Posts Tagged ‘Collaborative’

Education is increasingly becoming digital, using social networks, videos and collaborative online tools to enhance the learning experience. One of the largest online social education communities is Scitable. A hybrid between a virtual classroom, a social network and a scientific journal repository, Scitable boasts several hundreds of thousand users around the world. We recently got to speak with Vikram Savkar, SVP and Publishing Director at Nature Publishing, about what Scitable is, what it offers to students, and the future of social education.
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Countless numbers of people make videos of live concerts on their mobile phones, but what if these videos could be compiled into one collaborative clip, documenting the full concert experience? This is what Dutch multimedia platform 3VOOR12 is asking with a cool project called ‘Film It Yourself.’ FIY has been collecting pieces of concerts shot on mobile phones and posted to YouTube and editing together along with professional audio recordings of the concerts. FIY is offering a whole new way to experience concert recordings on the web.
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Writing a book. It sounds like a daunting task, but it isn’t so bad once you break it down into smaller pieces and have a support system to help you. I know from personal experience, having co-authored the Twitter Survival Guide, that the mere act of staying motivated can make or break your writing project.

A new service called FastPencil aims to help you in every aspect of your book-writing process, from providing you with ways to communicate and collaborate with your support system to providing publishing tools to actually sell your book.

There are some basic tools that leverage the Fast Pencil community that can help you get started, such as templates for popular book formats like cookbooks. From there you can customize your book accordingly. Turn to fellow writers on the FastPencil site in order to get ideas and feedback, learning from the experiences of others. You can do this by inviting friends into your current project so they can offer that valuable feedback.

If you’d like, you can even gain some feedback from the FastPencil team itself, through their own publishing tools. It will cost you, but you’ll receive editing options, and more. For publishing through FastPencil, you’ll get your ISBN number, and distribution options through eBooks, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

There are two publishing plans through FastPencil, one of which is is basic and the other of which is premium. The prices range from $399 to $699, with features sets to match the prices. The plans and price points are fairly comparable to other services out there, such as BookSurge, which comes recommended directly through Amazon. It’s always a risk to try a new service such as this and pay hundreds of dollars for it, so it may take some time for FastPencil to fully establish itself as a viable alternative to existing publishing options out there.

If you’d like to try out the service and get something for free, however, FastPencil is offering SocialTimes readers a free copy of their book. Just be one of the first 10 readers to email FastPencil at FastPencil [@] fortythreepr.com.

In private beta until today, the MixedInk collaborative writing platform has launched the public beta version of its product. This is a democratic writing and publishing platform that takes the Creative Commons license to the next level, enabling entire communities to work together on a single document or publication.

While this isn’t the first time this concept has been approached with an online tool, D.C.-based MixedInk is using a new angle for automating much of the process, essentially eliminating the need for wikis in the traditional sense, or even editors. As MixedInk promotes a democratic process, each document submitted by a member of the community can be voted upon, which pushes that document up in rank.
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