Forums | Podcasts and Zines

20 August 2018, 10:18 PM

Hi everyone:

Soon we will have an online Adobe Connect Meeting that will discuss where we are at with Podcasts and Zines. More about this next week, but anyone in this group with the URL will be able to login, either a Sunday or Monday night NZST 19:30. Details soonish.

Here are the latest stats from our 48 zines in Adobe Publish Online. 

21 August 2018, 11:11 AM

Stuart Macadam and I meet earlier today and he brought forward a number of comments/feedback from others re naviagation in kiwiconnexion. 

The Problem

The new user navigation experience is not so great. Stuart reports that he experienced the same difficulty when using Mahara at university. There are many options and ways of doing things when creating content. Interestingly though, when I went to WordPress recently,  I saw similar difficulties. I run two experimental sites there.

For those of us who have used the Mahara eportfolio over a long time (I started it 2012) we know that's usually the most common complaint.

Here's the sharp end of the issue. Most folk just want to browse a website (and many also have a fear of logging in and asking for passwords to be saved). Kiwiconnexion, however, is designed as much, if not more, for content creation All the individual pages and collections are in fact websites. So the user who want just to browse content is browsing multiple websites. If they use the groups well the navigation is in fact quite simple.

What's changed the situation drastically over the last year or so  - not just on the kiwiconnexion site -  is the dramatic rise in viewers using their smart phones to view the material.

All the content was designed for desk top/laptop, not mobile. Only in the last 12 months or so did we also start some docs to be read on the iPad or Tablet.

All the original was designed with the potential to print A4 pages as PDFs.

These PDFs are, of course, useless to to view on a phone.

The Solution

Adobe Spark content (example here) will do well on smart phones, as will a single column, limited content page like TRIO ( here as a kiwiconnexion page )

Adobe Publish Online is really designed for the iPad/Android tablet.

Part of the solution is recognising which content suits which viewer experience and promoting to that audience. YouTube/Vimeo videos always work well independent of devices, Facebook video is ok. 

Navigating...

There are numerous possible solutions here. One that we could easily trial for a couple of months is when viewers login they land at the Community News page rather than their individual dashboard. Currently we are setup for content creators to begin working rather than viewers to begin viewing. 

I will create archive pages/forums so that only content from the last 6 months stays immediately visible. Live-on-Air has a lot of old video content that could be easily tucked away. 

We could distribute the micro-moocs content out to the groups where the content belongs (an idea which appeals to me.)

Creative Spaces Group and Preaching Today Group need to have a lot of content archived.

The most important idea of all...

Ask all logged in members to watch a short 3 minute video on the use of the search button. Why is this so important? We run two servers, the first hosts the Mahara software called kiwiconnexion, and the second server hosts the Elastic Search, a very powerful tool for finding content/artefacts on the site. We have the capability of turning that on for not only searching our kiwiconnexion site but a number social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook. That makes a very powerful relevant search engine for kiwiconnexion. We are abit loathe to make this happen yet until members are more familiar with how search works.

21 August 2018, 12:56 PM

I try to promote kiwiconnexion but I get the feeling those I suggest it to find it even more baffling than I do. How would you feel about offering to share some specific preaching material to the lay Preachers wordpress website - I was thinking particularly of the short How to Craft a Sermon viedos and Tales from the Far Country.

21 August 2018, 6:26 PM

Interesting thought. You can easily share material with LPNZ from kiwiconnexion. If the page or collection is public just share the URL. 

21 August 2018, 6:34 PM

What is kiwiconnexion.nz? It’s the intersection.