Author: lux

I was playing with the recently announced Ubiquity Firefox extension from Mozilla Labs today and came up with a little Ubiquity command for Dojo users.

Ubiquity extends Firefox to enable end users to create their own ad hoc mashups of the various web services (Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, you name it) in cool new ways, without needing to know about the underlying technical details.

An example from their demo connects a restaurant with a map to get there and a customer review, then emails it all to a friend to make dinner plans. Needless to say, this is an awesome new development in web browsers that really puts more power into the hands of the everyday web user.

Back to Dojo, if you install the Ubiquity extension then browse to this page here, it will prompt you to install the Dojo Learning command, which provides search results of our lessons for use in your Ubiquity mashups. And here's a screenshot of what it looks like in action:



Enjoy!

We just finished launching our new Widget Builder, which displays your lessons on your blog or website. You'll find this under the Tools link in the footer of the site. You can customize the widget title text, how many lessons to show, and whether to include the lesson prices.

We also finished building a start page widget that works on iGoogle, Netvibes and several other start page services. This widget displays the lessons you're taking and instructing, and a feed of your latest Journal entries all available directly from your start page.

And lastly, if you'd like to show your support, we created several Dojo Learning badges which you can place on your website or blog. This is all on our new Tools page.

Make sure you subscribe to our blog feed to stay up on all the new tools and features we've got in the pipeline!

Now that we've finished the new How to Use Dojo Learning lesson, which all new users are automatically signed up for to help you get off on the right foot, we realized using that lesson's learner lounge would be perfect for creating discussion amongst Dojo users. And so the new Dojo forum was born, where you can share tips and ideas, help each other out, and make feature suggestions. We hope this becomes a great resource for our users.

We've also just introduced a small but really cool new feature, which is that instructors can now see a pie chart breakdown of learner input to any multiple choice question. What's cool about this is that in addition to being able to see trends in learner input, you could also use this to create mini-surveys inside your Dojo lessons, like a comment card at the end of the lesson. Here's a screenshot of the new feature in action:



As always, we'd love to know what you think of these new features, so hit us up in the new lounge in the How to Use Dojo Learning lesson or leave us a comment on this post!

We just finished putting up another series of updates to the site, including:

RSS feeds everywhere

Dojo Learning now publishes RSS feeds for the following things:

1. All lesson store pages have their own RSS feed you can use to include your lesson list on your own website or blog
2. The newest lessons and most popular lessons lists on the homepage also have RSS feeds of the same
   
3. Each topic has its own RSS feed of newest lessons in that topic

Dojo on Twitter

Dojo Learning now uses Twitter for two things:

1. General updates, news and stuff - http://twitter.com/dojolearning
   
2. Updating users about service issues - http://twitter.com/dojostatus
   

Scribd for files

Dojo Learning now uses Scribd.com's iPaper service to display common file types directly in lessons instead of making you download them to see them. This makes files like Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs much more integrated into the lessons.

We've made a few bug fixes here and there as well, but the above are the most notable changes. Stay tuned for more where that came from! :)

We just made an update to Dojo that all you Mac users ought to like. First, if you're not familiar with Fluid yet as a Mac user, you should be. Go check it out, install it, fall in love with it. Then try making a Fluid app for your Dojo Learning account.

First, you'll notice the icon for your Dojo Learning app is nice and sharp, like you would expect from a proper Mac app:


Next, right click the app once you're logged into Dojo and you'll notice a fancy Dock menu with a few handy quick links available:


That's all for now, but I'm sure we'll be adding more support for 3rd party apps like Fluid over time, so stay tuned!

Tonight we have officially begun launching Dojo Learning to the public. We just sent out our press release to all the Canadian sources we could, and we'll be doing additional releases online and internationally soon too. Here's an online copy of the press release as well:

Winnipeg Duo creates Web 2.0 Startup and Brings Social Learning to Life

Wish us luck!

We've been hard at work on a new tool to help lesson builders promote their lessons, which we just rolled out on the live site a few minutes ago. This feature can be found in two places:

1. As a new icon on your lesson listing page, and
2. As a new "share lesson" link in the lesson itself.

The "Promote your lesson" feature makes it easier to notify people about your new lessons either by email, on your website or blog, or through the various social news and bookmarking services. And with the "share lesson" link in the lesson itself, your existing learners can also share your lessons with their friends or colleagues in the above ways too.

We're pretty excited about this feature ourselves, and hope you find it as "nifty" as we do!

PS. Happy belated Canada Day, and Happy 4th of July everyone!

You can now add learners to your lessons straight from your contacts in Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and more thanks to Plaxo's new "Address Book Access" widget, which we've now integrated into Dojo. This widget essentially hooks your address book directly into Dojo, making it much easier to put the word out about your lessons. Enjoy!

I'm happy to report that late last night we pushed out a tonne of new fixes for various issues within the system, many of which should make our Internet Explorer users happy. We also completed the roll-out of a big Javascript upgrade, from jQuery 1.2.3 to 1.2.6 and jQuery UI 1.0 to 1.5.1, both of which should yield noticeable improvements in stability as well as speed. As an example fo the speed improvements, the release notes for this update to jQuery stated among many other speed improvements that "Events are 103% faster" -- not just a few percent, but over 100% faster. Nice!

We also just finished moving the Dojo source code onto github.com, which is really an amazingly new service, and to using Capistrano to improve the reliability of our updates to the site from now on. I have to say it feels really good to have these updates in place now, since that means a more reliable Dojo for everyone, and faster development of new features as well.

I just wanted to let everyone know that Les just finished the second video for Dojo's help area, called "The Journal, Part 1", which explores the basics of using the Journal feature of Dojo Learning.  It also gives a great conceptual overview of some of the ideas behind Dojo Learning, and why we think Dojo can really help companies improve the effectiveness of their learning process.  So I'm posting the video here to share it with everyone.  Hope you enjoy!

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