Alex Little

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.

This morning we relaunched the Cohere website. It’s almost a complete re-write of the old site and has a much improved user interface (we did plenty of user testing to try and get this right) as well as:

• Group management – you can now create groups of users for collaborative working
• API – for remotely adding, editing and reading data from the Cohere database
• Scheduled RSS importing – you can now set your RSS feeds to be imported into Cohere daily
• Firefox plugin – for creating ideas and connections as you browse the web

If you find any bugs or have any suggestions for improvement then please visit the Cohere support site.

Today I met attended a workshop with BTCV to try to decide on the future of the Volunteer Passport that I was involved with a few months ago (especially as I’m not going to be here to maintain it).

The Passport hasn’t been used that much yet – but there are several reasons for this, firstly that it’s not been promoted anywhere yet (many people in BTCV don’t know about it), secondly, it’s functionality is slightly confused and thirdly, it still need finishing off.

The original purpose of the Passport was to allow volunteers to record their skills and experience and then use this as evidence to put towards formal qualifications (NVQs etc) and act as an ePortfolio system. However since we decided to use Elgg as the basis for the system, this opened up the possibility of it becoming a social network for BTCV.

Much of our discussion today was about whether or not BTCV should be providing a social networking system for it’s volunteers (why not just use facebook?) and how it could be justified. We eventually came to the conclusion that it probably could be justified if we had some good use cases and evidence of how it would benefit current BTCV activities, but that the system as it stands would need  work on the interface design (layout, structure and terminology).

If there is anyone out there who is interested in following up this work (especially from a technical/development point of view) then please drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with the BTCV team

This morning I received an invitation to join Fire Eagle – Yahoo’s location sharing application, so I’ve just been having a little play. I’d actually forgotten all about it since I saw a presentation about it at the FOWA last October and must’ve asked for a beta account then.

On it’s own Fire Eagle isn’t much use – but the idea is that you allow Fire Eagle compatible applications and devices to read and/or update your location, so you only have to update your location once for all the applications to know where you are at any time (subject to all the privacy settings available). So to actually try it out I downloaded the Loki toolbar – which can automatically update your Fire Eagle location based on your (wireless) network connection. Though I’ve installed it on my desktop PC so my location is unlikely to change much (I’ve not moved my desktop PC for nearly 2 years!) – but it did pick up my location reasonably accurately for what I assume is an IP based lookup (I’m actually about a mile from where it autodetects).

The privacy with an application such as Fire Eagle is a high priority (as I remember being mentioned in the FOWA presentation) and there are plenty of ways you can allow different applications different levels of privacy (e.g. how exact the locations are) – but then each application (as with Loki) has it’s own set of location sharing privacy options. All of which seems to make for a mind-boggling array of confusing options (in my mind anyway!).

My main reason in looking at Fire Eagle initially was to see whether we could hook MSG up to it, so your MSG location was auto-updated, so I’ll have a look into the Fire Eagle developer section and see how feasible and quick this will be to get set up.

The OU SocialLearn project has been running a little ‘behind the scenes’ for the last few months and I’ve kept broadly up to date with what’s going on, but I’ve not been deeply involved (and OK, I’m still not sure what variation of the words ‘social’ and ‘learn’ make up the proper project title). Rather than me explaining it all here, Martin has posted an overview.

The SocialLearn API is now available (though I don’t think it’s public yet), so I had a catch up with my colleagues Liam and Nick, who have each been building applications using the API. Liam’s work has been on ‘Microlearner’ which links up Twitter to the SocialLearn API, so you can post learning goals to Twitter and they’ll magically be available in your SocialLearn profile. 2Learner is Nicks application, which allows you to search for resources.

From chatting to Liam and Nick it seems there’s still a way to go with the API (unsurprising as it’s a work in progress), for example, there’s currently no way to relate a resource to a learning goals, but I think this may change in the future.

The API has much in common with the Facebook API, in that there is a core set of functions and associated data on the SocialLearn server, then any applications can build upon these, but these applications are siloed, (i.e. applications can’t share any other data than that available through the API). While this might be fine for Facebook, and is entirely appropriate for that (especially with all the privacy issues involved), I’m not sure if this approach may restrict the range of applications that may be developed with the API – I’m assuming throwing buns and being bitten by vampires are not top priorities for SocialLearn.

We had a think about how we can get Cohere talking to the SocialLearn API, and what makes sense as a demonstration using the 2 existing applications. What we came up with was the ability to import your learning goals into Cohere, and then be able to organise then in a more structured way, but additionally to allow you to push out any ideas you enter into Cohere as goals in SocialLearn. Each of these will be fairly trivial to do, albeit in a not very clever way… so best get on with it ready to demo next week.