Inline Comments

PHP Markdown

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 19:45:00 EST

I offer my unadulterated praise to PHP Markdown. Markdown is a way of writing that can be converted to HTML. I use the BBEdit Markdown Plugin from Daring Fireballto write XHTML (including these blog posts) and it saves loads and loads of time.

I decided to add the ability to use markdown to linkwalla, to make it easy to add HTML to the link descriptions. I was able to get every thing working in about 20 minutes, I downloaded PHP Markdown and edited one file in linkwalla. Suddenly linkwalla is feeling much richer. That's some nice modularity right there.

So the when the next update of linkwalla come out, and that will be real soon, you'll be able to use Markdown. The only downside is the 40k markdown.php file is about the same size as all the rest of linkwalla combined, so I'll have doubled the download size of linkwalla. But sub 100k is still pretty lightweight.

Linkwalla 0.7 is live

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 11:36:00 EST

A new version of linkwalla is available for download this morning. This is the first release since August.

What is linkwalla? Linkwalla is way to share interesting web pages you see, or just to keep track of them for yourself. It's sort of a mini-blog for links. You generate an RSS feed of the links you've saved, that includes the link and a short description. It's also compatible with del.icio.us, so you can save your links to del.icio.us at the same time as adding them to your site.

What's new in linkwalla 0.7? Monthly archives are now created. Previous versions of linkwalla saved your links in one big list. This works for a while, but at time goes on the list gets unwieldy. With monthly archives the front page shows your last 20 links, and there links to monthly archives, so I can see all of the links I added in September, for example, on one page.

The other reason for moving to monthly archives, is that the links are saved in monthly XML files, instead of one big honking XML file. This means linkwalla won't slow down over time. I hadn't experienced any slowness in 0.7, but I knew that eventually as added hundreds of links, the file would slow down.

One downside to changing the way files are saved is that this release is not backwards compatible with linkwalla 0.6. I guess that's why it's not a 1.0 release yet. However converting the old linkwalla.xml file into monthly archives is pretty easy - it took me about 5 minutes.

It's been great using PHP again, I love being able to figure out how this stuff works.

Small college liberal arts students speak out on Tech

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:42:00 EST

As an alumni I have been participating in an experimental class at Earlham College called "Social Impact of computer technology." The class members blogged their way through the class, with their blog entries the primary means of being assessed. Then at the end of class each of the 13 students recorded their thoughts on class and the technologies they'd learned about.

I was pretty interested to hear a small sample of undergrads had to say on these topics.

Blogging: Mixed reviews. Students didn't like the tendency for rants and impolite comments, and many felt exposed by putting their work out for the whole world to see. On the other hand they said it was easy, and many liked getting feedback via comments. Trackback technology was universally held in contempt. It did seem that people thought blogging was the most interesting part of the class.
Moodle: Pretty poor review. Apparently some bug around submitting homework seemed to have soured the class on Moodle. People did seem to enjoy at as a shared reference work.
Social software: The only thing anyone had to say about social software was about del.icio.us. del.icio.us seemed to be new to everyone in the class, and nearly all liked it a lot and planned to continue using it. Flickr, et.al. didn't even rate a mention.
Podcasting: Sounds like the general consensus is that it's interesting but hard and probably not worth the effort. Many people said podcasting is a good way find grammar errors in your writing, so I guess their assignment was to read their paper out-loud and record it as a podcast.

I decided not to link to the studnet blogs, because I'm not sure how long they will be around and reading some of those comments, I'm not sure the students would all welcome me doing that.

The Stellar News Site

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:01:00 EST

I just updated the Stellar homepage so that the latest Stellar news article is linked as the 'spotlight.' This is good because we've been pretty slow about replacing those spotlight, while our communications person, Margaret Meehan, posts news and information about Stellar at least once a week.

User controlled design

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 11:52:00 EST

This note is reposted from an email I sent to the Sakai UI discussion group

Someone at MIT asked me to provide more information about what complications I see with the plan "to provide maximum flexibility for institutions who were keen to implement their own look & feel on the interface." This was a follow up to the recent "Do you support moving toward a flexible or adaptable UI approach in Sakai?" thread on the Sakai design mailing lists.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the plan from Toronto is not "to provide maximum flexibility for institutions who were keen to implement their own look & feel on the interface." It is to provide maximum flexibility for INDIVIDUAL USERS to implement their own look & feel on the interface.

I think everyone wants to make the UI flexible for institutions, there's no debate there.

Here are some issues with asking users to set their own interface preferences:

Help desk support

If every users' interface is different, it is much harder for the help desk staff to tell user how to do something, because they have no way of knowing what the user is seeing. Even if they if can see what the user is seeing it means they help desk staff need to know all of the possible configurations of any given tool.

Added complexity to the UI

A lot of UI design is centered around understanding user goals and making it easy to accomplish those goals with as little interference as possible. Adding additional forms that let users tweak the interface is more interference.

Easy to make bad choices

We also don't want to make it easy for people to shoot themselves in the foot. People messing around with the settings might think setting their link style to pink italics is fun for now, but it can cause them to not see links they need to work with in the future. People really do make some bad choices in this area, you can be a smart and talented person and not know a thing about UI design.

Not a great track record

Someone on the list pointed out (I lost the email unfortunately) that many portals have tried this, and found that users don't tend to be all that interested in personalizing the UI. So a lot of effort towards this might be misdirected when there are so many features more important to teaching and learning.

Let browsers do it

Many browsers have the power to overrule website CSS styles. So users who are keenly interested always having white text on a black background can use this method already - we just need to make sure Sakai uses web standards behaves well with supported browsers.

It may break the goal of loosely connected modular tools

It may well make tool development in Sakai closely tied to a particular technology (JSF or RSF or JSTL or whatever). This will make much harder to bring tools that were not explicitly designed as a part of Sakai into Sakai. By forcing all developers to use a set of shared JSF tags you've closed Sakai to most 3rd party application, and all applications written in PHP, Ruby, etc. New Sakai developers will have to learn an obscure method of coding in order to contribute a Sakai tool. This could really impact the future prospects for Sakai.

The accessibility argument

The strongest argument for this approach is that is supports accessibility, but there may be better ways to make accessibility work.

