Conferences & workshops

MoodleMoot08 – Padova, Italy

Alex May 12th, 2008

On Friday I gave an “Introduction to OpenLearn” presentation at the Italian MoodleMoot08 in Padova. The first day started in true Italian style – about an hour late – though to be fair this was actually more due to the fact there had been a train strike in the morning which had delayed a lot of the people arriving. The transport strike also explained why my bus from the airport to Padova on Thursday had been free, I’d tried to buy a ticket from the driver but he refused my money and just indicated for me to sit down, so I spent the hours journey wondering if the ticket inspectors would get on and I’d get fined! Fortunately not, and it was explained to me later that the refusal to take money is unofficial strike action by the drivers, for fear of robbery if they are carrying cash.

I was the only English speaker at the conference, but thankfully John Hannon (English teacher from Bari )translated everything on the fly for me, for the benefit of the entirely Italian audience of about 200 teachers. I just about managed to understand some of the other presentations, with help from little translations from the people sat around me.The conference was also being webcast – so I’m hoping that the replays will appear soon. [Update 15/5/08: the replay of my presentation is now available at: http://www.videoserver01.unimore.it/p85167542/, my talk starts at about 1'08. Presentations from the other sessions are also available - all in Italian ;-) ]

My presentation seemed to go really well, I certainly had plenty of people asking me about OpenLearn and our tools (especially FlashMeeting), so I gave a few demos when I could get on a PC with an internet connection. A wireless connection wasn’t available, which meant there was virtually no-one using a laptop on the audience (so no complaints about noisy keyboards), still I managed to grab a machine with in connection so I could give a few demos of FlashMeeting (or the FM project as it’s now officially called), though it was a little tricky with no web cam and no speakers!

Roberto Pinna from the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) dept at the Università del Piemonte Orientale gave me a demo of their MeetingPoint application – it’s a web based video conferencing tool, so similar to FlashMeeting although it uses the opensource Red5 server (rather than the paid-for Flash Comms Server). The main differences (that I can see) are that MeetingPoint doesn’t record the meetings for later replay (as far as I’m aware), but it has a plugin architecture, so if there’s a tool you’d like to embed then you can do so – or (for example) replace the provided whiteboard application with something else.

Luckily I had the time to spend the rest of the weekend in Padova as it’s a really nice city – not far from Venice (but far fewer tourists), but plenty of historic monuments, and being Italy, churches. It’s home to the second oldest university in Italy (Bologna University had opened 3 or 4 years before) and where Galileo taught and his observatory it still standing. Some parts of the old university are still standing (see my pics) – the crests you can see in some of these picture are the shields from the previous directors of the university and faculties.

Other sights I got to were the Basilica di Sant’Antonio and Cappella degli Scrovegni. St Antonio relics, seem to consist of slightly more gruesome relics than I’ve seen before (usually bits of bone), including his lower jaw, tougue and larynx… hmmm…

Far less grim were the botanical gardens – “regarded as the most ancient university garden in the world”.

OpenLearn conference

Alex November 1st, 2007

Spent the last couple of days at the OpenLearn conference, which was all quite interesting, although maybe not directly relevant to my day-to-day work – the things that were really relevant I should know about already!! – but interesting nonetheless. I won’t write about all the presentations I went to as there was some active blogging on all the sessions – so pointless for me to replicate all that here. The sessions I found most interesting were… John Seely Brown, Alan Cann, Erik Duval, Ray Corrigan and Tony Hirst.

One thing I did notice was that whereever Open Educational Resources (OERs) were discussed it generally referred to content – and essentially static content at that. Whenever tools were discussed they were as a surrounding/supporting activity rather than being OERs in their own right – as mentioned in the wikipedia OER article.

Live blogging

Alex October 30th, 2007

I’m currently at the OpenLearn conference and have helping with the live blogging effort on the Ochre website. However I’m finding this a little tricky – I’d be fine taking notes then writing up later, but my brain doesn’t work quickly enough to form sentences worth posting up as people are presenting. Think the best bet for me is to listen to the presentations then write up my overall thoughts at the end.

Think I may be making thing even harder for myself by writing to this blog and the Ochre blog at the same time…!

