Alex Little

Once again, I’ve been getting a bit slack with posting to my blog, seem to have got a bit distracted with writing project proposals and other work. So here’s a quick update on something I’ve been developing over the last couple of weeks… a smartphone application to easily create, deliver and take short quizzes and assessment activities. Firstly, a quick demo:

There are many quiz apps on Android market, but none that I found will allow you to easily create your own quiz questions (not without programming a new Android app). True, there are ways to do this, for example, to create your quiz in Moodle, then access via one of the mobile Moodle apps. But I wanted something that you could run on your phone offline and didn’t have the overhead of setting up a Moodle installation.

I now have a prototype website (at http://mquiz.org – very surprised this domain name was easily and cheaply available!), where you can create your own (multiple-choice) quizzes. Anyone with an Android smartphone can install the client application and download any of the quizzes created and submit/share their results. To download the client app see: https://market.android.com/details?id=org.digitalcampus.assessment or search for ‘mquiz’ in the market.

I’m planning to make some nice graphs/charts etc on the site so you can track responses to quizzes better. For example to see how many people have been taking your quiz, the scores they are getting, even identify which questions most people get right/wrong.

It’s very much a work in progress, so things are likely to change rapidly – not all the pages on the website are written yet even. Some of the key functions I’d like to work on are:

• Nicer analytics pages/graphs on the website
• Client app for other mobile OSs – thinking about porting to PhoneGap to make it easier to develop for multiple mobile platforms.
• More than just multiple choice – it would be good to support something like the GIFT format to make it easy for people to import existing quizzes
• Better sharing of quizzes – so you could email/sms someone a link to a quiz for them to opt to have it downloaded to their phone next time they open the client app
• Visibility/submission permissions – currently all quizzes created are publicly available and anyone can submit responses (even anonymously), would like to have the option to restrict quizzes to particular users/groups
• … probably much more to add to this list!

The code for the phone client app and the server app is available on GitHub, see: http://mquiz.org/developer/ for details.

Any feedback/suggestions much appreciated (as would any help with the development!)

For those of you in Ethiopia, ICE Ethiopia has the official launch of their iceAddis innovation hub this coming Saturday (7th May). For more information and how to register to participate, visit the iceEthiopia website.

iceAddis is based at the EiABC campus and is where Jaime and I held the elearning training in February earlier this year:

iceAddis

I’ve been using Delicious for several years now, but have only ever really used it as a repository for my storing links, rather than with the associated social functions (such as receiving suggested links or finding who else had saved the same sites). I’ve also been quite careful about making sure I have my own copy of any data stored in the cloud – so I was backing up my saved links regularly – and am often quite wary about being dependent on a third party service.

So a few weeks ago, when I read Liam’s posting about Scuttle I was keen to give it a try.

I’ve now set up my own Scuttle installation (at http://bookmark.alexlittle.net) to save all my links to – anyone else is free [Update: see comment below] to create their own account here to try it out too. So far the only function from Delicious that I’ve missed Scuttle is the auto-suggesting of tags. With Delicious I generally clicked almost all the popular tags which others had also tagged the link with, whereas with Scuttle I need to type all the tags I want – maybe this isn’t such a bad thing.

Introductory Bar Camp session

Just got back to my hotel after a full day at the first Bar Camp to be run in Ethiopia. I flew back to Addis yesterday morning and after catching up on a little sleep, headed over to the venue to help get set up and stayed on for the launch party in the evening – then this morning the real conference started.

Around 300 people attended today, with a really varied range of sessions happening throughout the day – from Google apps programming to participatory community planning and even a yoga session. My colleague, Goitom, from Mekelle Uni, ran a session about network centric computing architectures – covering the research he has been doing into thin-client system and labs. Even though it was much more technial than most of the other sessions, we had a good turnout, with plenty of follow up questions and discussions

Many students from Mekelle Uni managed to attend the conference so was good to see them helping out and getting involved – especially since it was a two day bus trip for them to get here.