In addition browser feature, operating systems now have features for magnifying screens or forcing high contrast.
Make this explicitly a mater of accessibility by offering simple presets in the user preferences that do things like increase font size or increase contrast.
Best of all do rigorous accessibility testing to ensure that the UI works for all users right out of the box.

Sorry for the long note! I was afraid I hadn't written clearly before, and I wanted to break it down a little. I also want to be clear that the work demoed by Toronto is really strong, especially in the area of working with multimedia in the LMS. I think there is an important place for it in the content authoring space.

Award nomination

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:10:00 EST

This here website, inline comments, is a finalist for a "Best designed/most beautiful edublog" award. And anyone can go vote. Vote now! You don't need to vote in all categories.

I describe my blog as �notes about my work� and �the life support system for an RSS feed.� The notes get automatically uploaded my a script on my laptop, allowing me to keep it fresh with little distraction from my other work. The aesthetic of the site aims to make the most of sites minimal mission. I think it could use some work of course, especially the archive pages, but I'm having fun working with the fairly extreme constraints of blogging this way.

Yahoo del.icio.us

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:40:00 EST

Not satisfied with Flickr, Yahoo purchased del.icio.us, and now own the majority of the tags on the web. Good for del.icio.us and good for Yahoo really, they seem to be really on top of this Web 2.0 thing.

But I can't help feeling weird about it. I mean, at the Sakai Social Software BOF lots of people were talking excitedly about mixing flickr, delicious, and google into their course websites. I think it's worth doing, but somehow i don't like the idea of having those two companies hold all of that data for us, using it all as the fertilizer for ad farming.

Why are all the big Web 2.0 hits owned by only 2 companies?

Sakai Austin Highlights

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:12:00 EST

In addition to the vigorous UI discussions I mentioned in my previous post, there were several other highlights to the conference

Social Computing BOF

I presented at this session, and here's the proof.

Hot topics

Back channels (IRC, jokes, comments, google searches being added by students as the presentation goes on)
Is it better to create more functionality in Sakai, or extend Sakai with external (commercial) services like Google, Flickr and del.icio.us?
How do you keep the fun in social software when it is institutionally supported?
Digital divide between students use of this tech and faculty use.

Faculty led pedagogy sessions

In particular Course Management Tools for the Humanities and Wouldn't it be great if.. - Exploring instructional methods using Sakai. I would love to see a conference based entirely around how instructors want to teach, and their ideas about what they would like educational technology to do.

Hearing about other schools' work

I'm thinking in particular of the oddly titled Is Linking Thinking? Web Pedagogies and Tools for Teaching and Learning in which Paul Bergen (Harvard), Tom Lewis (U Wash), and Dirk Herr-Hoyman (U Wisc.) described the homegrown non-Sakai (and non-Java) tools they use to help people teach and learn. It was the most persuasive thing I saw for showing the reasons Sakai should take 'loosely coupled' approach to technology that makes it easy for schools to mix and match in the tools they like with Sakai tools.

Sharing Stellar Images at the Technical Demos

I loved showing off the work we've done to date on Stellar Images and having the chance to talk to so many people from so many schools about it over just 90 minutes. It was absolutely exhausting.

Austin

I just love Austin, in a way I haven't quite defined. This was my third visit, and it just keeps growing on me.

How flexible is too flexible?

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 12:22:00 EST

After the Sakai conference in Austin, the wires are humming with mesages about how to move forward with an overhaul of the Sakai UI. This is great. Part of that discussion has revolved around the ideas that Jutta Teverianus and Anastasia Cheetham presented at "We don't all have to agree:" Flexible UI Design.

"Even if we go no deeper than simple style transformations, one implication of this approach is that we would transition from a style guide to a design guide accompanied by default style sheets or other styling mechanisms. Unlike the style guide the design guide would not make any recommendations regarding the specific presentation of the UI if it is possible to restyle that presentation characteristic. The design guide would require that the tools have a replaceable presentation. The recommendations regarding styling would in effect be communicated through the default styling mechanisms. This would also aid in achieving commitments to accessibility and internationalization."

I've been re-reading the Sakai style guide, and there is very little that relates to appearance or graphic design. The bulk of the style guide is describes common views and the elements used in those views.

An example from page 6.:

3 - Column Header (required)

A meaningful label for information contained in column that displays at the top of each column. Users can change the sort order of columns by clicking the header. When using column headers, indicate the following:

Users can change the sort order

The column that controls the current sort order (bold heading with triangle)

How the column is sorted

There is a parenthetical reference to "bold heading with triangle" but otherwise this entry is about interaction. Anastasia pointed out at the Friday UI BOF that the user might prefer to sort tables using a drop down menu, and hence the style guide was being to strict.

You can go too far with user preferences. Few people will want to go so far as filling out a form that allows them to choose details like what mechanism they use to change their table sort order. Even having the option of making sort order headers italicized rather than bold is a bit obscure. Institutions may make this choice, but they can do that already in the CSS.

As far as user-driven CSS overrides go, I think it's an OK idea if kept fairly minimal. I am concerned that it could add complexity to the UI that most users will not need, and that it creates support difficulty (Help desk: "Click the my workspace link. That may be on the top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right of your screen depending how you set your preferences."). Many browsers offer this functionality already, so building into the application seems odd. If I prefer white text on a black screen won't I want all my websites to look like that, not just Sakai? A browser-based solution seems more suitable for those users. We just need to make sure Sakai's front end coding plays nicely with those browsers, and issue for the accessibility team I think.

We can't make the mistake of thinking that our users will design for us, we need to make choices about what works well based on research and experience.

A couple more questions:

Is this modular functionality? It is a plugin for Sakai that people can take or leave, or is it hardwired in? If we decide this level of configuration is confusing our users, can we turn it off easily?
How much additional work does this approach create for new tool developers. It is already seen as being a fairly complex task to create or adapt a web tool to work with Sakai. Does this make it harder or easier? If was adapting something like JForums to work in Sakai, what would it take to make the presentation layer this flexible?

Sakai Austin: Open Source Portfolio

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:41:00 EST

I showed up for the wrong Open Source Portfolio (OSP) presentation . I came because I have little concept for what the tool does. The presenters are talking a lot about what it will do in 2.1. I have no concept of what 2.0 can do, so it's not to enlightening. They are using the metaphor of starting at 30,000 feet and moving down, so hopefully at the end they will show the actual tool and I'll be able to see what it does.