Future of web apps

Alex October 5th, 2007

Spent the last few days at the Future of Web Apps conference, and, as with the previous one in February, loads of excellent presentations and lots of food for thought. Also managed to wrangle myself a place in the workshop sessions, which were well worth it. Here were the highlights for me…

Steve Souders (Yahoo) on high performance websites, excellent tips on how to improve the response time in your web app. This was all focussed on improving the speed of the front end, rather than the more usual approach of improving backend speed (with database optimisation etc) – but as he demonstrated, the gains are much more significant when applied to the front end. Steve also gave a workshop on the same subject – his presentation slides give all the info you need – rather than me repeating it all here. Steve’s team have built a plugin for FireBug, YSlow, making it easy to show how your web app scores against his 14 rules (see the presentation for details of these rules). The only one of these rules I would question, for all but the biggest of web sites/apps, is the Content Delivery Network (CDN). Out of interest, I ran YSlow against our OpenLearn site and there is definitely some scope for improvement.

Dion Almaer (Google) on Google Gears, this was broadly the same as I’d heard at the Google Developer Day and I’m still not totally convinced it will get huge take-up. The reason being that I think it’s only really relevant for a small slice of web apps – eg for salesmen-out-on-the-road apps – or maybe I’m being unfair, being able to use GoogleDocs when not online would be good. I am quite interested in the WorkerPool with thread-like JavaScript, and would be fantastic if this could be implemented in JavaScript generally. I should probably mention that I do actually like the fact I’m not always connected to the web!

Robin Christopherson (AbilityNet) – I think this is the first time I’ve been to a mainstream web development conference where there’s been a presentation highlighting how to develop for visually impaired users and I’m sure (hoping!) his demo of screen reader software (especially the reading of the image names on the Amazon tabs) was an eye-opener (excuse the pun).

Heidi Pollock (BluePulse) on the mobile web and all the associated complications and headaches due to the sheer number of different web browsers used on different phones and the screen size you can actually work with. Before her presentation I would have had no idea where to start designing an app for mobile phone, now I do, but whether I want to cope with all those headaches is another matter!

John Resig (JQuery) gave an insight on the future of JavaScript (v2). Though I have a voice in the back of my head telling me that it’s just converging with Java, for example, optionally giving variables types and being able to import packages of classes. However, ignoring my fears that this is reinventing Java, it will certainly be good to see some more ‘real-programming’ type principles applied to JavaScript. I did learn Java before JavaScript, so maybe I’m biased anyway. Another thing John mentioned and is applicable to the work I was looking at alerting user to a new MSG message with a beep, is the implementation of <video/> and <audio/> tags in HTML 5.

Joe Walker (DWR) on Comet and attempting to get over the hurdle of the fact that the web is a pull technology. This is something we had to address with MSG, being able to push new message notifications and presence state changes out to the user. We achieved this by use long running connections, only returning if some needs pushing out to the client, or after around 45 seconds. So I’ll need to look into whether comet can give us a better/different approach.

Tom Coates (Yahoo) showing FireEagle (though it’ll have a different name on release), a way of sharing your location, so relevant to me with the MSG – Google Maps integration. Essentially it provides a service that applications and devices can use to either write or read your current location. So you could have your mobile phone automatically update where you are now (using GPS) and have this fed out to Twitter. This could be a really good one for us to look at for MSG and auto updating your location rather than relying on someone remembering to go update their location. As Tom pointed out, there are loads of potential privacy issues/concerns (“Burglary 2.0″ was mentioned during the Q&A), but they seem to have done a really good job of addressing and anticipating these.

And last, but by no means least, Michael Kowolski’s (Kitsite) workshop on Interface Design for Web Apps, reminding us just how critical a good user interface is – and he wasn’t just talking about the graphical design. Everything he mentioned ought to be common-sense, obvious and in-built to web app developers/designers, but to me it highlighted just how often and easily it gets overlooked. Creating a easy-to-use and intuitive interface actually requires quite a lot of thought and planning, the fact that the user doesn’t have to learn the interface is a *good thing*.
It did make me think that Moodle has a way to go in this respect, I know that Moodle has ‘themes’, but essentially this is just changing the CSS and a few graphics, and that’s not really changing the interface. Michael is going to post the presentation up soon (here), and it’ll be a good one to look through again.

