Anytime Anywhere Computing

Joss Winn / / Hardware, Mobile, Projects, Software

Together with the ITC Department, we’ve recently begun a feasibility study which looks at related areas of the university’s ITC provision. It brings together three, originally separate proposals to look at upgrading our wireless infrastructure, provide a more flexible desktop experience through virtualisation and improve our understanding of and support for Netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices. It’s good to be working so closely with our ITC Department. So often I hear people at other institutions complain about their ITC departments being ‘brick walls’ and showing no flexibility, but fortunately I can’t say that about my experience at the University of Lincoln.

The Head of ITC sent me a link to this video today. It’s a good example of why our study is both necessary and worthwhile.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://uk.youtube.com/v/uRUTtpk9EHg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Related to this, Tony Hirst recently bookmarked this ITC syllabus for 13-14 year olds recently, which, together with the video, provides a clear indication of what’s happening in schools.

We’re working closely with the Student Council and Academics and intend to survey them on the issues raised by the study early in the new year.  We’ve started talking to vendors of desktop and application virtualisation ‘solutions’, too (the virtualisation of our server infrastructure is almost complete). We’re also lining up some visits to other institutions that have experience in these areas.

If you or your school, your FE or HE insititution has seriously considered or implemented desktop and/or application virtualisation, a full service wireless infrastructure (i.e. it matches the services on your wired network) and support Linux and XP-based Netbooks and other mobile devices, please do get in touch or leave a comment below.

Ted Talks: My ‘Lifelong Learning Strategy’

Joss Winn / / Fun, Mobile, Web

These days, I’m working my way through 300+ Ted Talks on my iPod Touch while walking to and from work, managing about three 20 minute talks a day.  It’s part of my personal ‘Lifelong Learning Strategy’ 🙂 In fact, Ted via iTunes in the palm of my hand is my ‘Virtual Learning Environment’ with the highest calibre of Lecturers you’ll ever find in your pocket. Along the way of this wandering, multidisciplinary education, some talks stand out for their poetry…

When lectures of this calibre are delivered I’m absorbed to the point of being a hazard on the footpath.

OpenSim Virtual World

Joss Winn / / Learning Landscapes, Open Source, Software

Following my initial local install of OpenSim, I now have it running on the Learning Lab server. It was a bit of a nuisance to install and I still need to look at how best to work with its seemingly basic user management, but for alpha software it seems pretty stable and worth investing some time in. I’ve set up a page on our wiki to document the process.

I was first introduced to OpenSim by Ian Truelove at Leeds Met, who ran an introductory workshop to Second Life using OpenSim. He uses private installs of OpenSim with his students to teach design for virtual worlds, a genuine occupation for some. At least one academic here, who teaches 3D animation, wants to experiment with it and as I tell more people, I’m sure there will be further interest. My colleague, Julian, has also blogged about Second Life recently.

I’ve also been asked to write a Briefing Paper for the university’s next Learning Landscapes Working Group meeting, on how virtual worlds could extend the overall ‘learning landscape’ and benefit the student experience. It’s not a subject I know a great deal about (except for an intense period with Doom II while writing my MA dissertation, my gaming period ended with Elite), but there have been some useful and interesting reports recently, which I will look at again.

These days are full

Joss Winn / / Commons, Projects, Software

I am conscious that it’s been almost a month since I last wrote here but that is largely due to my work on other projects, websites and blogs.  Here’s an overview of some of the work I’m currently involved in. If you’re working on similar projects or want to discuss or collaborate on any of this, do get in touch.

