Publishing files on the open web

Good morning everyone, and welcome to our last week of intensive (for some) reflection and working on your blogs. The module ends on Friday, but of course the assignment still has to be done for submission before 10 August (remember 70% of the assignment is a document to be submitted on Webstudies scholarly describing your project according to the ADDIE model of instructional design).


Mirta had a very important e-mail request, and my reply is important for everybody, as it relates to e-learning and especially if one wants to share files (which are not pictures, videos, documents etc) but little folders/ sites containing a few files which have to be together in a directory before they will actually "work" on the internet. 
A good example of this is iSpring, which uses PPT, but then publishes a folder with three different files in them. All three files (one of them a flash file - .swf) needs to be on the internet somewhere (like on a website) before one can link to the start-file (the .html file in iSpring's case). This might seem overly technical to some, but try and understand the issues involved here. I must say, thinking about the difficulties in sharing folders without having a website over which one has full FTP (file transfer protocol - i.e. the ability to upload files to the internet in a website structure) control made more thankful that most universities have LMS's that take care of the display and distribution of documents, and other e-learning objects (like iSpring projects).
Well, the following is the exact e-mail I sent to Mirta earlier this morning:

Dear Mirta

iSpring publishes your PPT in a folder (the name of the folder is the name of your presentation) with a few files in them, the most important one being the flash file (.swf).

To share this presentation with the world you need to upload the whole folder to a website and then create a link in your blog (or on a website) to the .html file inside the folder that is now situated not on your computer, but on the internet.

This is very difficult to explain in an e-mail, so maybe for now you can send me the file. To be able to send the file, you need to go to the folder and create a Zip (.zip) file out of it. On Windows one can right-click on the folder and then choose “Send to>> zip folder” (or something similar). One needs a zipped folder as one cannot e-mail a normal folder. Then attach the zip folder in an e-mail and send it to me to view.

Alternatively, you can look inside the folder for the .swf file (the flash file) and just e-mail that one to me.

Note: Inside an LMS (like Webstudies) it is easy to display these kinds of published projects (like iSpring) as one has the ability to upload folders and files and then make it available to the students. The moment one moves to the open web (like with your blogs) it becomes more difficult to share these kinds of projects if one does not have your own website, where to one can upload projects like this (we call it “ftp”) and then link to those  files on the internet. There are free websites where one has ftp rights (like www.freewebsites.com) to – although limited bandwidth available.

Sometimes it is difficult to e-mail large files to someone (which might be the case if you try and e-mail your project to me). In that case one an use a service like www.megauploader.com where one can upload any file, and then send the link for download to an e-mail address. The receiver gets the link to the file, and then downloads it from the megauploader website.

Well, that is a mouthful already, so I will stop. But this topic (although nitty gritty in character) is quite important once one works outside the LMS. Where to store and host files can become quite a challenge.

Good luck for the week!