InrtaLibray training day

The first training/design session with IntraLibrary was held today. The morning was a general overview the system and an opportunity to play around with the new version. The afternoon was spent in discussion with Nick and his team on what was need to get this all up and running.

Their new version 3.0 (Beta) has had a complete interface re-vamp and I wasn’t overly impressed. In my repository report I mentioned that the icons and interface for IntraLibrary was one of the things that I felt made it stand out from the rest. The general ideas have been retained in the new version but the icons are less prominent as they have opted for much softer graphics. One thing they have removed, which I suggested they put back, was the inline help from the question mark icon. For a none-novice user this is very handy, at least I thought so, as it assisted in clarify what you suspected certain areas and functions were for. Much faster than having to go through the full help list. They have also made the help icon almost invisible. I asked a fellow participant if they could find it and it took them over half a minuet which is not good.

The afternoon session was with Nick’s development team, Jill and myself. During this we discussed the types of workflow required for both learning objects (LOs) and research outputs; security and authentication; taxonomy creation and how this related to LOs and research. One of the main issues to come out of this was the need for an external (available on the public web) search and result pages. These need to be developed in house. Another university (I forget which) has already developed and released (open source) a solution to this problem. We also discussed the possible integration with Sword, a client side depositing application which is currently being developed.

All in all it was an interesting day and while I’m sad to loose the old interface IntraLibrary’s functionality is still more adaptable than the rest. There will be another two training/development days which I hope to attend and Peter (chap from IntraLibrary) said he would get the API’s to me ASAP so we can start looking at integrating the ideas developed in Streamline.

Architectual model

As a new member of the team I thought it would be useful to produce an overall architectural view of the main workflow packages that are to be built as part of the streamline project. I produced a conceptual architecture model that identifies the key elements.  The final aim of the working system is to allow access to the streamline functionality via multiple mechanisms. Initially however user involvement will be via a Java based GUI developed by Dawn. Eventually a web-based GUI will be the way to go, once the interface requirements have been developed, tested and evaluated by end users.  The underlying areas of the system will be required to do some number crunching, e.g. the latent semantic analysis which will allow related search results to be displayed to the user.  Initially these components have been developed using C++ and Matlab due to the suitability of these languages for rapid mathematical programming.  The intention is however, to convert all the components into Java in order to provide ease of integration and allow the system to be opened up to third party application via web-services and a Java API. A prototype of a parsing algorithm (to be used for meta-data extraction) has also been developed in C++ by Elizabeth. In order to allow ease of translation a UML model of this prototype has been created.  This should also ease further development of the prototype up to a stage where it ready for translation and integration into the full system.

 

Colour coded metadata output for users.

At the May Streamline meeting I present the prototype in it’s current state (half baked). Since then I have so many other things to do I have had little time to fill in the missing pieces. That’s now underway and I anticipate good progress this month. Should have something user presentable at the very least.

Anyway while I’m hacking away I was thinking (I do that occasionally) about the comments made at the last meeting. One of the functions I have built in is a none-XML-marked up, human readable version of metadata content for a learning object. Basically a plain text version. This was done in response to some comments made at one of the eCat training sessions I attended back in January. One user pointed out that after filling in all (about a dozen) metadata screens the only way to check what you had done was to go back through all of them. There was no overview of the metadata entered, except of course as the outputted XML.

I made this screen really simple, just headings and metadata content associated with them, grouped in the UK LOM CORE structure, (I don’t wont it to be come a long overcomplicated input screen). One of the comments made by the Streamline members (I forget who) was that how do you identify what’s missing and then direct the user to where they can correct this. This was a fair point. Well I’ve tackled the first aspect of this by colour coding the output to highlight null or empty values. This screen shot shows the result. I also thought it might be useful to indicate the difference between manual, auto-generated and preference-generated input. I’ve got it working in a couple of instances but wanted feedback on whether it was worth while as it will take a couple of days to implement across the whole system.

I’m still working on the second part of that comment – directing the user to the correction point and will get back in due time.

TEL Day: Questionnaire

The TEL day presented a good opportunity to promote the Streamline project alongside PERSoNA and the Institutional Repository. Nick and I put together a shared questionnaire between these three projects, which I have now done the preliminary analysis on. This report shows the questions I asked and some basic statistics gleaned from them. Nicks findings are available here on the projects respective blogs: PERSoNA and Repository.

We had twenty respondents in total many of whom also indicated that they were willing to participate in the focus groups Meg has mentioned. Unfortunately our first attempt at organising one has been cancelled due to lack of volunteers. Meg suggested that there is a lot going at the moment academically (exam boards and final marking) and that we would be better of in a coupe of weeks.

I’m going to take these results and re-examine them alongside our previous questionnaires. I’m manly look for patterns of positive or negative attitudes and work practices towards the process around learning object creation and re-use. I will post these up in couple of weeks with a more detailed report. I’m also going to have a look at the social networking questions Nick asked in regard to our ideas about the organisation and sharing of learning objects.

TEL Day: promoting Streamline and The Institutional Repository

The Technology Learning Day took place last Tuesday 3rd June and presented a good opportunity to promote both the above projects.  As we’re at the stage where Streamline prototypes have been built, user feedback is necessary to enable development work to progress steadily.  A decision was made to test the prototype and gather feedback from knowledgeable users and the likely participants were anticipated to be attending the TEL day.  Many were approached with a few questions, and indicated their willingness to take part in the evaluation. 

