August 2008

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 had our first Dojo Learning outage today. It was an Apache server error and we just fixed it. Dojo Learning is up and running and we are looking further into this error in order to resolve future outages.

Dojo Learning

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!