MahZeh.org
Making the Web Work for Community.
MahZeh Creations
Yeshivat Simchat Lev
The founding administrators of this progressive Jewish adult education institution wanted to use the Internet to bring together a curriculum development team distributed across California, Oregon, and Washington states. What simchatlev.org’s first users all had in common was a familiarity with “blogging” technology, so MahZeh adapted this design, based on mystical Jewish artwork, to a popular open-source blogging application, WordPress.
What’s most exciting about Yeshivat Simchat Lev’s new web site is how the simple convention of a blog masks a sophisticated network of conversations among various groups of organization members. By engineering new features into the WordPress software, MahZeh gave school administrators the ability to create separate “rooms” for adminsitration, teaching faculty, and classes of students, within which members can publish and discuss their ideas, questions, and problems in private, with the option to broadcast selected subjects into other rooms or to the entire public.
More to Come.
The simchatlev.org project is still in development, as is the organization behind it. Among MahZeh’s future plans for the site are:
- Implementing “AJAX” techniques to make the user interface even easier for novice users.
- Integrating even-simpler-still options for accessing and contributing to discussions on the site via email.
- Adding multimedia publishing features to make it easier for users to include audio and video in their online conversations.
- Integrating the simchatlev.org site with the web sites of peer organizations, to promote conversation between the faculty and student bodies of different schools with similar curricula.