The proposed evaluation plan is to carry out a series of focus groups with about 8 people.   The discussion is to identify the difficulties and good aspects experienced while trying to create, find and reuse learning objects - particularly in adding metadata to a learning objects using any tool such as eCAT or CourseGenie or using metadata to do keyword searches within a learning object repository.

The outcomes of these focus groups will be a rich source to facilitate research!

Outcomes from the June 10th 2008 Meeting.

The meeting generated a number of interesting discussions, as has been typical of earlier meetings, however not all of these discussions have resulted in blog postings. One aim of this meeting was to re-invigorate the use of the StreamlineNews - the Project Blog. Hence one outcome should be an noticeable increase in postings to the blog.

Specific outcomes form the meeting included:

Following the 3rd June Technology Enhanced Learning event:

• Dawn and Nick to produce a short report detailing the results of the questionnaires collected.
• Dawn and Nick to initiate a paper outlining the relationship between the Streamline, Persona and Institutional Repositories projects using commonalities discovered in the questionnaire responses as points of focus.

Progress on the Automated Meta data generation tool has progressed slowly this month, largely due to holidays and involvement with the TEL day on June 3rd. There is a need for Dawn, Mark and Elizabeth to meet to review the development of this tool set.

Similarly involvement with another project has interfered with progress on the Resource Discovery tool development. There is a need to ensure significant time is allocated to this work package in the coming month.

The personal resource management work has progressed but is hampered by the lack of an actual repository to work with. The University has now decided on Intralibrary and work should move forward quickly here. There is some early training on this repository scheduled for mid June.

In conjunction with this work package the Persona project can also begin to move forward. There is an involvement with the EMERGE event on June 23rd which will allow some wider dissemination and offer opportunities for the wider EMERGE community to contribute their experiences of using repositories.

The next meeting is scheduled for the afternoon of Tuesday July 8th. July 15th clashes with a JISC event and the 22nd falls in our graduation week so the earlier date is preferred.

 

Why do we meet?

The Streamline project team meets (physically) about once per month … yet much (if not all) of the discussion could be handled online.  Yet, it seems as though activity and enthusiasm is at its peak just before a meeting (meeting the deadline) and just after (re-invigoration?).  After that it tails off … ready for the impetus of the next meeting.

I think I have suggested before that this might mean that a number of us are Web 1.0 people trying to come to terms with a Web 2.0 world.  What it certainly means is that systems, procedures and workflows we establish have to recognise that not all ‘come to the party’ with the skillset and ‘culture-set’ to engage fully … we need to offer a mix of web 2.0, Web 1.0 and Web 0.0 (’the handshake’) to ensure full participation and interaction.

Project Web

Most of us on the Streamline project team are also involved with other projects … and often in overlapping areas of interest and development.  So, at Streamline meetings we often hear of developments in PLANET, PERSONA and others … as well as emerging bids for new projects.  This ‘project web’ is actually very useful as each project is informed by, and modified by, events and findings in others.  I guess this was the whole point of basing these projects around a ‘community’ … enough of us are involved with EMERGEing issues to ensure we - and our projects - are not insular but gain from the added value of our involvements elsewhere.

What is a Web 2.0 app?

Nick and I had an interesting discussion yesterday while sorting out the questionnaire for the technology day event next Tuesday (3^rd June). Basically we have been trying to work out some questions to ask participants about social networking fro the PERSoNA project. We want to find out what social networking applications they use and how they use them. In formulating a list we had a bit of a disagreement as to what constitutes a social networking application and whether it was classed as web 2.0 or not. Nick wanted to include chat rooms and forums, but I felt they weren’t social networking apps. My arguments against the chat room is that there is no permanent record of the conversation and against the forum that it is a linear structure (like a file system) and therefore does have the flexibility of a web 2.0 app. While I’m not a hundred percent about my arguments, my gut still says that these old hat web functions are not part of the new generation of social networking apps that I think PERSoNA particularly and the term social networking generally aspires to. I think this is something that needs to be more closely examined for both PERSoNA and Streamline. When I got involved with Streamline I had I definite view of what a web 2.0 social networking app was, now I’m not so sure.

 

Another thing that came up in the questionnaire discussion was what constituted the term use. When you ask someone if they use a blog they can say yes even if all they do is casually come across blog entries while searching with Google. Alternatively they my say no if all they ever do is add comments to existing blogs but don’t actually run their own. We came up with a three level scale of view, comment only, and produce content. Does this really cover what we are trying to find out?

 

Contextual tag clouds

I had an interesting idea at the last project meeting, while we were discussing Elizabeth’s latent semantic analysis work. She came up with the idea of being able to browse semantically related items, like you do on a library shelf. The user enters a search query and the results are a group of items that are linked in the same way that books on a library bookshelf are linked. This groups the search results according to their semantic or contextual relationship rather than by ranking algorithms. It also extends the result set beyond those that contain the search term. The idea is then to present this as a visual net.

 

Anyway this got me thinking about metadata keywords (part of LOM) as being similar to tags used for describing objects or text entries on social networking applications. Tags are often represented as tag clouds (group of words), where the frequency of the tag’s use is indicated by the size or colour of the tag words. As the applications collection gets bigger the number of tags and the space used for a tag cloud does as well. This was one of the things I found visually unsatisfying with my experimental use of del.icio.us. So I was thinking this would be a good place to apply latent semantic analysis. Tags could then be weighted according to their semantic relationship and form smaller more manageable groups. How this works from the user perspective I’m not so sure yet. But I think there’s something in this so will think on.