The ALT-Scotland special interest group will be hosting an event on Thursday 20th June, 11.00-15.30, at Glasgow Caledonian University. The focus will be on open education and what it means for our practice in Scottish institutions.  Topics will include Edinburgh University’s experience of Coursera (Christine Sinclair), a look at Open Badges (Grainne Hamilton), designing the ocTEL platform (Martin Hawksey) and an update from the SQA (Joe Wilson) . There will also be plenty of time to network and catch up on the latest developments.  Book your place on the ALT website.

Part of the Learning Analytics Summer Institute Global Network

Jisc CETIS in partnership with the Open University in Scotland and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics will be hosting a one day event on the 5th July in the Informatics Forum (Edinburgh) focusing on Learning Analytics.

LASI-UK is part of a global network of events in the first week of July, which are linked to the Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI) at Stanford University. LASI-UK will explore ways of working with data to draw out and share insights that can make a real difference to learning and teaching. This free, interactive event has a dual focus on data visualisation and working with dialogue data. You can check out the draft programme here.

Delegates are also invited to join us for an optional evening session, where we will be broadcasting the final morning plenary session live from Stanford.

Who should attend?

Anyone with an interest in using data to support students and inform curriculum design and teaching, including:

• Data analysts, planners and management information providers
• Curriculum designers / education developers
• Those involved in the construction, delivery and analysis of MOOCs

Registration

Click here for more details and registration

This is a free event; however, places are limited, so interested parties are encouraged to register early.  We look forward to welcoming you to our event.

• Learning analytics for open and distance education | Learning together online – May 24, 2013
• Notes on Narrative Science and Automated Insights | OUseful.Info, the blog… – May 22, 2013
• The last ever MOOCshow #openandonline » FOLLOWERS OF THE APOCALYPSE – May 20, 2013
• scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com – May 13, 2013
• Learning Technologies: ScHARR MOOC Diaries: Part IX: Pressing On – Using press packs to spread the MOOC message – May 13, 2013
• Visualization Papers at CHI 2013 — Fell in Love with Data – May 10, 2013
• Traditional Coursera drop-out post, or “What is this thing called MOOC?” » FOLLOWERS OF THE APOCALYPSE – May 7, 2013
• The Researcher Dashboard | Orbital – May 3, 2013
• Isn’t it time that Higher Education went agile? – April 30, 2013

What is Gmail Label Feeder?

It’s a little Google Apps Script app that you can setup to select one of your Gmail labels, preview content (with the option to remove all the links you’d like not to publish, like unsubscription links) and publish a public feed of the result. This video (embedded below) gives an overview of the problem and how the ‘Gmail Label Feeder’ app works:

How can I setup Gmail Label Feeder and how does it work?

Whilst logged in to your Google account open this script and then follow the instructions below:

1. In the Script Editor File > Make a copy (this makes your own personal copy of the script which lives in Google Drive. With this copy you can control permissions etc and means I except no liability if it goes wrong, breaks, doesn’t work)
2. From the Script Editor Run > setup
   IMPORTANT: when authenticating use the Gmail account you want to create feeds for
3. Still in the Script Editor File > Manage versions… and create an initial name and ‘Save New Version’
4. Then, Publish > Deploy as web app… and select ‘Execute the app as: me’ and allow anyone access even anonymously
5. Finally open (and bookmark) the ‘current web app url’ to create (atom) feeds for your gmail labels

The process covering the creation of individual feeds is covered in the video above. The video below shows the five steps for the initial setup:

How it works

Having already used Eric Koleda’s Feed+ script when creating a similar app to turn Scoop.it searches into an RSS feed it wasn’t too much effort to change the source data to a Gmail account. It’s not the first time I’ve hacked the functionality of Gmail having already used my inbox to re-enable Google Reader social share features, so I already knew/had code to GmailApp.search using the ‘label:’ search operator. One thing I struggled with was removing selected links from emails. The UI side was straight forward thanks to the fantastic framework already developed by Eric. Initially I tried Removing html tags and content where tag content matches an array of values using Xml.parse() but as you see from the answer and comments from Jonathan Broughton and Bruce Mcpherson (thanks guys!) I used regex instead (only after getting caught out by line breaks and tabs).

Dark social judo: Pulling the email push

I was first made aware of ‘dark social’ via Alan Cann (who is ironically quoted in the THE today for his work around social media) and in particular his move to email as the main communication tool for students.

