{"id":86,"date":"2008-04-08T16:26:09","date_gmt":"2008-04-08T16:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=86"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:08:28","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:08:28","slug":"seeking-workflows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2008\/04\/seeking-workflows\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeking Workflows"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a workshop given early this semester, I found myself teaching an instructor a workflow. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to do something in Blackboard, but that she needed a quick click-click-click task pattern to do something efficiently.<\/p>\n

The other day I was listening to the podcast of Stephen Downes’ presentation on Personal Learning for Alec Couros’ EC&I 831 class<\/a> at the University of Regina. As Downes took us through his Personal Learning Environment, he showed how he uses tools like Plex, MyGlu<\/a>, RSS Writr, and Edu_RSS<\/a> to sort through information (I think these tools are his own inventions). Although it was certainly not the point of the presentation, I found myself focusing on his workflow.\n<\/p>\n

Then I stumbled on CogDogBlog’s post and replies about Web 2.0 gems<\/a>, which led me through one of Alan’s own responses to FlickrCC<\/a> (where I can find creative commons license images more quickly), which offered editing for the images in Piknik<\/a>, an online image editor. I imagined a workflow when I need an image:<\/p>\n

Find image in FlickrCC -> edit in Picknik -> download to desktop -> upload to website<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, when I tried it, I found I couldn’t put the attribution link in easily at all. It kept making it too big for the image. I usually do this kind of thing in html, or by editing the image in GraphicConverter. So the workflow became:<\/p>\n

Find image in FlickrCC -> Save Image As to image folder -> open Graphic Converter -> create margin -> copy and paste attribution text and save -> open Dreamweaver -> upload image<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/p>\n

Not fun. I know some of my current workflows are more cumbersome than they need to be. I open Dreamweaver every time I want to upload a file. But I keep stumbling on the same issues with web apps. It looks<\/i> like the workflow will be great, but then it doesn’t work in a key area.\n<\/p>\n

I bookmark to Del.icio.us<\/a>. This should be easy, because Firefox has a toolbar button. Ideally, I go to a page, I want to bookmark it, and a window pops up to tag it:<\/p>\n

Find page -> click toolbar button -> tag<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Works fine from my office computer. From my home computer, I have to log in to Del.icio.us every time I start a new session. This is a separate pop-up window, and I lose track of what I wanted to bookmark in the first place.\n<\/p>\n

Today I am seeking an online presentation tool, a PowerPoint beater. I tried Zoho Show (see previous post). OpenOffice’s presenter was too slow on my iBook. I downloaded a demo version of PulpMotion<\/a> and tried Empressr<\/a>, but they only seemed to accept local files, audio and video I either record on the spot or already possess, nothing from the web like embedded YouTube. I tried Preezo<\/a>, but it only inserts an image (though it does let you use a URL for that) or text, no multimedia. So now I’ll keep going through other people’s tool lists<\/a>. It’s not that I couldn’t go further and possibly make these other programs do what I want, but why should I have to?\n<\/p>\n

So I’m thinking I’m not looking for good web apps any more. I’m looking for good workflows. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At a workshop given early this semester, I found myself teaching an instructor a workflow. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to do something in Blackboard, but that she needed a quick click-click-click task pattern to do something efficiently. The other day I was listening to the podcast of Stephen Downes’ presentation on Personal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,15,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online-teaching","category-presentation","category-web-20"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10066,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/10066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}