“I’m sitting here talking about this job because I know the systems you build are robust.”

Thanks @spotlightkid, you made my day.

• Analytics for the Whole Institution: Balancing Strategy and Tactics
  with David Kay of Sero Consulting
• Analytics for Learning and Teaching
• Analytics for Understanding Research

Links in the list above point to individual download pages.

Crazily, for someone who would like some free time to follow up diverse interests, my mind has now been drifting to two larger writing projects, one a book on the use of Personal Learning Environments in Formal Education, and the other a book on Agile Methods, tentatively called Shuhari, about steps to mastery of agile practices.

We shall see what actually gets written, most of Hedtek’s time is now being taken up by steps close to the release of our assessment system as a webservice.

Here’s a report (pdf) we wrote for SCONUL on future user experience of libraries in the UK Higher Education sector.

Notably, the work here includes a small ethnographic survey of UK HE student perspectives on the constraints and affordances of e-libraries by Dave Randall of Unique Adequacy Ltd. We recommend more work of this kind.

From the executive summary:

This report surveys some of the changes that are affecting or will affect users’ experience of library systems (libUX) within Higher Education.

Factors germane to libUX are surveyed in a changing landscape section of the report. These include hardware and platform issues; most importantly, library system use will be changed markedly by adoption of mobile technology, in part driven by decreasing cost and increasing hardware capability. Discovery is a problematic issue for future libraries; their traditional role in providing search facilities is being undermined by global search services including Google and Google Scholar. Further, the increased prominence of electronic resources (including e-books, online serials, and Open Educational Resources) will change the ways libraries need to operate.

It is proposed that various measures need to be put in place to ensure that libraries can respond to these changes. These measures include implementing libUX roles within libraries, including providing training to develop staff placed in these roles, meaningful involvement of users in the development of future library systems, and appropriate funding.

Results of a small ethnographic survey of school leavers and university students and their perceptions of reading, study, and university libraries are included as an appendix.

The report was commissioned by SCONUL, with funding from JISC.

Various participants at M-Libraries 2012 asked for a copy of my invited presentation from today. Here it is for download.

One thing that I don’t touch on in the presentation is the variety of prototypes that could be constructed, the talk only covers paper prototyping, and, particularly, not wireframes, low and high fidelity prototypes. Each has its own advantages, probably the subject of another post if asked about in the comments.

While paper provides significant examples, particularly for encouraging participatory design, at Hedtek we have moved on from paper protyping, preferring to deliver working code and UIs as part of our agile practices. Hey, different stokes for different folks! We are lucky enough to have skilled developers who can modify delivered functionality and user interfaces to order.

But this agile practice is not always the case, recently I’ve been sketching and, through sketches, exploring interfaces with one of our clients who wants to break new ground in computer-supported decision making.

On the verge of the ALT-C 2012 conference in Manchester, Hedtek are proud to launch Gradient, our new e-assessment system. Gradient provides solutions for tests, assignments and exams, and supports multiple formats, including for handwritten answer books.

Gradient offers:

• A superb interactive experience for markers
• Faster and more consistent marking.
• Enhanced student learning through personalised, actionable student feedback.
• Feedback is structured for student use, even by less motivated students.
• Easy reuse and adaption of past feedback.
• Criterion referenced assessment
• Faster marking turnaround and improved feedback helps improve National Student Survey scores on assessment and feedback.
• Built-in quality assurance mechanisms, including mark traceability.
• Support for institution-specific assessment lifecycles.
• Ease of use means minimal training requirements.

See the product description.

Gradient is offered as an institutional system, institutionally hosted or hosted by ourselves, and, in a cut down version (without institutional support, but with our superb marking and feedback facilities) over the web as markitquickly.com.

We’re not stopping here: Future developments will include support for multi-media assessment, peer assessment and Calibrated Peer Review. Ultimately these formative peer assessment techniques will form part of our institutional- and community -focussed Personal Learning Environment.

Since we started out developer blog five months ago we’ve added 36 posts and had more than 4,600 page views; on average 33 times a day.

Over a similar time frame our open source gems have been downloaded almost 3,800 times.

Meanwhile, our main site (you’re using it) is getting about 1,500 visitors a month; average 50/day.

