Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Participate 3.1.1

Participate 3.1.1
Access to the Digital Community Quest

 To achieve and be successful in a digital community access to digital resources are very important. However, many do not have the luxuries of a high speed Internet connection, digital devises, or the funds to cover cost that is associated with these things. Many want to be members of a the digital age but are unable to because of location, disabilities, income disparity, copyright, politics, or educational policies. In order to enable students and educators to become members of the digital world schools and school districts must be willing to provide tech equipment (checked out like a library book) and high speed Internet access. Also, public libraries should have access to all of these things.

For tools to accommodate those with low bandwidth I came across this website:
http://www.kstoolkit.org/Low+Bandwidth+Tools

I found this list very helpful:

Examples of Low Bandwidth Friendly Tools

There are software and web based services that require less bandwidth or can operate well on older computers and operating systems.

  • EVO – A video conferencing environment, which is particularly suited to desktop or low bandwidth applications.
  • AccessGrid – An open source video conferencing and collaboration tool kit, which is great for room to room meetings.
  • Sakai – An online collaboration and learning environment, support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.
  • Plone, Joomla, Drupal – A ready-to-run content management system, that provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets. These can work in low bandwidth environments if optimized properly.
  • Wikis – A way to easily create, edit, and link pages together, to create collaborative websites. (must be online)
  • Google Docs (must be online)
  • Free Email Lists (Software: Sympa, Mailman. Hosted: Yahoogroups, Google Groups)
  • DGroups
  • Onlinegroups.net
  • Low cost tools
  • Blogs
  • Social bookmarking sites
  • Chats
  • Skype
  • loband.org - a website that reduces webpages to the bare bones
  • squid+squidguard - a proxy software and a webfilter combined for getting rid of all the ads and take advantage of a server cache. Very effective, but has to be installed and configured on a linux server by a knowledgeable system administrator
  • Portable applications on a pen drive (so you can take your applications and use them on any computer, such as at an internet cafe)
  • Sending large files: Yousendit, drop.io ,
  • Downsize photos: Picnik ; ShrinkPic ; Microsoft's Image Resizer (Part of their PowerToys set) http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx, Dropresize: automatically resize images dropped in a preset folder
  • Video: http://corp.kaltura.com/ (which is a field side contribution tool). This is for more advanced video editing within an organization before posting to YouTube/Vimeo. MediaSilo http://www.mediasilo.com/
  • Twitter http://www.twitter.com/
  • Browsing with a lowband connection:
    • deactivate display of images (speed boost!)
    • in Opera , activate Opera Turbo : compresses pages (and images!) by going through Opera servers (read this if you have privacy concerns)
  • Low Bandwidth File Sharing Tools
    • Matt Moore recommended using Riverbed (http://www.riverbed.com) for bandwidth optimisation). And to answer Peter's request, Gabriele suggested using an optical character recognition sofware - although this would imply further editing and Alfonso Acuna's recommendation particularly Adobe online PDF creator (https://createpdf.adobe.com/).(KM4Dev discussion)
     
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