Earlier this year ACCT Canada, The Alliance for the Commercialization of Canadian Technology, requested proposals from our group members to suggest new and novel uses of Flintbox as part of the grant program from NSERC. We received many excellent proposals, and the final three chosen were from the C4 consortium, the University of Victoria (IDC) and Red River College. Thanks to these great proposals and funding from ACCT Canada and NSERC all our members now have access to new Flintbox features.
“We are pleased to announce the launch of new Flintbox features funded by ACCT Canada and NSERC.” said Janet Scholz, Managing Director of ACCT Canada. “As part of the launch, ACCT Canada has added the new Flintbox widget to our website, allowing our members to stay up-to-date with all the latest innovations from more than 80 research institutions in Canada. ACCT Canada is proud to support building connections between industry and the Canadian research community through Flintbox.”
WYSIWYG Editor (C4)
No longer do you have to use HTML tags when editing Flintbox profiles and projects. WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get” – just enter your text and use the buttons for formatting. We also created social bookmarking, and received many more great ideas for ways to connect the Flintbox membership.
Flintbox Widget and PDF Generator (University of Victoria)
With the Flintbox Widget, you can now easily add Flintbox to your own website. Its easy – and free – to sign up. Just use the code provided, and in minutes you can display an inset with Flintbox postings on any website. The widget updates automatically, allowing you to have the most up-to-date content from Flintbox on your website or blog.
Currently available are either the Flintbox Technology Feed, or the Flintbox Most Popular, visit the Flintbox website for instructions and examples.
Coming soon – Canada’s Hot Technology, profiling a great new technology from a different Canadian research institution every week!
IDC’s proposal also included the first stages of a PDF generator to allow anyone viewing a project on Flintbox to take away a PDF copy of the page. This is phase one of the project, we are hoping to complete phase two later this year, which will allow for more flexibility, editing, and report generation.
Blaze – Educational Resource Co-operative (Red River College)
Members of the Canadian Virtual College Consortium, spearheaded by Red River College, received ACCT Canada funding to launch Blaze, an open educational resource (OER) co-operative for international sharing of Canadian educational resources and curriculum content. Flintbox members can tag educational resource postings with “OER” to have them added to the Blaze site.
Thank you to ACCT Canada and to all our participating organizations. Please contact us as support@flintbox.com to let us know if you have any questions or feel free to send us feedback on these new features.