All in all, a thought provoking few days, and makes me wish I had far more time to investigate in detail all I’ve found out. The final thing I’ve learned is that I ought to get into the habit of blogging live, rather than leaving it till I get home and trying to remember all the excellent stuff I found out about! (or take better notes…)

OpenLearn day at CALRG conference

Alex June 7th, 2007

As part of the CALRG conference a whole day (the Thursday) is going to be devoted to presentations from the OpenLearn team. I’ll be presenting a session on how we developed the Google Maps within MSG and there are also sessions on developing Open Educational Resources, Communications & Technology in OpenLearn, how to provide interactivity, usability testing and more!!
So hope to see you there ;-)

Google Developer Day 2007 – Google Gears & Mapplets API

Alex June 1st, 2007

Yesterday I went to the Google Developer Day in London and learned quite a lot of new ’stuff’ about the APIs they are producing and what’s coming up in the future, so here’s a brief overview of the workshop sessions I attended… for info, videos of all the sessions are here: http://code.google.com/events/developerday/

Maps API workshop
In this workshop we developed a small maps application, most of which wasn’t that new to me – putting makers on a map, drawing lines etc – much of which I’ve done during the development of the MSG Presence Maps. But there were a couple of new things for me, firstly the driving directions – I hadn’t realised how easy it was to add these to a map or that they were available through the API (plus a text description of the route). Secondly, Google Mapplets, now you can develop a mapping application and combine it with other mapping applications (either porduced by you or other people) so, for example, you could use an estate agents mapplet to find houses in an area, and use a schools mapplet to find schools in the same area – these would all be overlayed on the same map, and you can add/create other mapplets as you like. (Mapplets info & demo).

Google Gears
This seems to have been mentioned everywhere else in the last few days – so should mention it here too ;-) Essentially it’s an open source browser plugin to allow you to continue to use web applications even when you’re offline – giving seamless experience between on/off-line. There’s plenty more info about it around. It was very interesting to see the WorkerPool – which provides thread-like ability for JavaScript – preventing your browser freezing up whilst some long winded JavaScript is running. I was slightly unconvinced though by their reasoning behind not dealing with synchronisation conflicts (where two people update the same data whilst offline and then try to sychnronise their changes back), in saying that this was for the application to deal with – I know it’s a hard problem (maybe impossible to create totally automatic synchronisation conflict resolution?) but I feel conflicts should be highlighted by the synchronisation engine – not the application (as other db synchronisation managers do).

Maps – new features
(lots of maps stuff for me today!) There was more mention/explanation here of the Mapplets, but I also found out some more things abotu the existing API that I didn’t know you could do. For example the overview map (small large scale map in bottom right of the main map – to give some context) – I’d not realised this was available through the API – so going to look at adding this to MSG Presence Maps. Similarly with the CustomControlArea – this might be a good place to put the MSG user search – in a box overlayed on the map – in fact maybe all the controls, eg group selection etc could go here? Also thought about making the mashup.jsp service from BuddyXML return KML which could then just be loaded driectly into the small ‘online users’ map in the MSG block.

All in all a very worthwhile day out & learned quite a lot (which didn’t go straight over my head – always a bonus). As always, it’s just now going to be getting the time (and have an actual application for) to try all of these things out :-)

Sussex Learning Network

Alex May 10th, 2007

Yesterday a few of us (Elia, Jenny, Michelle and I) gave some workshops/presentations at the Sussex Learning Network conference. All seemed to go very well, between the four of us we ran three sessions in parallel – and had lots of interesting questions and discussion. A FlashMeeting of the presentation Elia & I gave is available if you’d like to see how it went ;-)

Presentation… “Integrating Google Maps into MSG”

Alex April 18th, 2007

This morning I gave a seminar in KMi about how we developed the MSG Presence Maps, the seminar was webcast and you can view a replay :-)

I hope to also put up a link to the ‘raw’ powerpoint presentation.

Future of Web Apps presentations

Alex March 6th, 2007

The mp3s and pdfs of the presentations are up on the FOWA website now: see: http://www.futureofwebapps.com/

The ones I’m going to be listening to again are: Bradley Horowitz, Tara Hunt, Rasmus Lerdorf, Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia, Simon Willison and Werner Vogels.

Future of Web Apps 07

Alex February 21st, 2007

Had fun last couple of days at the Future of Web Apps conference, heard some very interesting talks. All the presentations are going to be available as podcasts, so I guess they should be up soon and I’ll post a link. The most interesting aspect for me was collecting plenty of web app urls to try out in the next few days, e.g. openid (single sign on), twingly.se (visual representation of blogosphere), soocial (contacts management), mybloglog (getting connected with people who read your blog), spinvox (voicemail to text), thinkfree viewer (for publishing MS office files online). When I had chance to have a play with some of these I’ll post up my experiences and thoughts on them.

The application I’m most interesting in finding more about is OpenID, as seems to be an innovative way to solve the single sign on problem. Really interesting to hear about the experiences from founders and developers from last.fm and digg. The OU got a positive mention from Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) ;-)

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