Pressible is ready for your content

Posted on by Brian Hughes

We are excited to announce the release of Pressible today! This is a very experimental release, though we are hoping you (the lab) and others hop on board and give it a try! Please see our features page for more details, but in a nutshell:

  • Pressible is highly “templated” — meaning that users can’t change much about the design of their site. Is this a good or bad idea? (Is it good or bad for Facebook?) In any case, it allows us to try some things out that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Watch for more visual elements in the future.
  • We think Pressible is a reinvention of blogging as a vehicle for publishing your ideas and work to the web in a fast, intuitive, and powerful way. Will you? Let us know!

Also, here are some things we think are cool about the project as a whole:

  • It’s hosted entirely in the cloud — a new experiment for an EdLab application.
  • It’s built on the back of WordPress. We did kung fu on the data WordPress throws around to create cool results now, and even cooler results in the future.
  • Right now it’s experimental, but we are hoping it can mature into a fully-fledged software project hosted by the Gottesman Libraries. We think it can become a way to not only serve the TC community (and alumni), but also individuals and organizations around the world.
  • We hope you break it. Really… we’re ready to learn from our mistakes. So if you do, let us know!

We hope this is the beginning of a new stage in the lab’s exploration of the future of publishing (hey, it may also be the end of the road!), and are excited to invite the lab to join us moving forward. We envision a lot of other features and functionality that did not make this release, and there are probably things we haven’t even considered yet.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for Pressible today and begin your next big publishing project!

Update on March 15th: Only someone with a Columbia University email address can sign up for Pressible without a special invitation.

A virtual exhibition that makes you want more

Posted on by Brian Hughes

I haven’t been to the MOMA in a while, but I just found the James Ensor Exhibition website which more or less offers a ‘virtual’ version of the show (and serves as a rich online ad). I felt it gave me a ton of information, and also made me want to go to the real thing! That’s not an easy thing to achieve with web design, but art may be well-suited for this since there’s the so-called “aura of the original” that can perhaps best be perceived in person.

I wonder what the equivalent is in education? What is the in-person or social interaction that you would want to have in person even if you could get almost everything of (a practical?) value online?

Note: I did end up going to MOMA and seeing the Ensor show. It showcases a fantastic artist on the cutting edge of his profession… and Modernity as well!

After Ed TV is launched

Posted on by Brian Hughes

After Ed TV is the new home of EdLab‘s nascent web video channel. We designed this site to serve as an archive of past episodes, but also as a destination for upcoming promotional efforts. Our primary goal at this point is to see if we can get other organizations to post our multi-video player on their websites – which we hope is seen as a low-effort way to make any website more active. New videos on the future of education appear on a weekly basis.

The next phase of our growth will be getting the word out about the website. Our audience is, broadly,  learners and teachers. We’re currently working on events and other outreach efforts to broaden our exposure and visibility. Coming up in December, for example, we are working with a New York City school to use After Ed TV as a resource for thinking about the future of education. At an Edit Jam event on 12/14, the production team will help students and teachers produce their own web video which will be highlighted in our lineup.

Sociable media development with MIT

Posted on by Brian Hughes

MIT’s Sociable Media Group looks like an interesting bunch of people. I like the Webbed Footnotes project, where one can “annotate web pages with comments and can read and reply to the annotations left by others.”

I think the existence of groups just like this one suggest a course of action for EdLab’s software development activities: sharing our code. A downside may be that it takes more time to write code that is suitable for sharing, but a benefit would be that if a project gets some legs, we could benefit from collaboration from outside our small development group. There seems to be momentum in this direction, and it could be a great way to compete in the educational software market in the near future.