Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

I've been relearning a lot of stuff these days. In the project I am working now I need to collect a lot of information from researchers working in the University. I've been filming some of them. Video clips of no more than 5 minutes which I save as WMV files. I have also got PowerPoint and Word files. All that information will be uploaded in a virtual research/learning community I am designing in Sakai.

The name of this community is Virtual Graduate School and its purpose is to help PhD students and young researchers learn how to do research. We will populate the site with information about research in general and about the research that the staff and students of the school are doing. We want to do this by adding a human/personal touch to the site. The site won't replace books and journal articles. Those are available in libraries and on the web for researchers to be read. What is not there, or at least is not that visible, is information about the process of research. How people come up with ideas, how they make their choices, mistakes, rights and wrongs, etc. I call these aspects the human side of research. When you go to a seminar, or read an article, you are told all the good stuff, the final research questions/hypotheses, the methodology and the results. Then don't tell you why and how they came up with those ideas, and what problems they found on the way. This is the gap that the Virtual Graduate School is trying to fill. Of course it will also cover all the formal aspects of research.

The question I've been working in the last month is on how I can do this. First thing that came to my mind was to show "real, life cases". And it occurred to me that video taping people talking about different aspects of their research was a good idea. Some other people are writing short essays or creating PowerPoint presentations for the project. The next step was to think on how I could show or display that information in a site like Sakai (which is the site that this university uses as a virtual learning environment). I decided to try the blogger tool to create Posts containing the videos, PowerPoint, etc. and a short description of the topic presented plus an invitation for discussion. What I want is to make the site (visually) attractive so people will come and visit it, and also thought provoking so people can start a discussion. Discussion helps people learn, so that would be one of the objectives of this project as well.


Now on to the technical side (Sakai is still being tested by the University's computer centre and I am still learning how to use it.)

As I previously said, I am creating sort of articles (posts) contaning text and other "objects". The blogger in Sakai accepts html code so I am using the "object" and "embed" commands to embed videos. See first picture, it is an article with 3 video clips. This is just an example, the videos are real, but the text has been copied from a random website. My idea is to make members of the site watch the video and read the related written content which provides contextual information like, introduction of the presenter, a bit of background of topic discussed and then a set of questions which I hope will encourage people to participate with their comments. This is the code I am using:

<object width="320" height="285" align="right" type="application/x-oleobject" standby="Loading Microsoft Windows Media Player components..." codebase="https://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#Version=5,1,52,701" classid="CLSID:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95" id="mediaPlayer">
<param value="https://video.wmv" name="fileName" />
<param value="true" name="animationatStart" />
<param value="true" name="transparentatStart" />
<param value="0" name="autoStart" />
<param value="true" name="showControls" />
<param value="true" name="loop" />
<embed width="320" height="285" loop="true" designtimesp="5311" autostart="0" src="https://video.wmv" videoborder3d="-1" showstatusbar="-1" showdisplay="0" showtracker="-1" showcontrols="true" bgcolor="darkblue" autosize="-1" displaysize="4" name="mediaPlayer" id="mediaPlayer" pluginspage="http://microsoft.com/windows/mediaplayer/en/download/" type="application/x-mplayer2" />
</object>


For PowerPoint and Word documents I thought on converting them to PDF and then embed the PDF into the blog. See second picture. This is the code I am using:

<embed width="576" height="443" src="https://file.pdf" type="application/pdf" />

The menu and toolbars are hidden within the original PDF file. (Go to File-Document Properties and click on the "Initial View" tab)

The advantage is that the presentation comes in a small portion of the site, allowing for an introduction and some other descriptions to be put beside it. However, the presentation is not that small that it cannot be read. The scroll bar remains so the reader con change "slide/page" easily. Also, the reader can have the chance to review some of the comments already made below the article without having to scroll down so much.


Another advantage is that I can do this without any other tool than the standard set I get in a University's machine. I was thinking on converting videos and files to flash format but I don't have flash converter/creator. I will have to buy one. And also I am not sure about how much time it would take and how beneficial it would be.