Sakai Austin

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:51:00 EST

I'm here at the conference - it's packed as usual about 550 people. Just saw a good talk from Missouri State about how to get departments to move over to using Sakai, by targeting early adopters and focusing on Sakai's ability to work with custom discipline-specific tools.

No hearing about Portland States move to Sakai and OSP.

I'm taking the occasional cameraphone photo while I'm here. You can see all the Sakai Austin photos on Flickr.

Ready for Austin

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 15:48:00 EST

I'm ready for my trip to Austin tomorrow. I pulled to gether a couple of 2x3 Stellar Images posters (pdf-950k) for our technical demo on Thursday.

The gadget bag will be full as usual. I have have been practicing sending my camera phone photos to Flickr with nifty new cell phone.

Boston expects a big snow storm tomorrow so I'm just hoping I get out of the airport.

Sakai Austin

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:35:00 EST

Wow, the draft agenda for the 4th Sakai Conference is up and it is packed with interesting sessions. I'm going to help lead a BOF meeting on 'Trends in Social Computing' and we'll have a table at the technical demonstrations to discuss Stellar 2 and Stellar Images.

Jean Foster

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:07:00 EST

One of the earliest members of the Stellar team left MIT today. While I was still working on the user interface for the initial release of Stellar, Jean told me we'd be doing usability testing, which I'd only vaguely heard of, and handed me a copy of Jakob Nielsen's book to read. Over the following months (and years) I observed a great number of occasionally excruciating user tests. The design crits I'd had at the Museum School were nothing compared to the horror of watching a stranger sit down and fail to understand how to do add a document with the user interface you'd built.

I've learned a ton from Jean. Those tests changed the course of my career, and even the way I see the world. Thanks, Jean!

Jean Foster is now going to help make websites useful at InContext Design.

Stellar discussion board

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 15:02:00 EST

The current installation of the Stellar discussion board needs to be replaced. It is slow, and seems to be taking a significant performance hit as more and more Stellar courses come on line.

What we have now is an old version of Jive Forums. We identified 3 contenders to replace it, based on their technical compatibility with Stellar.

The newer version of Jive
JForums, which is being adapted to Sakai by Foothills College
A custom Sakai discussion board being developed at Indiana

By comparing the published feature list and screenshots of each product with the feature list for forums that came out of the LPAG meetings and other input, I created a grid to show how each product lined up with our needs

I wound up recommending the tool Indiana is developing. That tool is still under development, with an expected release in December. Indiana is pretty good about being on time, though, so it will probably work for us as a new forum tool for Fall 2006.

By the way of you are JForums or Jive developer or user, and you want to contradict my conclusions, please do! This was a quick study, and there a lot of 'maybes' in my diagram.

Building 9¾

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:25:00 EST

When we came into work this morning, we were amused to find that all of our room numbers had been changed to read building 9¾ instead of the usual plain old 9, and our offices had been reassigned, so that my room is now Professor Flitwick's office. Also the old Men's and Women's bathrooms are now marked for "Witches" and "Wizards." I guess some MIT students are pretty enthused about the new Harry Potter movie opening tonight.

MITblogs.com

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 19:43:00 EST

I just noticed that the MIT admissions office has set up a whole bunch of blogs over at a site called MITblogs.com. There's even a ben.mitblogs.com, with no relation to me. This is part of the MIT Admissions website at the highly desirable URL my.mit.edu.

People from outside MIT assume we're all working in the same office as part of some large coordinated strategy, but there are so many web projects, and we techies are so busy with our own, that we're lucky if we know half of what is going on.

Fresh links available

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:54:00 EST

I've decided to add a little 'mini-blog' to the footer of this website, provided to you by one of this website's sponsors, linkwalla. Special thanks to Feed2JS

Google print ego surfing

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 13:24:00 EST

I saw a reference on Caveat Lector to ego surfing Google print. I decided to give it a try even though I've written anything scholarly, so I imagine there would be precious little to for anyone to cite. But lo and behold there I am, and three of the four are actually me.

World Usability Day

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 09:01:00 EST

I celebrated World Usability Day by spending an hour combing through a recent usability test of the Sakai Gradebook, and puling out the problem reports that were related to the Sakai's OOTB Style Sheet. I sketched out my comments by drawing on a screen shot which I posted on the Sakai User Interface wiki.

PHP and XML class

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 08:48:00 EST

I'm thinking of offering a class for IAP: Easy web development: Build a simple web app with PHP and XML. I'll be doing sessions on Stellar as well, but at IAP it is traditional for people teach classes about their hobbies.

I'd do one two-hour session. The intended audience is people who know how to make a web page and want to take it to the next level by learning a little PHP.

Linkwalla, an example of a simple PHP/XML application (10 min)
Quick intro to XML (20 min)
Quick intro to using PHP (20 min)
How to turn your XML into a web page (20 min)
How to edit a 'node' in the XML (20 min)
How to add a new 'node' in the XML (10 min)
How to delete a 'node' in the XML (10 min)
How to publish your new tool (10 min)

Now that's all kind of rushed, of course. So I'd provide a nice juicy handout full of notes about how to do it, plus links to more information about installing PHP, picking webhosts, getting help, recomended books and all that. I'd also add links to download all of the code demoed in class.

What do you think? Would anyone sign up for this class?

What day was it when you were born?

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:03:00 EST

(This is a rare cross-post from my family blog)

Our friend Michelle mentioned that her kids keep asking her which day of the week it was when they were born, and she wasn't sure. So I whipped up a little PHP script to answer the question.

Michelle said she wrote down the days and hung them on the wall so now everybody knows. I am one proud nerd. Plus, now I know Lisa was born on Sunday and Nathan & I were born on Tuesday.

What day was it when you were born?

The Persona Lifecycle

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 22:32:00 EST

I went to a presentation today on user personas by Tamara Adlin. Great presenter, she was very funny (looking at her websites I see two of her recent publications were Are Your Corporate Underpants Showing? and Let Them Pee - which is right at the level of my sense humor). She had to deal with the Stata center's faulty projection system and wound up presenting from a chair with her lap top facing us in her lap, the audience gathered around her in a small circle. It was like preschool, quite fun. Luckily the audience was small, since there is quite gale blowing through Boston.