In the last five months we’ve developed our e-assessment system, Gradient. While developing Gradient we implemented some 340 user stories and user interface features. During this, parts of Gradient were re-implemented up to seven times as we learned more about the domain, our solution, and the advanced technology that we need to use to provide simple and easy-to-use application functionality.

During this we have averaged about 1.23 person days development per user story or user interface feature, but this is heavily skewed by longer times at the start of the project. In effect, as the product owner I know at the start of the day that the top for or five stories in our kanban backlog are likely to be in the demo column by the end of the day.

Notes

Gradient is an institutional assessment system that offers significant advantages for teachers, learners, and administrators. adoption.

Gradient (without its institutional features) is  also a web app that individual teachers can use to set, administer, mark assessments and supply feedback to students.  MarkItQuicky runs in the cloud, and is available in beta form at markitquickly.com and (soon) markitquick.ly. Students take assessments via a cloud version of the Gradient Taker Tool or via a VLE (for the latter we are working on Moodle integration at the moment, with BlackBoard following thereafter).

).

Together we are doing our first Moodle job, a small extension to the Moodle Web Services interface. Somewhat noise in the scheme of things, but it helps a friend company, and we’ll contribute the resultant code back to the Moodle community.

More Moodle work most welcome!

Events today made me realise that we never blogged about FishDelish here, a project that we performed June 2010 to July 2011, in partnership with the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science (UMCS) and the FishBase Information and Research Group Inc (FIN), a not-for-profit NGO.

Rather than repeat ourselves, the project aims, technologies and results appear on the FishDelish blog in the UMCS domain. Please head over there to check it out, but warning, the blog is hosted on a virtual machine that may at any time be rolled out from the fishdelish server, so the first page load may take a few seconds.

In that project we learned a whole lot about triples, linked data, triple stores and SPARQL while polishing our skills in various LD-related technologies. There remain several innovative ideas that we want to exploit in the future, including the FishOMatic architecture and advances in the area of active essays [1] which we would, sometime in the future, like to use in improved pedagogic practice.

We could not have done this project without help from Rainer Froese (IFM-GEOMAR and FIN) and Maan Bimbao (FIN) and their bravely open licensed data in FishBase, and our good friends Bijan Parsia (UMCS) and Sean Bechhofer (UMCS), both of whom know approximately a million times more about linked data and semantic technologies than we will ever know!

[1] cf Alan Kay, to whom, together with the rest of the PARQ Smalltalk group, a huge hat tip from Smalltalk programmers everywhere….

As the major part of that work we designed and developed a very clean user interface to replace Jorum’s rather arcane and frustrating user interface. The new user interface was implemented by the provision of a new front-end webservice to handle all user interaction including new navigation and discovery features. The new front end was  implemented in Ruby on Rails, and used the DSpace REST and SWORD APIs to communicate with Jorum’s DSpace core.

Our work also entailed considerable improvement of the open source DSpace REST API, where we performed testing and refactoring to support our new front end functionality. This involved complex work in Java. Other Java-specific work performed for Jorum involved modifying DSpace’s OAI-PMH interface to allow ingest of Open Educational Resources with specific kinds of open licences from other repositories.

We have some regrets about this contract for Jorum because, due to a need to perform unscheduled work on the REST API, Jorum’s funding  ran out before we could transform our clean user experience into the phenomenal end-user experience that we wanted to implement. This early end was always acknowledged as a possibility, but nonetheless we are pleased to note that, when rolled out, a clean user interface and accompanying user experience will be a vast improvement for Jorum.

Despite the contract ending, we did some pro bono work for the service post-contract purely because we like Jorum and want to see it succeed. This extra work was in four areas: (i) a final refactor of code and tests to ensure clarity (ii) Rails skills transfer, (iii) a bit of tricky Rails development in a separate branch of the front end code so Jorum could later rapidly proceed with the development of some more advanced features they want, and (iv) performance and load testing of the new composite system (report to be published in a later post). As a result of the latter we confidently predict that the new Jorum will handle many times its current load.

We look forward to seeing Jorum rolling out our work in the near future.

Announcing that we’ve started a developer blog for notes on the technologies we use, experiments we have performed, etc.

One post is on Ember.js , which we are using in a current development project.  As part of that project, we have recently open sourced four gems that we are using to help us deploy Ember in our Ruby on Rails technology stack.

To date, these gems have been downloaded at an average rate of 35/day, with, to date, 467 downloads. That’s good .