Alex Little

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.

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.

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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”.

Firstly, a slightly belated Happy New Year!

Yesterday we had an interesting discussion about how we could evaluate and review the social tools included in OpenLearn, namely, the Knowledge Mapping (with Compendium & Cohere), MSG and Flashmeeting. Our feeling is that they’ve not been as successful as we first hoped, and there maybe lots of different reasons for this. For MSG I’ve detailed some of the possible reasons in a JIME paper that will be published soon.

It’s quite interesting to compare how OpenLearn is viewed externally to the OU vs how it’s seen internally (and within the OpenLearn team). The feedback we have from external users is that, to paraphrase, “OpenLearn is great, I can get free OU content”, whereas I’m slightly dissappointed that MSG isn’t used more than it is. I guess the difference is due to the fact that users may see the site as a way of getting content, and not necessarily somewhere they can come to to gain access to tools, such as IM, video-conferencing etc.

Ever since I started working on MSG we’ve been asked for extra functionality to be added, most notably group-chat and option to have audio/video chat. We’ve always tried to resist giving in to these requests – on the basis that other IM services already do these things so why reinvent them, also, it’s all open source so if you can add them if you want!

However we’ve kinda given in to one of these, the video/audio chat one, the reason being that it’s actually relatively little work – we already have a service (FlashMeeting) which provides this type of functionality – so just need to link the 2 together. Well, we’ve nearly got this finished so when you’re in a chat session, there’s a one click launch flashmeeting – which automatically books the meeting and gives you the link to it…. so far so good – and also dubiously solves the group chat issues, since flashmeeting is multi-user rather than 1-1 (in fact better at multi-user than 1-1)…. but then we realised that we’ll only be able to apply this solution to the OpenLearn server.

The FlashMeeting and MSG OpenLearn servers have the exact same user base and account ids/emails etc all match up – so it’s quite trivial, however we run into problems with our general FlashMeeting and MSG servers as they have different user bases and even different policies on who can get accounts on each server. FlashMeeting accounts are only created by the FM team (you can’t self register – well, not without an OU email address?), but MSG has (or rather, will very shortly have) the ability for anyone to register – so we can’t then automatically auto create accounts the FM server. I know there are ways we _could_ do this but too many variables and too much if.. else if.. else if.. else.. code for my liking Another case for us to seriously look into whether OpenID and oAuth can really help solve these types of problem for us.

There are other services that we could use (recently found MeBeam – or rather they found us) which offer free to use, no-registration multi-user chat/audio/video facilities. However, we’ve not finally decided on any of these yet… and any other suggestions for services we could link to gratefully received

I’ve now started work on being able to launch an instant FlashMeeting when you are using MSG. This would enable users to start up video & voice capabilities directly from MSG, rather than having to visit the FlashMeeting site seperately and book a meeting. It would also be a workaround for (all) those who want voice chat and multi-user chat as you could just instantly fire up FlashMeeting to get these capabilities. Most of the structure is now in place, we just need to get a service built which would book the FlashMeeting (behind the scenes) and check the FM server has capacity etc. Hopefully we should be able to get this implemented soon

Had some discussions yesterday with the FlashMeeting guys as to how we could integrate MSG and FlashMeeting in some way, the upshot was that we’re going to look at developing an API for MSG so that presence info can be embedded in other web applications – simply stick a few references to JavaScript files in your application, add the tags for who and where you’d like presence info displayed and then the page will automatically display presences for those users (and keep them up to date).

In fact this morning I’ve been working on a little demo of how this could work, so I’ve got a plain html page running on my desktop PC which is calling the relevant JavaScript files on my development Moodle server – and all seems to be working well, it automatically logs you in to MSG (if you aren’t already). Next step is some more generalisation of the code and getting it moved over to the actual MSG server.

The main issue that we’ll have is with authentication, but I think we’ve got a method for coping with this. Essentially the MSG server needs to know how to authenticate the user, before the user can be logged in (and their contacts presences displayed). So, suppose I have Website X where I would like to display presences and I needed to have logged in to this website (so I’ve got a cookie). When I call the JavaScript initialisation function for MSG, I pass it the authentication type (in this case ‘WebsiteX’) and an array of authentication parameters (which would include my cookie). JavaScript calls the connect service in BuddyXML (on MSG server) providing these authentication details. BuddyXML then knows how to authenticate the cookie that’s passed (i.e. in this case to call a validate service running on Website X) and can automatically log the user in to MSG, on the basis that we trust Website X.

Spent last couple of days getting ready for the OpenLearn launch tomorrow. We’ve created a short demo video to show all 3 of the KMi tools (MSG, Compendium and FlashMeeting) being used together, we’ll get the video put up on the web hopefully sometime next week.

Still been getting some quite erratic problems with launching MSG from the web browser (or using the click to chat function) – and it’s quite hard to replicate any of the problems as they aren’t occuring reliably, a possible reason is that some of the ‘messages’ are getting lost either between browser & Moodle server or between Moodle server and MSG server.

Final thing we’ve (well, actually Chris!!) been working on is to resolve the problem that enrollment on a course in Moodle doesn’t filter through to the MSG application for a few hours. This looks very odd for users, especially first time users, as teh MSG block in Moodle will show a number of contacts, but launch MSG and none of them appear. The reason is due to the 6 hour cache on the Wildfire (MSG) server. We could reduce this, but then performance of MSG client may suffer. Chris has worked out a ‘cunning plan’ where by when a user logs in to MSG this triggers a background process to update the cache for that particular user. This should mean that the MSG groups/membership details will appear straight away rather than having to wait for the cache to expire.