thahui's Blog

We just launched a new project for a client–KnowledgeWorks Foundation. The client is a non-profit organization dedicated to education. It is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Charity. They’re a great client and we do some interesting projects for them. This one was no exception. Educators and parents everywhere can benefit from this application. The site is built using .NET, Flash, Flash Remoting, and a discussion board package called Community Server.

The application is based on a map that was put together by The Institute For The Future. They have predicted the social drivers of change and impact areas that will affect education in America over the next ten years. The map is interactive. Each social area on the map is an area that can be expanded, discussed, printed out, can have external resources attached, and referred to a friend. We’ve enabled social interaction with discussion boards, bookmarking inside the map, and tagging.

The map uses Flash Remoting to connect to the .NET/SQL back-end. Users session information is stored in Local Shared Objects. The map content is searchable making use of a deep-linking mechanism. This also covers SEO. Map content can be printed out using a dynamic PDF module.

The discussion boards are a modified version of Community Server. Not the easiest thing to skin, but eventually we made it through all the stylesheets.

In the end, this is a very robust Web based application, that I think the education community overall can really benefit from. Check it out here: http://kwfdn.org/map/