The Learning Lab

I recently wrote a brief summary of the work I’ve been doing under the ‘Learning Lab’ banner, since I started my work as Technology Officer in the Centre for Educational Research and Development. WordPressMU occupied a large chunk of my summer, though I feel I have a good understanding of it now and can relax a little while supporting staff and students who wish to use it. It will soon be moving to the new, permanent home of http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk

One of the unexpected outcomes of working on WordPressMU was the realisation that not only training but a different model of support is key to sustaining and improving the use of blogs and other Web 2.0 tools.  I’m keen to advocate and support the user-to-user support model that most open source and social web services develop rather than the traditional user-to-professional, ‘Help Desk’ model that exists for much of the software provided by the university. Models of user support are not something I’ve taken much of an interest in until recently, but the reality is that I alone am unable to support the growing adoption of WordPressMU at the university and I need to encourage staff and students to help themselves wherever possible.

Having said that, with colleagues in the Library and Research Office, I’m also planning to offer regular staff training sessions on the use of Web 2.0 tools in education and I’m visiting classes to give one hour introductions to WordPress, which is a good opportunity to work with and learn from both students and staff. In addition to this, I’m contributing towards the revision of policy documents which ensure that these new tools are used effectively and appropriately.

Lincoln Academic Commons

This is something I’m developing to promote and support the various initiatives at the university which provide Open Access to our research, teaching and learning. I started working for the university on a JISC-funded project to develop an institutional repository, having been working as an Archivist and Project Manager of a Digital Asset Management system in my previous job. Then, a few months ago, I heard about the difficulties people in the Lincoln Business School were having trying to establish a series of ‘Occasional Working Papers’ (OWPS) using existing portal software provided by the university. At the same time, I was looking at the Open Journal System for publishing Open Access journals, so I suggested that we set up the OWPS using OJS. Seeing what a great piece of software OJS is, I then suggested we use it for NEO, a planned journal of student research which we intend to launch in the Spring. Finally (and this is where it gets really interesting for me), Mike Neary, Dean of Teaching and Learning and Head of the Centre for Educational Research and Development, is advocating a more critical engagement with the debates about the marketisation of higher education through teaching practice. He’s calling this critical engagement, ‘Teaching in Public’, which encompasses the idea of an Academic Commons.

Professor Neary argues the uncertainty over the university’s mission requires the notion of ‘the public’ to be reconceptualized, so as to remake the university as an academic project that confronts the negative consequences of academic capitalism, and the commodification of everyday life. He will present Karl Marx’s concept of the ‘general intellect’ as an idea through which the university might be remade.

I contributed to a book chapter Mike has recently written which elaborates on this in more detail. You can read more about that on a previous blog post.

Access Grid

A project I’ve been leading for some months now is the installation of an Access Grid node at the university. We were fortunate in being approached by the Mental Health Research Network (MHRN) several months ago who offered to fund the installation of an AG node at the university to support their staff who work at the university and provide a facility that is otherwise missing in Lincolnshire. It’s been a really interesting and useful project for me as I learned about how the university undertakes a tendering exercise and I’ve been able to work with colleagues from across the university.  The node should be available to use sometime in January. The Access Grid project is yet another technology-based initiative at the university which further improves our research infrastructure and supports collaboration and the wider exchange of ideas among colleagues worldwide.

Anytime, Anywhere Computing

This is a new project that brings together three, originally separate proposals, that the ICT department and CERD were proposing to take forward. It covers:

  1. ubiquitous wireless networking
  2. so called ‘thin client’ technology as an alternative to desktop PCs and the management of software applications and resources
  3. access via user-owned devices, such as low-cost and increasingly popular ‘netbook’ hardware

We’re just starting to look at how we might offer the same user experience and services on our wireless network as we provide on our wired network. Currently the wireless network only offers Internet access. At the same time, we’re interested in evaluating new virtualisation technologies for the desktop. The ICT department are concluding a server consolidation project which is virtualising much of our server infrastructure. This brings many benefits and allows the ICT department to provide a more flexible service to users.  Our new study will look at whether similar virtualisation technology can bring benefits to desktop users, too. The third part of this project is based on a proposal I made a few months ago to evaluate the user experience and support issues that the new generation of ‘netbooks‘ introduces. Smaller screens, Linux operating systems, an emphasis on web-based applications and the rapid adoption of these low-cost devices often aimed at the education sector, require a better understanding of the impact of this technology and the influence it may have on driving students to use more and more web-based applications.