I've always had a hard time working with persona's. I have some tacked on my cubicle wall, but I still tend to work on a persona that is in roughly formed in my mind after several interviews with the people who will use our software. In large projects I have spent time contributing to the creation of personas only to see them have little influence over the actual design process.

I didn't have the breakthrough I'd hope for, where I would say "A ha! Now that I know this our whole team will embrace personas, refer to them by name and let their imaginary yet prescient needs drive our our work." But I did see some good strategies for bringing the personas into requirements and design work.

I chatted with Jean Foster after the session and we may give personas another go in helping us plan for stage two of Stellar Images (in stage two we'll let people take all those images they found and turn them into class room presentations). Maybe we'll pick up Tamara's book and really make it work this time.

How Jira works

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:38:00 EST

We've been using Jira to track bugs an feature requests in Sakai. At first I found it overly complex and hard to use, but I've adjusted to it, and now really value it's functionality. I get an email every time a Jira request is added. Those that I'm interested in I add to my watch-list so I'll know how and when they are resolved.

But here's something funny. This feature request -- Group enable worksite setup tool -- was created at 9:09 AM. 15 minutes later new code was checked into the repository to solve the issue, and at 9:39 the issues was marked "resolved."

Now this is a controversial issue, and there was a highly charged email debate about it. But I'm not writing about the content of the Jira request here.

What's funny is that it shows how important Jira is now in the development process. In Catch-22 there's a chapter about the map of Italy that the officers keep near their tent, showing the positions of allied and axis forces. Based on the position of the little axis flags on the map, the air crews will be sent on bombing runs. But the base is so fixated on the map, they lose track of the war. They start moving the flags around just to manipulate their flight plans. Don't want to fly over the anti-aircraft guns? Move the flags. Have some code you want to check in? Create a Jira issue.

Online Calendars

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 15:33:00 EST

Jason Fried posted a note asking "Should calendars online look like calendars offline?"

I thought the same thing when designing Stellar 1.0 eons ago, I decided to forgo the grid calendar, and opt for the list of dates I saw in Syllabi instead. Mostly this was to handle the challenge of people creating events with long titles, which would then some how be crammed into a little calendar grid. Years later, the schedule tool is little improved. Few people use it, fewer complain about it, it has remained a low priority.

But now Sloan School representatives have reported that having a grid calendar is highly desirable. If you read the comments on Jason Fried's note you'll see a majority of people speaking up for the old grid calendar. It's not just the grid, people have come accustomed to seeing weekly views and day views as well.

When the time comes to bring a new Calendar into Stellar/Sakai (Sakai is much closer to what people want). It's going to take a lot of work to deliver the calendar people now expect. Ideally I think the solution would be to not have the calendar appear in the course management system, but instead appear on a institutional calendar (like Tech Time at MIT) so class deadlines appear side by side with other events.

Shoplifting MP3s

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 22:20:00 EST

From Walter Mossberg's column in the Wall Street Journal, Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities

Even if you think the record labels and movie studios are stupid and greedy, as many do, that doesn't entitle you to steal their products. If your local supermarket were run by people you didn't like, and charged more than you thought was fair, you wouldn't be entitled to shoplift Cheerios from its shelves.

I agree by and large with his message, which I read as "leave the consumers alone and go after the people pirating for profit." But I can't stand that metaphor. It's the old copying a music file = shoplifting metaphor. Except, it doesn't work. If shoplifted some Cheerios, the store would then no longer have the Cheerios. It is simply not possible for me to make a copy of the Cheerios and leave the original Cheerios box in the store.

You see what I mean? The metaphor gets so surreal when you start trying to follow it.

A more accurate metaphor is that instead of buying the Cheerios, my friend gave me some free Cheerios he made at home (violating General Mills' Cheerios patent). The store doesn't get my business, but they get to keep their Cheerios.

The media really need a new metaphor if they want a breakthrough on this copying music business.

Paparazzi Screen Capture

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 22:32:00 EST

Wow, sometimes I bump into a little app that solves a small annoyance I have had just perfectly. Take Paparazzi, this little app that can grab a screen capture of the full length of a web page. I want to do this every six months or so, and wind up settling for with less than optimum cropped screen shots instead. It's just a beautiful little app. Now all I have to do is remember that I have it next time this comes up.

I found this from Cool OSX Apps, which close to my favorite RSS feed lately.

MIT Jabber server

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 16:38:00 EST

Cool. MIT has a new Jabber service. I am using mine now go ahead an IM me to see. The account is the same as my email address, benbr with @mit.edu added on the end. Of course I already had an AIM and a Yahoo ID, but a third never hurts. And it will allow me to treat this account as me "work" account.

Labeling issues in UI

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:58:00 EST

There's currently an issue post in sakai's change request database regarding the 'assignment' label in the Gradebook. Someone quite reasonably questioned the label "assignment" to describe those things which are graded in a gradebook. This is something we've gone round and round about, and resolved in usability testing.

You can spend hours having rational arguments about the best label for something in a user interface, only to find the most rational suggestion slows down the people who use the tool. This was one of those times. Here's my comment on the case:

This is always a tricky area, especially when you consider that tools go by different names at different schools. At MIT we plan to use the Gradebook and call it that, but we have no plans to use the Assignment tool, favoring our own Homework tool in it's place. Also, we allow instructors to relabel their tools. So in some cases a class may call it's Homework/Assignment tool "Problem Sets" and it's Gradebook tool "Feedback." This doesn't effect the precise area of the UI mentioned in this suggestion, but keep in mind the flexibility of labels.

Now on to the "assignment" label...

In designing the UI for the gradebook we conducted series of usability test using a prototype (though not in the context of the assignments tool). We gave them the UI and the syllabus of a pretend class and asked them to talk us through how they would set it up, using the prototype. We tried both 'assessment' and 'item' in the UI and found that they lead to confusion. When using Item and to a lesser extent Assessment people weren't sure if that link would do what they needed. When we switched to Assignment, that problem dropped away.

I'm not saying that means we've found the solution and shouldn't change. But I do propose that the change be made on the basis of further usability testing. We'll be doing a round of testing this Fall on the live gradebook tool. We'll share the results and the protocol, and would love to see results from other schools.

