Alex Little

Have been pretty busy last couple of weeks (hence no postings) and had few days off work here and there too! Much of my time has just been getting MSG ready and installed on our acceptance test servers, ready for the launch of MSG Presence Maps on LabSpace and LearningSpace on 17th May. All seems to be running fine now after a bit of fiddling around.

Have now started to think what we do to get more information into MSG from users’ OpenLearn profiles and what would be the most relevant infomation to show to try and get people chatting to each other. One of the problems I think we’re having with people not using MSG that much is because it’s essentially just a list of names, there’s no way of knowing about that person & whether they’re ‘worth’(!) chatting to or not. So … my thoughts on the aspects we could include…

1. biography info – getting the info/biography info users can enter in Moodle
2. courses in common – using the fact that you are enrolled on the same, say, 5 courses as user X means you’re more likely to want to chat with them than someone who only has one course enrolment in common with you?
3. forum/learning journal postings – finding the number and ratings of other users forums postings to discover their reputation, eg if their forums posting are rated highly you are more likely to want to chat to them?
4. photos – just grab users photo (if they’ve submitted one) from Moodle to show within MSG.

Much of this is guesswork and supposition, until we give it a go we’re not really likely to know what’s going to work. These are based on what may be currently available form the OpenLearn system (rather than things we’d need to first build into Moodle). Also, still not sure whether to just focus on a subset of these or all would be needed to create a useful system.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions welcome as to whether including and or all of these would be good (or bad!) – or if I’ve missed anything I ought to include

Last night we had the official launch of the OpenLearn and LabSpace websites, they are both freely available for anyone to access at : http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn and http://www.open.ac.uk/labspace respectively.

The evening went really well, people seemed really interested in what we are doing, and there already been plenty of users registering for the sites. Obviously my main interest is how people get on with the tools in the in LabSpace site, especially MSG, so if you have any feedback or comments about this then please let me know – either leave comment below or email me directly

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.