'Ishi Beca Ciao' playing at launch party

I ran a session as an overview to our Digital Campus project, similar to the presentation I gave at Elearning Africa in May, all seemed to go well, despite it being at the end of the day and up against a parallel session where a guy from Google was giving away free t shirts!

For tomorrow, I’ve put myself forward to give a presentation about open educational resource, so will now need to get a presentation together to give.

Finally has been great to see the new computer labs in full use. On Tuesday I went over to the lab at Ayder, to find it not only open, but full of students (all 45 terminals in use), so this was very pleasing to see. The only downside was that students were almost exclusively using Facebook (except for the girl looking at the wikipedia page on Enrique Iglesias) rather than anything to do with the courses our tutor have produced.

I suspect that this is only to be expected, students rarely get to use a computer so the first thing they want to do is check their emails and facebook status. I still can’t really figure out exactly what the appeal is of spending so much time on facebook – but maybe that’s just me. There is talk at the university of blocking facebook and some of the other social networking sites simply because of the bandwidth they consume, but then last year there was also talk of doing the same with some webmail services (specifically Yahoo).

The use of the labs in this way isn’t really too concerning for the project – as least it demonstrates the demand is there and better than the labs being empty or locked. Surely students can’t spend 24/7 on facebook (or can they?) and eventually perhaps they’ll move onto something more constructive? Or do we need to get the course content and learning activities into facebook?

We have noticed that many students are sharing accounts/passwords – giving them to their friends. Seems there’s little we can do about this apart from trying to educate students that their documents and work are at risk of being deleted/copied etc if they give out their account details. Or we introduce fingerprint or iris scanning!

Over the past couple of days I’ve been started the training programme for the three new elearning staff, all going well so far. They’ll receive some training from ECBP (Engineering Capacity Building Programme, Ethiopia, funded by GTZ) so we’re looking at ways in which we can coordinate the Digital Campus training programme with theirs.

Our internet connection has been quite poor since I returned – off for 2 days last week then another 2 full days this week. There is an incredible difference in the number of students in the labs between when the internet is on and when it’s off.

Am now trying to decide where the best place will be to watch the England match on Saturday, choice is basically between either the Axum hotel (free entry but expensive drinks), or a DSTV house (very cheap entry and better atmosphere, but no drinks!)

From the BBC:

The world’s biggest social networking site has launched a slimmed-down version for people with slow or poor internet connections.

Facebook has said the Lite site will be faster and simpler because it offers fewer services than the main site.

Initially it is meant to support users in developing countries and where bandwidth constraints make the current version too slow to use.

Over the last few months I’ve noticed more and more people here using Facebook – the connection we’re got at the Uni has been gradually improving and it’s finally now got to the point where you can usually reliably load Facebook. But then we’re on a broadband connection – users in internet cafe’s etc have had slim chance of loading up Facebook when on a shared dial up connection. Now with Facebook Lite, I guess I’ll start to get many more friend requests…

Seeing myself getting completely locked into using Google products, I thought it might be an interesting experiment to try not to use any Google services for a month. [I'm also still a little annoyed with them for not sorting out the problem I still have with Google Groups].

Perhaps I’ll find some other interesting tools and services, or maybe not, but at least it will push me to explore and look for them, rather than going into default ‘use Google’ mode.

The main Google services I use are search (obviously), mail, reader and alerts. A while ago I was also using docs, but stopped doing so once I’d been in Ethiopia and couldn’t rely on an internet connection. So what are going to be my alternatives?

Search
Not a huge choice here, but then I don’t tend to do very sophisticated searches. Going to give Bing a try, and maybe Wolfram.

I did question whether or not I should exclude myself from using Google for search, after all, then where do I stop – not using YouTube? But I decided it would be good to force myself to try out some other search engines.

GMail
Although I read my mail through my GMail account, it’s usually a forwarded copy from my own domain. I could, with minimal effort switch to the Squirrelmail or Horde mail interfaces provided by my hosting provider. This will work fine in the UK, but back at Mekelle Uni, these interfaces run off non-standard ports, which are blocked by the Uni proxy. So, I’ve installed RoundCube to use instead. It has quite a basic interface like SquirrelMail, but has some Ajax features such as drag and drop. I don’t think I’ll miss GMail labels, but it’ll take some getting use to not having the conversation style layout of messages, to which I’ve now become accustomed.