Horizon project wiki

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:31:00 EST

I was just checking out the NMC's Horizon project, which I read about on Phil Long's weblog. The yearly horizon report. They have set it up as a wiki, including a space where you can add ideas that they should be considering. I went in and added federated image presentation tools, since we've found it to be such a rich topic.

Jakob the usability guy on blogs

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 19:56:00 EST

I have mixed feelings about Jakob Nielsen. His book got me excited about designing for user experience years ago, and I enjoy his rigor. But something about his tone sets me on edge, and his website is just so ugly, it's hard to use.

So he published a little piece on "The Top Ten Design Mistakes in Weblogs" today, and I have to say I agreed with him up and down the list. This weblog you are reading has made several of the mistakes, my pitiable 'about me' and lack of photo, for example. I often check for an about page when I first read a new blog, so I should know better.

Many of the usability issues of my weblog stem from my drive to simplicity which led me to publish a weblog in my AFS account, which could be maintained with the absolute minimum of maintenance. Here's the process of writing a blog entry for me. Write a blog entry in BBedit and save it. That's it, a little script updates my blog for me every 30 minutes. But publishing to AFS means the site is a set of static files, and I've foregone categories and individual post pages (you just get monthly archives). Sadly those monthly archive pages are so long, Google doesn't index the whole page, so they aren't even very searchable.

So, I've been a little chagrined to find myself embarrassed by Jakob, a guy who's website looks like it by a elementary school student. Honestly, I barely think about my weblog as a website, it's mostly an RS feed to me. But I may just spiff the place up a bit, here and there, for those readers who come here the old fashioned way.

50 whole downloads

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 12:26:00 EST

Just now Linkwalla was downloaded for the 50th time. Nice. Hitting the big time!

I have the next round of Linkwalla improvements planned out (supporting long term use by adding monthly archives). Unfortunately I am hosed between work and school and maintaining my secret identity, so there won't likely be any new updates until January.

Small Tools Big Ideas

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 14:25:00 EST

I was thrilled to present at the Small Tools Big Ideas conference in New York last week. Carl Jones and I split a presentation on developing Stellar images as a presentation tool that uses external image repositories titled Cooperative Technology (pdf, 1.2MB).

Here are some more highlights from the conference.

I met Michael Feldstein, who's blog I've been reading for a while, and we had a chat while waiting line for lunch. His ideas on a Learning Management Operating System are looking better and better to me.
It's interesting how many people were working towards the same thing
- Separating image repositories from the presentation tools that remix the images
- Seek out a standard way for tools and repositories to talks (OKI and SRW are starts)
- Metadata that travels well
- An end to copyright insanity (or at least a good a workaround)
I got to see the best products in the 'teaching with images' market and meet the makers.
- MDID is cool, but Windows based which makes it hard for us to work with.
- ArtStor seems to be making a solid effort at being a good, sharing, edtech citizen and a money-making company at the same time. And they are using SRW now on their repositories (not sure how far that goes, though).
- Almagest is a great tool. They are hoping to tear it's repository half and it's presentation half apart so they can work together, but also work separately with other tools. (that could be great news for our tool!)
I had a chat with one of the reps from Saskia - a provider of high quality digital images for libraries. They are open to loading their images in DSpace and having copies moved to something like Stellar. They aren't concerned with turning off student access at the end of the semester. It's nice to hear of such reasonable policies.
Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium gave a great keynote, drawing heavily from the horizon project at the NMC.
The Windows logo hovering over the panelists during the final panel Q&A drove me bonkers. After the short presentations, the projector stayed on, the screen saver kicked in and it was the floating Microsoft logo moving around every few seconds. I wanted to run up to the podium and smash the projector, sort of like in that seminal Apple ad where the woman smashes big brother.

There was so much more. It's hard to blog about such a rich experience. Big whuffie points to Beth Harris and Steven Zucker for their work.

I am writing this at Logan Airport on my way to Berkeley for a meeting on Sakai's course management API. It's been a busy couple of weeks.

WebCT and Blackboard

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 12:52:00 EST

So the big ed tech news (besides the Video iPod) was the purchase of WebCT by Blackboard. This gives them a tremendous market share, and gives them more power to compete against open source efforts like Sakai.

Here's quote from Jim Pease at Syracuse

Although not open, there is a large community of support and development around Blackboard and WebCT. Although I would argue that the open licensing of Sakai is enough of an advantage, I don't think it is enough to motivate a switch from Blackboard/WebCT. What argument would you pose to university officials if asked, "What is the advantage of Sakai over Blackboard/WebCT?"

To me the differentiating factor has to be user experience. Which LMS makes it easier for people to teach, learn and collaborate?

Sakai's not there yet, but hopefully as it's framework and APIs mature, and universities begin contributing their work it will be competitive with a large commercial solution on the basis of user experience. The APIs are maturing. I am writing from Berkeley today, at a meeting going over the requirements for course management in Sakai - man having reps from 5 big schools in the room really hammers on those requirements.

But I'm hopeful that the as the framework, kernel and APIs get solid, Sakai will become a reliable platform for schools to develop against. That's when the fun really begins.

Conference tagging

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 14:49:00 EST

I think it would be great to print a suggested 'tag' for the Sakai conference in Austin right on the conference programs, and the website.

By tag I mean the tags that people use when adding photos to flickr, links to del.icio.us, blog entries to technorati, etc. I'm adding a 'sakaiaustin' technorati tag right to this post.

I often find that there are some people at a conference either blogging the conference or taking lots of pictures and putting them on flickr. I was at a conference last week, and Raymond Yee was tagging his photos for the conference "smalltoolsbigdeas". Unfortunately since there wasn't an agreed tag before hand, he's the only one with photos there.

Daphne Ogle rightly suggested that the program ought to include a note saying what the heck a tag is for people who aren't dorks.

Web Freshener

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:44:00 EST

So here's my idea for a small project to complete for my database class: Web Freshener. Web Freshener will help us and our clients keep websites current by reminding us to update stale web pages.

