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Visit from intraLibrary

I spent most of today with Nick and Peter from Interlect resolving some of the issues with the repository. The discussion revolved around getting intraLibrary to do what we want in terms of learning objects (LOs). I haven’t had a great deal of time previously to play with the system and it was a good [...]

Releasing the metadata prototype

I’m was intending on releasing the first version of the prototype this week, I suspect it will be end of next week now. Came across a few problems. Well the first isn’t really a problem but it is time consuming and must been done right. The question is what Rights package are we going [...]

Linking to intraLibrary

Today I started looking at the repository in more detail. There are several jobs that need to be done in order to ensure that metadata produced by the automatic generator prototype will be successful integrated. The first of these is to define the subset of LOM that is to be applied to all LOs. Having [...]

What’s in it for them?

An interesting discussion at the Repository Day on Monday with one of our X-stream (VLE) team leaders. His question to us could we give him a 10-word summary of the benefits the Repository would bring to an average overworked academic. For the research side it is fairly cut and dried. Research assessment is in future [...]

Repository Tools Taster Day

Today the Streamline project finally got to show off the completed metadata prototype to non-project members. As part of a joint taster session with the Repository and PERsONA projects, we invited members of Leeds Met staff to enjoy a presentation and get hands on with various tools. Over the course of the day various groups [...]

e-framework workshop from John (Heap)…..

I, along with a lot of other bright people, have just attended the JISC e-framework workshop in London.Well, we thought we were bright when we turned up …. but now we’re not so sure.We just know we’re confused. The workshop was not what most of us expected. We thought we were going to have the e-framework [...]

What is Personalisation?

One of the work packages in the Streamline project (and very much related to PERSoNA project) is that of personalisation. It seems to me that personalisation can exist at a variety of different levels: Customising the presentational aspects of an interface: by this I mean that in many instances a user can control the colour, size [...]

Aquabrowser

I mentioned in the meeting yesterday that Streamline may want to look at Aquabrowser which is a novel resource discovery platform that the library has been looking at recently. The screenshot below is from a library site running the software and shows results for “fox”; on the right hand side results are returned in a traditional [...]

Colour coded output 2

In a previous post I discussed using colour to identify for the user the sources for the generated metadata. Whether it had come from the documents they had passed into the application or from one of the data collections. While I liked the idea I felt it was to complex which effectively defeated the [...]

Extracting Metadata (basic)

Discussed with Mark Thursday 24th ish before going on holiday. The basic interface and functionality of the automatic metadata generator is almost complete. As identified in the report on eCat’s use of metadata there are three potential sources of metadata. The Learning objects (LOs) content and supporting documentation. Persistent collections of data – data that can [...]

JISC Innovation Forum

Wendy and I are attending the JISC Innovation Forum in Keele representing Persona and Streamline. After a few technical hiccups we had a successful “Market Place” session this afternoon on all three Leeds Met repository projects and got some useful pointers to projects that we might link up with (The Depot was one key one) [...]

Meeting with Critical Friend - Monday July 14th

Janet and I met with Peter Hartley, the EMERGE Critical Friend for the Streamline Project, yesterday and enjoyed a really useful discussion. Hopefully we brought Peter up to speed with the project and the changes that we have made as the project has developed and gave him a copy of the revised project plan and [...]

July 8th Monthly Meeting

Hi Everyone, Just a quick summary of the excellent meeting yesterday afternoon. The actual minutes are attached as a file. Mike Taylor of the Skills for Learning (S4L) team attended and initiated a very interesting discussion about how Streamline could help them deposit their existing and new learning objects into the Leeds Met repository. One issue concerns [...]

Timing

On the EMERGE blog, I recently wrote a piece (some might say a bit of a rant, but I prefer to think ‘critical but measured’) about the e-framework suggesting that the tightly structured form of many of the components of the framework (I was actually commenting on Service Usage models) seems to contrast with the flexible, [...]

Crossovers with the Repository Project and PERSoNA

Streamline aims revolve around tools that can be integrated into staff workflows with the minimum of disruption. The tools themselves should, in some way, make a computer based job easier. The first tool we have decided to develop is aimed at reducing the job of thinking and producing metadata for Learning Objects. Having examined previous [...]

