0.3 Bringing timea content into connexions

Through the Travelers in the Middle East Archive 's partnership with Connexions, we hope to go a step beyond the typical online archive and makedigitized texts, images and maps about the Middle East the building blocks for interactive learning communities—that is, to provideoriginal sources and construct educational materials and communities around these sources. TIMEA modules should thereforereference content within the archive.

We’ve experimented with bringing digital texts and images from TIMEA directly into Connexions, but we have found that sometweaking of TIMEA content is often necessary. For instance, TIMEA images are typically too large—1024 pixels along the longdimension--to work in Connexions. Since the ideal width for an image in Connexions is no wider than 600 pixels, we suggest thatyou download it from the TIMEA site, resize it, and upload it into Connexions as part of your module. At the same time, readers shouldbe able to see the larger version of the image and learn more about it, such as who created it and when. Therefore, we ask that you adda link to the item in the main TIMEA archive both in the "links" section of the module and in the caption for the item.

Using a timea image in connexions:

1) Download the image from DSpace , TIMEA’s content management system. Simply right click on the image (or, if you are using aMac, CTRL-click) and select “Save Image As.” Since all TIMEA content is available through the Creative Commons attribution license , you can download it without worrying that a horde of lawyers will soon descend upon you.

2) Resize the image so that its width is no greater than 600 pixels. You can use commercial programs such as Adobe Photoshop orfree programs such as IrfanView (our favorite), Gimp , or Picasa . Save the image in a format that will display on the web, such as jpg, png, orgif.

3) Import the image into Connexions. Once you are in the “Edit Module” part of Connexions, click the files tab, then follow thesesteps:

• “Click the down arrow in the text box next to Add New Item. A drop-down list of valid item types appears.
• Select "Image" from the drop-down list and click Add New Item. The "Edit Image" tab displays.
• Click Browse. The "File Upload" dialog box displays.
• Find the file you need and click on it.
• Click Open. The image filename appears in the text box next to Browse.
• Click Save to upload the image file into Connexions. A confirmation message and a preview of the image display.” (SeeConnexions’ tutorial on Editing Modules )

4) At the point where you want to insert the figure, use the<figure>element, as shown below. You’re required to provide a unique ID for the figure (it can be pretty much anything, so long as it is unique). You can use the<name>tag to provide a title for the figure, which will appear immediately above the image. To bringan external figure (such as a jpg file) into the module, use the<media>tag; in the "type" attribute, indicate what type of file it is, and in the "src" attribute what it is called.