Have you ever been looking at a website then notice their news updates page hasn't been updated since 2002, or it mentions some event that happened months ago in the future tense? Makes you wonder how much you can trust anything you read there. On the other hand I see how it happens. I'm often in meetings in which we decide that certain webpage will have areas of fresh content, meant to be updated regularly. It happens once or twice, then people get distracted before you know it six months have gone by, and we think 'wow we should really update that spotlight link on the home page.' What's even worse is having someone outside our group point it out. Stale web pages are embarrassing.

Web Freshener will be a web based database. Managers can add web sites, and add people responsible for updating them. Then people can add updates - an update can be something like: "Replace spotlight on the home page" or "Review the feature list for accuracy" or "Write a new blog entry." Most updates will have a URL, a person responsible for the update and a "shelf life" or the amount of time after the page is updated before it goes stale. When an update goes stale, the person responsible gets an email reminder. The email will include a link they click to to say "OK. I did the update" which will start the shelf life timer back up again. Also anyone can view reports to see what updates have happened to a site, what updates are coming up or late, and who is responsible.

That's it. Pretty simple really, but it should save us a lot of memory for more important matters, and maybe help us avoid embarrassing staleness in our web sites.

Vaccinating against babies

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 11:35:00 EST

Here's a odd User Interaction issue. I was analyzing the website of Drs. Foster & Smith - they sell pet supplies, and veterinary medicine. I tried a sample search of "rabies." Seems like a possible search for right? Well when i searched I got a big set of returned products and articles along with a little note: "Text Search: Corrected to babies"

Now that's odd. I wonder what kind of software they are using? Seems like they are finding the closest matching key word, but it suggests a real weakness in their taxonomy.

Micro Presentations

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 23:21:00 EST

I'm doing three presentations this week. Two are now complete. The first was to the heads of department from the School of Science, the second to MIT's new provost. Both, though different in content, were about the Stellar Course Management System, and both were for about 5 minutes to allow room for more speakers.

Later this week I'll be discussing Stellar Images at the Small Tools/Big Ideas conference in New York. And it's the big one - I'll have a whopping 10 minutes after sharing a 20 minute time slot with Carl Jones from the MIT Libraries. Carl and I are last on 90 minute panel with thee other 20 minute presentations -- I hope our moderator is strict with the time limits or I'll be talking to people on their way to lunch!

It is much harder to give a 5-10 minute presentation than 30 minute presentation. You can only hope to make you point well enough that the listener may be motivated to learn more later.

CocoaMySQL

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 08:58:00 EST

Carl Jones pointed me to a nice OS X front-end for MySQL called CocoaMySQL ( download | FAQ | more ). I downloaded the official MySQL OS X installer and was in business in 5 minutes. Looks great, though I don't know enough yet to do much with it.

Also I came up with an idea for my class project that will revolutionize the way we do website maintenance. More on that later.

Sakai hacking

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:30:00 EST

Man check out that crazy Sakai hacker Steve Githens, busting out with a lab notebook app for his class, popped wight into his Sakai installation. Go, Steve, go.

The Prototype Middle Path

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 09:32:00 EST

I saw a great article on Balancing fidelity in prototyping. It is easy to over do prototypes, leading to lots of wasted effort. I've been guilty of under-developing prototypes as well, because the ideas seem so clear in my head.

Here's how I think I'm doing on the Stellar Images prototype.

Don't get carried away in making the prototype look pretty

I haven't done any more that the minimal styling, since I assume the style of the tool will come from the course management system it's working with. Many developers would do less, many designers would do more, but I've aimed for the middle path.

Keep interactivity at a medium to high level

I think I've done that, I added in JavaScript and made all the links work. Hopefully the HTML and JavaScript and some of the CSS from the prototype will pop right into the JSP pages that present the working application.

Don't compromise on breadth

All pages covered (luckily there aren't too many). I could probably do more coverage of error messages and such though.

Compromise as much as you can on depth

Done. This is where I could really lose it though, by adding various search results pages, and long list of images. If we were doing more usability testing at this point, I'd feel a lot of pressure to go overboard on depth.

Overall my use of HTML prototypes is too much for some applications, but in this case starting with HTML helps move on development and design at the same time, and will save us QA later.

DSpace vs. Fedora

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 16:35:00 EST

The question was raised on the Sakai-Library discussion list: Does anyone have any opinions on dSpace vs. Fedora?

There were many insightful answers, but this was the most concise, from Hussein Suleman

dspace provides a simple installable package with a user interface, some workflow management, its own repository, elements to support preservation, etc.

fedora is all about the repository and management of items in it.

technically, one could modify dspace to use fedora rather than its own repository ... so it may not be a choice but an "and".

you would choose fedora if you wanted to integrate a repository into a larger application. you would choose dspace if you wanted a one-stop-shop digital library system.

I love a nice simple answer.

Grampa's tales of yesteryear

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:08:00 EST

I've been participating in a class at Earlham College in Indiana - my Alma Mater. The class is called Social Impact of Computer Technology. The instructor, Mark Pearson, has set up the class so that every student is required to blog on their topic, and he's invited a panel of alumni working in the field to follow along and comment on the blog. I'm interested on how blogs can be used in teaching and learning, so I signed up.

This blog entry that sounds like something I would have written as an undergrad drunk on post-modern social theory: "Whats a Banana?". Here's my response.

"I know a lot of people work in the video business. People pay them to make videos about events, or about their company or whatever. When digital video cameras became affordable, and products like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro made it easy for people to edit video without a lot of equipment or training, people in the video business got nervous. Would everyone just make their own videos now?

"Nope - they have more business than ever. Thing is that they anyone can make a video, but it takes a lot of effort and skill to make a good video. Same thing for web designers. Now anyone can figure out how to create a web page - but to make a really useful website takes skill and effort.

"Just something to think about. The increased availability of tools is a great help - and will open a lot of doors for people. But it's talent and the hard work that create something valuable."

My god I'm so OLD. That's the worst thing about this project - I feel so old an grizzled. I start saying things like "it's talent and the hard work that create something valuable." I should have signed off "Grampa."

A wee JavaScript

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:45:00 EST

I added a JavaScript function so that when the 'remove' checkbox is selected the effected row changes it's visual style on the edit class images mockup. It's not a big thing, but it will make it easier for people to see what they are doing (and it won't detract from the experience of those who can't see).

I've ordered a new JavaScript book - DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM - which looks great for the kind of coding I aspire to write, with the JavaScript truly removed from the XHTML.

