Alex Little

Once again I’m back in Mekelle, I arrived on Monday afternoon, good to be back again and although it’s only a couple of months since I was here, it feels much longer. It’s now almost 2 years since I first arrived in Mekelle, shortly before the Meskel festival in Sept 2008. Meskel will be on Sunday night and Monday this year – so looking forward to my third visit to the celebrations (2008 and 2009).

I had a friend text to say that I was on ETV again last night, from when we were filmed at the Meskel celebrations in Adigrat last year, I later found out that not only was it just on TV, but that it’s part of a pop video! It may be up on YouTube, so if I find the link (and am feeling brave enough) I’ll post a link.

At the University some of the work seems to have been progressing well, though plenty that still needs to be followed up. We’re getting ready to start training again next week, with new tutors from Health Sciences and Technology Institute. This year we’ll also enrol all the students from each tutors course – last year we only accepted a small group of students from each course.

Facebook is now blocked on the proxy server between 8:30-12:00 and 2:30 until 5:00. The policy has been put in place as the use of facebook has been affecting staff productivity too much. It’s also then blocked in our computer labs – so next time I see it full of students, perhaps they’ll be doing something slightly more productive!

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!)

I’m surprised it’s taken them so long… (admittedly it might have been there a little while and I just haven’t noticed!)

Will have to investigate and see what it’s actually built in, whether you can log in using a different client and if you can add contacts from outside FB? I suspect that you’re tied to using their client and your only contacts are your facebook friends.

I’ve finally got around to having a look at OpenSocial, following it’s launch last year (and all the subsequent blog postings) I’ve not really heard too much about it, or who’s actually implemented it, but it seems quite a few social sites have done (though obviously not facebook): hi5, Ning, MySpace to name a few. My comments below are my first impressions from only having looked and played with the docs/examples for couple of hours, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about anything below!…

The first thing I needed to find out was what OpenSocial actually is and what it gives you (apart from the generic description that it’s an API for social web applications). My impression had been that (and I don’t know why I thought this), as well as a way to write applications (Google Gadgets) that can run in compatible social sites, OpenSocial would also help solve the problem of having multiple disparate networks of friends on different social sites, so you didn’t need to recreate your friends network when moving between different social sites. Unfortunately this doesn’t appear to be the case (please correct me here if I’m wrong!), but it does give application developers the chance to build applications for social sites which will run in multiple sites, rather than having to learn a different API each time.

The problem of friends being on different networks was one we came across when thinking about developing a Facebook application for MSG. Users would already have a set of contacts in MSG, but how to link match these up to Facebook friends. The point of having MSG in Facebook, or any other social site, would be so that you can chat directly to your friends within that network. It seems we could run up against the same problem if we created an OpenSocial MSG Gadget too.

I did find this little video about Shelfari and their OpenSocial implementation that we should be able to learn something from – though even after watching this I’m still a little confused as to how your Shelfari friends match up to your friends in Orkut :-/ . Then I got slightly distracted looking at some blog postings about Shelfaris invitation process – it appear rather similar to how Facebook used to (or still does?) automatically invite all your email contacts.

The part that I found most interesting (and also most confusing) was how you could make a social site compatible with the OpenSocial API (i.e. allow users to add applications to their profiles). It certainly seems a non-trivial task to create a site which would be compatible with the OpenSocial API – which is why in the tutorial I get pointed to a number of “container” sites which will allow me to test out my new (hello world) Gadget.

So… will be having a think now about how we can apply some of this to Cohere – and what should a Cohere Gadget embedded in a social network site actually do/look like?

Have just started to have a look at developing an MSG widget/application for Facebook and am getting myself familiarised with the Facebook developers API. Appears to be fairly straightforward so far – well, I guess it can’t be too hard judging by the number of applications already out there and the API has only been available since around June (I think!).

One thing I do need to get sorted is exactly how the application should work and how it should interact with your facebook friends. My thinking at the moment is that it should look to see which of your friends have both a facebook & MSG account on the server you’ve specified and display their MSG presence – but I need to think a little more about how this would work in practice, or maybe it should just display all your MSG contacts? But then there could be less linkage between your Facebook contacts identities & MSG contacts identities. hmmm.. any ideas/thoughts?