Chat Rooms

1. Make a new "Standard Site". In this example I:
   • Put it in the /examples site and named it "simple chat rooms".
   • Renamed the "TOC" file to "header" and replaced the contents of the file with the simple "Back to: ..." links that appear at the top of this page
   • Opened the "Web site template" object in the new site, set the left sidebar to "(none)" and set the header to "header".
2. Find a floorplan image, or draw one on the whiteboard. In this case I found a gif image named "groundfloor4-mod.gif". (Extra credit if you can identify this house :-)
3. Create a new drawing object by going to "Add to ..." in the "Exploring..." window's file menu, selecting "Objects", then "Blank Drawing", then clicking "Create". In this example I renamed it "floorplan".
4. Add the image to the drawing.
5. For each room, make a new blank page object and a new chat object. These are both available by going to "Add to..." in the file menu, under the "Objects" category. In this example I just made a page named "Kitchen" and a chat named "Kitchen Chat".
6. Add any text that you like to the page for each room. A few hints:
   • It might be useful to set up one room, revise it until it looks the way you like, and then copy it for the other rooms.
   • If the page for each room will have some custom, per-room text as well as some standard instructions, the instructions could be put into a separate page and then added to each of the other pages. In this example, I put instructions into a blank page named "instructions", and then included this to the other pages by adding "\instructions\".
7. Add a link to the chat object to the room's page. In this case I actually added two links, one that will open the chat in the "live" (interactive) client, and another that will open a simplified version of the chat directly in the web browser:
   • The "live" chat link looks like "`Enter chat room>Kitchen Chat`". The backquotes around the text tell bridge to make this a link that will launch the client. (The backquote character is usually on the same key as the ~, typically in the upper left corner of the keyboard.)
   • The web link tools like "*enter chat room on low-bandwidth connection*".
8. Link each room on the floorplan image to its page. In this example I:
   • Double-clicked on the floorplan drawing object
   • Drew a rectangle over the Kitchen area
   • Selected the rectangle and chose "None" from the attributes menu for both line color and pen color.
   • Selected the URL tool and clicked on the (now-invisible) rectangle
   • Selected "This object", then selected "Kitchen", then clicked "OK".
9. Add the image to the site's home page. In this example I added "\floorplan\ to the Home page.

• You can set the permissions on each page and chat object to control who can see, modify, and contribute to the pages and chats. (Tools for setting up student accounts will appear shortly...)
• Once the activity is finished, you can preserve it for archival purposes by turning off read and write permissions as appropriate.
• Backquotes can be used to add a link to any bridge object, allowing an interactive version of it to be opened without opening the full editor.
• In this example, navigation between rooms is done within the web browser. This has some accessibility advantages, but also has some problems. For example, you cannot see who is in a room unless you actually follow the "enter chat room" link, and doing so in each room can be slow. We'll have a more efficient means for navigation in place in the near future.
• For activities that might involve students working together on objects other than chats, we are developing a "workspace" object. More on this in a future example. (Here's a simple example.)