JISC EMERGE Day 1

Having never done an online conference before (I’ve used web cams and voice over IP with family and friends) and I was anticipating a new experience. Aside from this I was alos looking forward to finding out the views of the Emerge community on Web 2.) applications and their potential. The first day started with [...]

InrtaLibray training day

The first training/design session with IntraLibrary was held today. The morning was a general overview the system and an opportunity to play around with the new version. The afternoon was spent in discussion with Nick and his team on what was need to get this all up and running. Their new version 3.0 (Beta) has had [...]

Architectual model

As a new member of the team I thought it would be useful to produce an overall architectural view of the main workflow packages that are to be built as part of the streamline project. I produced a conceptual architecture model that identifies the key elements.  The final aim of the working system is to allow access to the streamline functionality via multiple mechanisms. Initially however user involvement will be via a Java based GUI developed by Dawn. Eventually a web-based GUI will be the way to go, once the interface requirements have been developed, tested and evaluated by end users.  The underlying areas of the system will be required to do some number crunching, e.g. the latent semantic analysis which will allow related search results to be displayed to the user.  Initially these components have been developed using C++ and Matlab due to the suitability of these languages for rapid mathematical programming.  The intention is however, to convert all the components into Java in order to provide ease of integration and allow the system to be opened up to third party application via web-services and a Java API. A prototype of a parsing algorithm (to be used for meta-data extraction) has also been developed in C++ by Elizabeth. In order to allow ease of translation a UML model of this prototype has been created.  This should also ease further development of the prototype up to a stage where it ready for translation and integration into the full system.

 

Colour coded metadata output for users.

At the May Streamline meeting I present the prototype in it’s current state (half baked). Since then I have so many other things to do I have had little time to fill in the missing pieces. That’s now underway and I anticipate good progress this month. Should have something user presentable at the very least. Anyway [...]

TEL Day: Questionnaire

The TEL day presented a good opportunity to promote the Streamline project alongside PERSoNA and the Institutional Repository. Nick and I put together a shared questionnaire between these three projects, which I have now done the preliminary analysis on. This report shows the questions I asked and some basic statistics gleaned from them. Nicks findings [...]

TEL Day: promoting Streamline and The Institutional Repository

The Technology Learning Day took place last Tuesday 3rd June and presented a good opportunity to promote both the above projects.  As we’re at the stage where Streamline prototypes have been built, user feedback is necessary to enable development work to progress steadily.  A decision was made to test the prototype and gather feedback from knowledgeable users and the likely participants were anticipated to be attending the TEL day.  Many were approached with a few questions, and indicated their willingness to take part in the evaluation. 

The proposed evaluation plan is to carry out a series of focus groups with about 8 people.   The discussion is to identify the difficulties and good aspects experienced while trying to create, find and reuse learning objects - particularly in adding metadata to a learning objects using any tool such as eCAT or CourseGenie or using metadata to do keyword searches within a learning object repository.

The outcomes of these focus groups will be a rich source to facilitate research!

Outcomes from the June 10th 2008 Meeting.

The meeting generated a number of interesting discussions, as has been typical of earlier meetings, however not all of these discussions have resulted in blog postings. One aim of this meeting was to re-invigorate the use of the StreamlineNews - the Project Blog. Hence one outcome should be an noticeable increase in postings to the [...]

Why do we meet?

The Streamline project team meets (physically) about once per month … yet much (if not all) of the discussion could be handled online.  Yet, it seems as though activity and enthusiasm is at its peak just before a meeting (meeting the deadline) and just after (re-invigoration?).  After that it tails off … ready for the [...]

Project Web

Most of us on the Streamline project team are also involved with other projects … and often in overlapping areas of interest and development.  So, at Streamline meetings we often hear of developments in PLANET, PERSONA and others … as well as emerging bids for new projects.  This ‘project web’ is actually very useful as [...]

What is a Web 2.0 app?

Nick and I had an interesting discussion yesterday while sorting out the questionnaire for the technology day event next Tuesday (3rd June). Basically we have been trying to work out some questions to ask participants about social networking fro the PERSoNA project. We want to find out what social networking applications they use and how [...]