Google Reader
Again, this wasn’t a huge deal to switch from. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on my domain and imported the OPML from Google Reader. The functionality is very similar to Google Reader, but it has the advantage that I can choose to cache images from feeds. It may not sound like a huge deal, but it will mean when I’m in Ethiopia that I’ll be able to view the photos and other images from blogspot feeds, which are otherwise blocked in Ethiopia.

Google Alerts
This was the only service where I failed to find an equivalent. There are other alert services (alerts.com, Yahoo alerts and more) but these seem very restrictive and targeted at people wanting updates on news, sports, stocks etc. rather than general web and blog alerts. So, for now, I’ve kept my Google Alerts in place, but I’m very willing to try out other alerting services if anyone can point me in the right direction.

I like the idea of being more in control of the tools and services I’m using, despite the fact that I need to be more self-reliant for backups etc. Having my own domain (and associated email), made it relatively easy to install and run roughly equivalent services without huge upheaval.

Will the reduced (or just changed?) functionality and usability make me miss Google too much? I’ll find out in the next month, or maybe just the next couple of days.

I’ve finally got around to allowing you to post a comment using an OpenID, by installing one of the WordPress OpenID plugins.

I had tried to do this over a year ago, but couldn’t quite get it working correctly. I had a number of problems before, notably that my hosting server only ran PHP4, whereas (at the time) most OpenID plugins seemed designed for PHP5, or a specific version of PHP4 that I wasn’t running. The other main factor was that most of the OpenID plugins at the time were very early (beta or earlier) versions, so may have been a little buggy still, whereas the plugin I installed today was very easy to get set up and running.

Anyone using a verified OpenID to post a comment on this site will find that their name and email is not required, plus your comments skip moderation.

Please let me know if you find any problems in using your OpenID on this site.

Like many people, I’ve been gradually moving towards using web based apps and keeping my data ‘in the cloud’ (e.g. GMail, Remember The Milk, Google Docs etc). This is despite the occasional report of problems, such as having your GMail account deleted – I’ve basically been thinking that this would never happen to me.

Well, you may have seen my posting the other day about being banned from Google Groups. This is still unresolved – despite sending a number of emails to Google support – and has made me much more wary about my ongoing usage of these types of services.

I do realise that these are ‘free’ services (though Google does generate huge profits) , so maybe shouldn’t expect too much, but I would at least expect to have received notification that I was being banned and the reasoning behind it – as far as I know I’ve not knowingly done anything wrong. I appear to be blocked from accessing all Google Groups using my GMail account – including groups I’ve never visited before – which is contrary to the message I receive which says that the group administrator has blocked me.

My main problem with all this is that fact that I am now the administrator of 3 Google Groups which I am unable to access (and I’m the only administrator for each) – so now I’m unable to prevent other users signing up and posting inappropriate messages.

I wonder how many more times my experience will be repeated for other users before Google does anything about it… but with 08 Q2 profits at $1.25bn they probably won’t care too much.

Found out this morning that the OU are going to be trialling unified messaging with MS Office Communicator. Up until now we’ve basically used email (and occasionally the phone!) to get in touch with colleagues, but we’ve never had any actual presence information alongside this  – so you’re not sure if someone is actually in the office or away on holiday (people don’t always turn on their out-of-office auto-replies).

Some of us use MSG for getting presence info to see if people are around and available and having quick chats, but there hasn’t been a big take up in the organisation for using instant messaging (well, not for work anyway!). So I wonder how much the instant messaging aspects of Office Communicator will actually get used. I guess the integration with Outlook/Exchange would have a big bearing on this. If you know that someone is in the office and free you might just call or IM them instead – so maybe we’ll see a reduction in the number of emails flying around?

Not sure what all of this means for MSG and FlashMeeting (Office Communicator also has video-calling) – though I’m sure they’ll live on, especially for communicating with people outside the organisation.