Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

My mind is not working today. Actually it has been on a strike for a few days now. It must be the easter holidays. :)

I am trying to take a step forward in the project I am working in. So far I have recorded a few video clips from staff and students in the school. Yeah I think I have a good number now. I have done some myself. The videos are short, an average of 5 minutes each. I am also getting other kind of material, like for example a PowerPoint presentation an ex-PhD student sent me, or an essay a second year student is writing. I have also been working on Sakai. I focused my exploration on the blogger feature, but also on the wiki, forum, podcast and resources tools. As I think those will hold the core of the material I am collecting. Of course I will also use the schedule, annoucements and messaging tools, but I think those will form part of the peripheral of the site.

I feel like stuck now. I sort of guess what I should do next but do not know how to do it. I think my next step should be organising all the material I've got so far and try to build a map of themes. This map would help me to:

1. Know the gaps I need to fill regarding areas of research in the school I need to cover
2. Create sort of groups of themes to which the video clips and other material can be classified
3. Then I can use these groups to create a series of blog posts within one or more sites in Sakai.
(I am not sure yet if I will need more than one site in Sakai. I can probably have 2 sites, for example, and name these sites as my two highest level groups of themes. If I have more groups at the highest level I will need more sites).
4. Relate or draw links between groups of material. I could then use these links to connect material between them. For example I can say "If you want to know more see this other podcast ....".
There might be other benefits of drawing a map but at the moment my brain is just starting to warm up. Maybe 20% functional. I have written a list of themes on my whiteboard (see picture) and I hope I can get ideas about how to organise them soon. Sometimes staring at the whiteboard helps, so that is what I've been doing this morning, before I decided to write this post :)

The blogger feature in Sakai, allows each member of the site (that will be staff and students in the school) to create their own "blog". So a site can have as many blogs as there are members in the site. Each "blog" will hold a list of posts. A post is basically an article containing text, pictures, embeded files, like videos or PDFs, etc. When a member access the blogger tool s/he sees a list of all the posts uploaded by everyone in the site. There are ways of filtering this buy author though.( Each site member could have their own PhD/Research diary in their blog as someone proposed in a comment in my previous post.)

Because I am the only one working on this project everything I will upload will come under my name. I have filmed the videos, edited them, I am editing PowerPoints, etc. I will write and upload instructions and introductory texts to each material. Will organise them and make connections between them. But in reality the owner of the "message" withing each material is every single person who has volunteered to help me. So I think I should publish their material under their names. What do you think? I am not sure though about how to do that. Would I require access to everyone's Sakai account?

Having each material under different names will help the site to build a sense of community. New comers will see that other people have posted things and would think about uploading more material themselves (hopefully!). Some members could ask questions in their blogs or in the forums (as someone else commented in my previous post) and other members could create posts to answer those questions.

What I am doing now is just building the foundations of a site that should start feeding itself with the material that staff and students will upload in the future.

hmmm I think this site will need one or more moderators in the future, just to keep it organised.

I am also thinking on a couple of suggestions that a friend of mine made. He said it could be useful to use the google search engine within the site. That can help students to find the material they are looking for. I am not sure about using the actual "google" search engine. Sakai is a password protected environment and all its content should be kept confidential. (or could I embed a google search engine in Sakai?) The blogger in Sakai comes with a very basic search option which searches within all posts in all blogs in the site. I hope that should be enough. Only problem I find is that there will be other material posted in the forums for example and that search engine woudln't find them. One would have to go to the forum search engine to look for things in the forums... and so on.

My friend also suggested using tags in "del.icio.us" or "technorati" but again I am not sure because of the confidenciality and security issues. The blogger in Sakai allows the creation of "keywords" for each post, so I guess I can use them. I could use the theme groups' names as keywords for example. Finally my friend suggested RSS feeds. Some students could use RSS feeds to keep them updated on new posts or comments on posts within the VGS site. I use RSS feeds in my cellphone to read the news sometimes. I use the RSS option in google sidebar to keep me updated with posts in some blogs, on Hi5 and on Facebook. I like them. Some people may not.

Now I will go back to staring at my whiteboard.

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.