Untitled Talk about Cooperative Technology

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:16:00 EST

Here's the abstract for Carl Jones' and my talk at the Small Tools/Big Ideas conference.

DSpace is designed for the long-term storage and management of digital assets. Stellar is designed for managing and presenting teaching materials while a course is being taught. Stellar Images will use DSpace assets to present images as course materials, playing off of the strengths of each tool.

This approach encourages innovation, reuse, and cooperation. DSpace will be one of many repositories feeding Stellar Images, and Stellar Images will be one of many windows into DSpace content.

We will talk about our plans to connect the two concerns, and the practical requirements of the faculty and students using these tools. We will also touch on the role of OKI's Repository OSID ("Open Services Interface Definition") as an interface between these tools.

What we need now is a title.

UPDATE: "Cooperative technology: Making institutional repositories and course management systems work together"

Listening to users

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 09:32:00 EST

Here's a must read piece: "Listening to users considered harmful?" on Creating Passionate Users. The gist of it is that listening to users will help you make incremental improvements, but won't lead to revolutionary improvements. It's something I've been grappling with when we discuss setting priorities for Stellar development.

Other than the work we're doing right now, I believe the best major improvement we could make to Stellar is to restructure the materials, schedule and homework tools to be organized around class sessions. Instructors would come in, with slots to fill up for each time their class meets. My inspiration comes from looking at hundreds of syllabi, and looking at the way 100s of Stellar courses are organized now.

Nobody asks for this change, but I can see it buried in many suggestions and complaints, "It's hard to keep my materials organized" from an instructor or "It's hard to see what I need to do today" from a student. Yet my experience and instinct tells me this what's needed. I'm applying the general rule of listening for user goals when I hear feature requests, not listening for solutions.

By listening to users we'd add infinitely nested folders like in Sakai's resources tool, and an elaborate calendar tool like dotLRN (I love dotLRN's calendaring, btw). These could be improvements, but the problems would persist and ease of use would decline. It's not revolutionary, it just adding features to existing tools.

We're not in the position to make either of these kinds of changes to existing Stellar tools right now. Hopefully Sakai will give us that opportunity - but I'm afraid it's design goal of being generic enough to work for research teams as well as academic classes will make it difficult. If advocating for this kind of change is a hard sell at MIT, it becomes exponentially more difficult when there are so many other stake holders involved.

No solutions here, I'm just wondering how to keep a development team nimble enough to make revolutionary improvements on a project that is so big.

Simmons Database Class

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:50:00 EST

I've started a class in database design at Simmons. The class is taught by an information architect named Amy Warner. The first class was great - it will benefit my work. Predictably I plan to do a final project that's some sort of web database application, probably using PHP and MySQL.

I had been thinking of whipping together an app that would make it easy for my group to track billable hours - but Basecamp scooped me by adding their own time tracking feature today.

Stellar use still growing

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 14:20:00 EST

I just saw the the number of Stellar class websites has inched up above the number used last semester. There will surely be more requests trickling in of the next week or two, but as I write the number is 428, and we maxed out at 416 in the Spring. In case any one wonders, that's 2137 class websites since Fall 2001.

Image Footnotes

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 13:18:00 EST

I brought my son to a kids event at MIT on Sunday. I talked with a grad student from BCS who I've met a couple of times. We got to talking shop, and I told him about Stellar Images. As all teaching staff ask, he wanted to know if we'll supply copyright information. In particular, he want to know how he could keep track of which of the pictures in his personal collection could be re-used. I didn't know how to do that once the picture was downloaded. He said he wished is said in little letters on the bottom of the image.

I think that's a great idea. I saw professors with collections of images on their hard drives, images they could never in use OCW without knowing their source. I added a note to each full-size image in the mockup (example) in a 15 pixel strip on the bottom. I included info about how the image may be used, along with a sample attribution. I didn't include the actual license info, because I hear instructors saying they don't want legalese. The stripe is almost black (not full black which could distract from the image). I used Jason Kottke's Silkscreen font to make type that was readable at a very small size.

Not sure if we'll be able to manipulate the images on the fly like this in the Fall proof-of-concept, but I hope this will wind up in the final product.

Stop Wasting Time in Usability Tests

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 12:37:00 EST

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox entry this week, Time Budgets for Usability Sessions, is a worthwhile read. Basic idea is that we spend time in usability sessions asking focus-group or survey questions that would be better spent watching how people use the interface. This has certainly been the case in most MIT usability tests, which suffer from an exhausting list of subjective questions, answered with a rating of 1 to 7.

I do enjoy the post-test debriefings. We're testing in an academic environment, and the people testing are faculty, TAs or students. It's good for us to take the time to hear they have to say - we often get great ideas. It also teaches them more about our work, and they leave more of advocate for our service than they were before the test.

MDID

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:20:00 EST

MDID is an open source project with much in common with Stellar Images.

"Developed at James Madison University, the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) software brings the digital image library into the teaching and learning process."

The big difference is that MDID is an image repository, ours is a tool that accesses image repositories (it could potentially access MDID repositories along with DSpace, HarvestRoad, etc.) MDID os moving towards accessing other repositories, but the general approach of Stellar Images is much lighter.

MDID is worth keeping an eye on - it has many of the feature we might strive for in future releases. One possible disadvantage for us is that it's an ASP/.NET application.

Access Denied, with a way out

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 10:39:00 EST

The new Stellar access denied pages are getting quite a work out in these first couple days of classes. The page is the usual access denied page, but if person trying to get into the class is logged in successfully (i.e. has an MIT certificate) they can use a form on the page to send mail to the instructors and administrators of the class asking for access. The course staff then get an email with the request, plus a link to the page where they can rant access. There have been 300 requests since the new page debuted on July 31. 155 of those requests were in the last 24 hours.

I heard from Rich Garcia in Academic Computing that the number of support requests coming in is much lower than in other semesters. All of those people getting access denied messages now have an action they can take, other than calling the help desk. This is also much easier on the instructors, who get a link directly to the access page, rather than having to puzzle through the process any time someone asks them for access.