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic — who writes about the influence of what he calls “dark social” on engagement and traffic patterns. While everyone is busy watching Twitter and Facebook because they are easy to track, Madrigal argues that most social traffic still comes from old-fashioned or difficult-to-track sources like email and chat messages – (From Dark social: Why measuring user engagement is even harder than you think)

The use of email is something we’ve paid particular attention to in the open online course ocTEL, developing a daily newsletter to push a automated summary of course activity (talking about automated summaries read Tony Hirst’s Notes on Narrative Science and Automated Insights). There’s nothing particularly new in this but one whole I wanted to plug was getting an archive of these back into the ocTEL Course Reader (an RSS aggregation of all available course activity), hence the Gmail Label Feeder. Whilst doing this and picking over my own inbox for example emails I started to think about the ‘push’ I got from social sites like Twitter, Google and LinkedIn keeping me aware of activity and making suggestions for people and content I might like. Whilst some of these are very basic action reporting others require a degree of processing to generate.

The particular scenario I had in mind was if for example you were running a course Twitter account, when you get the inevitable ‘suggestions similar to’ or ‘do you know’ would there be some value judo style ’pull when your opponent pushes’  and publishing this content so it’s available to all your students. Even if this is of little individual value to the student wouldn’t aggregating this data in a machine readable way be useful down the line. Have a look at the menu of push options, wouldn’t at least some of these be useful to your students. Should we be doing a bit more dark social judo?

• Script editor added to Google Docs and Forms
• Addition of the Forms Service which lets you programmatically manipulate forms
• Extending Google Docs functionality using Custom menus and user interfaces including creating custom sidebars

The last one in particular looked interesting. Having a scriptable area to supplement the main control area immediately made me think about resurrecting tools like the citation robot ‘Igor’ or supplement Google Spreadsheets on the fly graphs or extra info from 3rd party sites.

As Tom Smith (University of York) has discovered sidebar integration in Google Spreadsheets isn’t available yet, but the word from Google I/O session announcing this feature (video not available yet) is it’ll be here in a couple of weeks (see comments thread here).

So, like Tom, to kick the tyres on the Google Docs sidebar functionality I set myself a small project. One of the features of MS Word I like is the ‘Navigation Pane’, in particular for jumping around a document using section headings. Given this operates from a sidebar it seems an ideal candidate to try and replicate.

Looking at the Google Apps Script documentation we can see that we can getLinkUrl() from a TableOfContents within a Google Doc. Using an example from stackoverflow it’s easy to extract the link urls using:

 var tocDat = {};
  var doc = DocumentApp.getActiveDocument(); //get active document
  for (var i = 0; i < doc.getNumChildren(); i++) { // loop all the document elements
    var p = doc.getChild(i);
    if (p.getType() == DocumentApp.ElementType.TABLE_OF_CONTENTS) { // if the element type is a TABLE_OF_CONTENTS extract item links
      var toc = p.asTableOfContents();
      for (var ti = 0; ti < toc.getNumChildren(); ti++) { // looping over each ToC item
        var itemToc = toc.getChild(ti).asParagraph().getChild(0).asText();
        var itemText = itemToc.getText();
        var itemUrl = itemToc.getLinkUrl();
        tocDat[itemText] = itemUrl; // create object array
      }
    }
  }

It’s worth noting that to get this requires the user to have already inserted a table of contents into the document. There is an open issue ticket to do this using script. Something else I was unable to do was return what level the heading link was for (e.g. Heading 1, Heading 2 etc). To do this I had to loop arose the entire document, which you can see in the final project code.

Here is a copy of the example document with the code included. Because no need edit rights to run custom menus you’ll need to File > Make a copy to get the ‘Custom’ dropdown menu option.

The first time you select Custom > Show Document Map you get a big scary authentication window (another one of the new features announced was a pilot of a new authentication flow). Once you’ve ‘Ok’ you can run Custom > Show Document Map which launches the sidebar:

At this point you are probably asking where are the links in the document map. For some reason the caja sanitisation is stripping the anchor link. Regardless of this, if you dig around the page source you’ll see as part of the sanitisation links target _blank which will open a new browser tab.

In the sidebar documentation it says that communication with other Apps Script services is possible, which might be a way to hook the navigation functionality in, but as I can’t find any methods to change document position it looks like for now it’s a lost cause.

So while I’ve hit a dead-end having the sidebar, particularly when it reaches Google Sheets, is a big bonus but as always it’s important to be aware of the limitations. I’m looking forward to what others come up with.