Are you working on similar initiatives? If so, please leave a comment and share your experiences.

More like a web application and less like a website

Joss Winn / / Open Source, Software

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, released a report today which summarises their recent project to test the usability of WordPress. It’s an interesting read if you use WordPress, but also if you’re interested in software development and usability testing. What’s most interesting for me, is how a large and successful open source project can co-ordinate a major redesign of an application, tested by thousands of enthusiasts for use by millions of general users.

While discussions about the design of an open source application can be had at any time on support forums, in this case, the formal change process began in May, through focused third-party usability testing, where 12 volunteers were carefully selected (and paid $75 in wordpress.com credits!). There was then a presentation at the San Francisco WordCamp in August, where wider feedback was elicited. A survey was announced in early September and a further survey, calling for 5000 participants was announced in late September. An annoucement was made at the beginning of October, where feedback was invited on a series of ‘wireframe’ mockups of the new design. Following feedback, the re-design was formally announced in mid-October and later this month designers were asked to submit their portfolio if they were interested in being recruited to design new icons (the following week!). Throughout this process, the development code, updated nightly, could be downloaded, installed and the application reviewed, too. Several mailing lists are used for open discussion, notably the ‘hackers’ and ‘testers’ lists.

The outcome of this incredibly rapid and completely transparent consultation, testing, feedback and design process has made it into the next release of WordPress (v2.7), due for release on November 10th. At just seven months from start to finish, it’s an excellent example of public collaboration between developers, designers and users, largely co-ordinated by one Automattic employee.

Here’s the testing report (PDF)

Here are the wireframes (PDF)

Here’s the presentation they gave in August, which covers the usability testing process.

Microformats and Firefox

Joss Winn / / Fun, Standards & Specs, Web

When I have time, I like to read about new and developing web standards and specifications. Sad, you might think, but it’s a way of learning about some of the theoretical developments that eventually turn into practical functionality for all users of the Internet.  Also, I am an Archivist (film, audiovisual, multimedia) by trade, and am somewhat reassured by the development of standards and specifications as a way of achieving consensus among peers and avoiding wasted time and effort in managing ‘stuff’.

So, while poking around on Wikipedia last night, I came across ‘Operator‘, an add-on for Firefox that makes part of the ‘hidden’ semantic web immediately visible and useful to everybody. If you’re using Firefox, click here to install it. It’s been available for over a year now and is mature and extensible through the use of user scripts.  It’s been developed by Michael Kaply, who works on web browsers for IBM and is responsible for microformat support in Firefox.

Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services.

In practice, Operator is a Firefox tool bar (and/or location/status bar icon) that identifies microformats and other semantic data in a web page and allows you to combine the value of that information with other web services such as search, bookmarking, mapping, etc. For example, this blog has tags. Operator identifies the tags and then offers the option of searching various services such as Amazon, YouTube, delicious and Upcoming, for a particular tag.  If Operator finds geo-data, it offers the option of mapping that to Google Maps and, on this page for example, it identifies me as author and allows you to download my contact details, which are embedded in the XHTML. Because it is extensible through user-scripts, there are many other ways that the microformat data can be used.

Of particular interest to students and staff are perhaps the microformat specifications for resumes and contact details. Potentially, a website, properly marked up (and WordPress allows for some of this already), could provide a rich and useful portfolio of their work and experience which is semantically linked to other services such as Institutional Repositories or other publications databases where their work is held.

After using it for a few hours, I now find myself disappointed when a website doesn’t offer at least one piece of semantic data that is found by Operator (currently, most don’t but some do). Microformat support will be included (rather than an add-on) in Firefox 3.1 and IE 8, so we can expect to see much more widespread adoption of it. A good thing.

There’s a nice demonstration of microformats here, using the Operator plugin.