me during the research Florence and I did for equalinrights. I found out a lot of information about it without being able to understand it fully.

Chris and Pier from euforic started us out with a short YouTube video from Technorati called "RSS in Plain English". I'm going to embed the video here:

We tested out RSS Feeds with our Google homepages. That's one way to do it, but apparently you can also use Google Reader (or other types of Reader). I am saving up my question about this for later.

euforic workshop sessions

2008-04-10T13:50:00.000+02:00

Today, 10 April, in the afternoon session of the euforic workshop on Web 2.0, we are trying out blogging.

Pier says: the best blog wins the prize! Woohoo!

More importantly, I hope this will be a way to show my colleagues back at equalinrights' office what I'm learning and how they can use these tools too.