PS Must try the programmable forms next (it might be an opportunity to update EventManager v3)

Highlights from Jisc Cetis Analytics Series include

• Analytics; what is changing and why does it matter?
  This paper provides a high level overview to the CETIS Analytics Series. The series explores a number of key issues around the potential strategic advantages and insights which the increased attention on, and use of, analytics is bringing to the education sector. It is aimed primarily at managers and early adopters in Further and Higher Education who have a strategic role in developing the use of analytics in the following areas:
  • Whole Institutional Issues,
  • Ethical and Legal Issues,
  • Learning and Teaching,
  • Research Management,
  • Technology and Infrastructure.
• Analytics for Learning and Teaching
  A broad view is taken of analytics for Learning and Teaching applications in Higher Education. In this we discriminate between learning analytics and academic analytics: uses for learning analytics are concerned with the optimisation of learning and teaching per se, while uses of educational analytics are concerned with optimisation of activities around learning and teaching, for example, student recruitment.
• Legal, Risk and Ethical Aspects of Analytics in Higher Education
  The collection, processing and retention of data for analytical purposes has become commonplace in modern business, and consequently the associated legal considerations and ethical implications have also grown in importance. Who really owns this information? Who is ultimately responsible for maintaining it? What are the privacy issues and obligations? What practices pose ethical challenges?
  Also of interest the LAK13 on An evaluation of policy frameworks for addressing ethical considerations in learning analytics
• Institutional Readiness for Analytics
  This briefing paper is written for managers and early adopters in further and higher education who are thinking about how they can build capability in their institution to make better use of data that is held on their IT systems about the organisation and provision of the student experience. It will be of interest to institutions developing plans, those charged with the provision of analytical data, and administrators or academics who wish to use data to inform their decision making. The document identifies the capabilities that individuals and institutions need to initiate, execute, and act upon analytical intelligence
• Case Study, Acting on Assessment AnalyticsOver the past five years, as part of its overall developments in teaching and learning, The University of Huddersfield has been active in developing new approaches to assessment and feedback methodologies. This has included the implementation of related technologies such as e-submission and marking tools.In this case study Dr Cath Ellis shares with us how her interest in learning analytics began and how she and colleagues are making practical use of assessment data both for student feedback and overall course design processes.
  Aspects of this case study and other work in this area are available in this webinar recording on Learning analytics for assessment and feedback

Examples of Learning Analytic Tools

Taken from Dyckhoff, A. L., et al. “Supporting action research with learning analytics.“Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge. ACM, 2013.

References for these tools are listed here

Here is a more general set of Analytics Tools and Infrastructure from the Analytics Series

A quick reminder that the Analytics in UK Further and Higher Education Survey is still open.

I’ve been messing around with Excel; trying to create a “punchcard chart” that will let me visualise data by hour and day at the same time. This is where I’ve got to so far, using nothing more than COUNTIFS and SUMIFS.

It works, more or less, although there are some bits to tidy up; notably that y-axis, which should really read Sunday through Saturday or the like.

Here’s a link to the Excel workbook if you want to try this out: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B26bhH2SxecqcDN4c3JvYTlfYTA/edit?usp=sharing

Knowing that Google Sheets/Spreadsheets permits the QUERY formula which allows SQL like data manipulation I thought I’d give it a try. The result is mixed. As thought reshaping the data was relatively straight forward using a query along the lines of:

 =QUERY(raw!A:A,"SELECT COUNT(A) WHERE HOUR(A) = "&C2&" AND DAYOFWEEK(A) = "&D2&" LABEL COUNT(A) ''")

where raw!A:A is some datetime data (in this case imported from TAGS).  Here’s the source spreadsheet if you want a closer look at the formula.

So far so good. Next to graph the data. This is where the trouble starts. First here’s the result (click for the interactive version):

Looking at the bubble chart option it says:

The first column in the table should be text, and represents the label of that bubble. The numbers in the second column are plotted on the x axis. The numbers in the third column are plotted on the y axis. The optional fourth column should be text, and determines the bubble colour. The optional fifth column is numeric, and determines the size of the bubble.

Okay … so in the first image you’ll see I’ve had to start spoofing columns. In B:B I’ve had to create a column of unique labels. In E:E I needed to create a dataset for results where the count is zero. This is because the bubble chart will render bubbles even if the size is zero. To get around this I’ve tried removed the fill on zero values. Another aspect I’m not entirely convinced with is the bubble scaling, but I’ll let you decide.

The really worrying aspect of all this is given the recent announcement of Deprecation of Gadgets in Google Spreadsheets which allowed you to embed your own charts in Google Sheets (here’s an example gadget I wrote to include a d3.js force layout graph), come July/August  if I want to visualise data in a spreadsheet all I’m going to be left with is Google’s crappy charts … sigh :(

My initial reaction was:

just got an email after logging into service hadn’t just in a long time asking if I found everything I needed … #octel

— Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) May 10, 2013

Bit creepy but wondered if suitable model for open courses? #octel

— Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) May 10, 2013

Looking at how they did this there are some clues in the email. Notice the email contains a link with ?source=intercom (campaign tracking), and the email domain for the sender is intercom.io. Visiting the intercom.io site it’s immediate to see the pieces fall in place, Intercom providing a customer relationship tracking/engagement service which allows condition based automated messaging.

If you click ‘Start using intercom’ more is revealed about how this service works. By embedding a code snippet to your sight which returns the logged in user email (in the advanced setting this can be encrypted/hashed rather than plain text it appears you still need to send either a user_id or email in plain text as well as hashing)

And true to their word in 30 seconds I was able to track active on the ocTEL testbed site.

Tracking user logins is a standard feature on most platforms (and can also be enabled in WordPress with the last login plugin), but there are nice features of Intercom that might make it a useful component within an open course situation. As well as tracking ‘last seen’ Intercom are able to track location, extended social profiles and levels of engagement. The fact it’s easy to install is a big plus, but if you are prepared to pay the $50/month you can get your hands on some nice additional features. As well as auto messaging you can reassign message replies to other users (the scenario I have in mind is reassigning messaging to other tutors).

So what would your reaction be if this tool was used in a course like ocTEL? Are there similar or better tools out there that you know about?

PS I’m currently having problems getting the email encrypted version of the embed code to work. Others might have more luck

Update: Here’s the code to add to your theme’s function.php to added Intercom.io support

This week’s webinar is on platforms for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and in particular focuses on the connectivist style of courses being often taught by individuals or small teams of academics. As well as an overview of emerging trends there will be an in-depth behind the scenes look at the ocTEL platform. ocTEL is built on the open source WordPress blogging platform which has been supplemented with a set of additional plugins and some custom coding. Participants will gain an insight into the challenges of developing and running a connectivist style open course and have the opportunity to quiz the platform architect Martin Hawksey.

You can access the Week 5 webinar via this link A recording of the session is here.

Recently when reflecting on my career path two key moments came to mind. First around 1999 having graduated as a structural engineer I got a job converting course content marked up in Word documents into HTML. Why this was important was I was forced to understand the raw building blocks of the web, I was in a foreign world and I needed to learn the language and fast.

A decade later and my interests shifted, less about static content and more dynamic data. Tapping into the work, primarily of Tony Hirst, my eyes were opened to the opportunity of remixing the web. Taking existing data, a dash of code/3rd party services and creating new things and ideas. In this world data feeds are the new building blocks to play with. In particular RSS and Atom feeds are the prize. Usually openly available and easy to manipulate/render.

Unfortunately this ease of access appears to be putting off the big 3rd party services. With the latest Twitter API atom isn’t an option, with Google+ RSS feeds should be forgot about. This is a great shame a number of open online courses recognise the value of learners finding their own space, feeding their activity into tools which can aggregate, potentially sense make, and feed the rhizomes of the networked learner.

Like other open courses this is the challenge we face in ocTEL, pulling distributed activity into the machine. For some services RSS is still championed.  Diigo where the RSS badge with pride..

JISCMail go even further also flying the auto-discovery flag (yet another front being eroded) …

What about Delicious …

Mendeley … exists but you have to go digging

Google+ … this is where it gets interesting

Eric Koleda has created a Chrome Web App (Feed+) that lets you create RSS(Atom) feeds for Google+ searches. Using Google Apps Script Eric has created a user interface and it does all the negotiation with the Google+ API converting the data into RSS. Given the availability of a Scoopit API and using Eric’s base code I’ve forked the project to create the Feed+ Machine Chrome Web App and the standalone Feed+ Machine App (Google login is required to manage your feeds). To begin with it only supports creating feeds from Scoop.it! post searches, but given Eric has done such a great job on the design it’ll be easy to extend. I’ll spare you the details of the code but the source files are here if you want to unpick what’s going on and ask questions.

Here’s an example of a feed for Scoop.its referencing ocTEL, which we are already digesting in the ocTEL Course Reader. But why do this? My interest is primarily in capturing as much of the digital landscape, each artefact collected adding more detail to the map. Whilst material pulled from Scoop.it is potentially yet another churn of existing content, who is sharing and any insight they add provides additional context and may be another way in which participants can identify and migrate to new clusters of activity.

There is a downside to this to this approach. Having a search feed from Scoop.it is useful but having wrestled with the ScoopIt API there is much more data available not being captured such as metadata around posts and topics. So perhaps like others I should abandon the feed and favour JSON and start filling the Tin Can …

PS NEW!!! CETIS briefing on Activity Data and Paradata for more developments in this area.