But why are there so many people being denied access? Mainly it's that Stellar is operating off the pre-reg lists now, the since Reg day was just Tuesday, the registrar's official lists aren't out yet. Here's a sampling form the last 100 messages that have come through:

40% Unknown - either they didn't leave a note or it was unclear why they wanted access.
31% Not on Pre-reg list
15% Auditing - either they want to audit for the semester or they are shopping for classes and wanted to look at this one more closely
10% Registration problem - The student says they pre-registered, and they should have access
2% Section request - The student is trying to join a section subsite
1% Faculty - Faculty asking another professor to look at their course
1% TA - TA assigned to the class hasn't been added as a TA yet

Looking at the first 100 messages, from before the semester began, I saw lot more requests from faculty looking to to see old versions of the class they are teaching, and from TAs trying to get into the class they've been hired to work on.

Although I'm pleased with the new page, I can see some improvements we can make.

Improve the reg feed. This is out of our control, but the faster we can updates from the registrar the happier our community of users will be. There are many "I turned in my registration form 5 minutes ago, and i still can't access this website" messages.
Different access denied page for sections. We have an good system for section signups, those emails from people trying to get into sections circumvent that system.
Avoid duplicates. Not a big problem yet, but I saw some potentially annoying duplicates. It seems some students were submitting the form, waiting a while, and if they hadn't been granted access yet, submitting the form again.
Let the class staff designate gate keepers. Currently every professor, TA and admin associated with a class gets the access request email - it would be nice if they could pick one or two people to handle these requests.
Make adding students even easier. I'd love to see the email to instructors have a "Add this student to the class" link which take them to a page saying "The student has been added, and they have ben sent an email letting them know." One click and the job is done.

Why I removed bulk adds of images

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 13:08:00 EST

In the initial wireframes for the Stellar Images showed a little check box next to each image that turned up after searching the repositories. There was a button to "add selected images" which would pull each of those images into the class collection. I recently removed that bulk add feature. Now to add an image, you click to view the image details, then click the "add to class images" button.

Why would I do that? There are more clicks involved, especially if someone wants to add 5 of the images that turn up in a search.

What I realized is that bulk adding is something some one on the development team would want to do when demoing or testing this app - get a bunch of pictures in there quickly. But it's not something I saw the professors doing when they prepared their own presentations.

The faculty, whether they were using Google Images, government archives or the slides in their own filing cabinet carefully select individual images to their presentation. For example, if some one wants a portrait of Richard Stallman for their history of open source computing class, they search for Stallman, then click the thumbnail that looks most appealing. Seeing the larger image they can see what it will look like in the presentation, and decide whether they'd really like to use it.

It also let me reduce a lot of clutter. The UIs for bulk action are always a little off putting for novice users, so by removing it, I can really improve the flow of the application. Someone somewhere is going to want to bulk add, but the people I am designing for, personified in the user personas I'm using, don't need bulk add, but do need a tool that's easy to understand.

There are 100s of little decisions like this that happen in UI design. Someday someone is going to ask me, or more likely someone one on the front lines of user support, why there is no bulk add. How do I communicate this kind of design decision?

Mailman's HTML written by a Wildebeest

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 15:24:00 EST

I'm cleaning up a GNU Mailman template to use with Stellar. This work involves replacing code like this:

  <TR>
<TD COLSPAN="2" WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="#FFF0D0">
  <B><FONT COLOR="#000000">Subscribing to <MM-List-Name></FONT></B>
</TD>
  </TR>

with code like this:

<h3>Subscribing to <MM-List-Name></h3>

Ay carumba. Mailman seems to be a lovely piece of software but HTML like that really makes a person question the entire application.

Updated Stellar Images mockups

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:51:00 EST

I spent much of the day updating the Stellar Images mock-ups and functional specs. I added a little JavaScript to make it look more like a working application.

Small tools/Big ideas

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 10:00:00 EST

I'll be presenting at the Small Tools/Big Ideas conference in New York on October 7.

This year's conference focuses on the ways that digital image libraries and newly developed digital tools are reshaping the practice of teaching art and art history.

I'll be there with Carl Jones, a programmer from MIT Libraries. We're working together on the image collection and presentation tool I'm designing for Stellar/Sakai. Carl works on DSpace, particularly on getting the Rotch Visual Collection online. We'll be talking about the strategies we're using to collaborate on that project.

Stellar's Tipping Point

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 19:30:00 EST

You know what the killer feature was that led to Stellar being the course management system of choice at MIT? Automatically synching the membership page with the registrar's enrollment data. Once we did that Stellar had a steep increase in the number of class websites requested. We started off with a class list that instructors maintained on their own, adding whichever students they like, or letting the whole world in. But maintaining those lists was a source of more work, and they looked to Stellar to reduce their workload.

It's such a boring feature to be the big sell. But it is a core piece of functionality, and without that Stellar was like a car without seats. You had to bring your own seats with you.

The basic functionality we need to work on for our Sakai pilot is simply better class list management, starting with registrar feeds. Administration, especially course management, is a weak spot for Sakai. As it stands now, Sakai classes don't even have a visible class list. The sectioning efforts under way will help, and I hope to get better acquainted with the status of those efforts in the next few weeks.

Throttling Netflix

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:42:00 EST

I'm a big Netflix user. Lisa and I don't have a TV, but we watch a TV show nearly every night thanks to our Netflix subscription. A while back I read about their strategy of "throttling" customers who rent a lot of movies. Apparently Netflix starts losing money if you rent more than 5 movies per month, so when you do that you start seeing slowdowns. It takes them an extra day to receive that movie. It takes them 24 hours to put a new movie in the mail when it used to take them 30 minutes.

Here's a great discussion from Stanford on the Netflix throttling strategy from Stanford.

Throttling is a big mistake for Netflix. I used to proselytize people left and right about the benefits of Netflix. I gave a few Netflix gift certificates as stocking stuffers one christmas. I would go on and on about how great it was. But now my relationship with Netflix is strictly business. I'll take my throttlings, but I'm not offering any hugs in return. Second I see I better deal, I'll be parting ways with Netflix.

Vacation

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 21:37:00 EST

I'm off for a vacation. We'll be somewhere in Vermont with no cell phone reception. I'm not going to bring my computer, which is a very radical step for me. I hope I find it refreshing and energizing after I get past the part with the tremors and vomiting.

Whisper and Wu-Wei mirror

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 20:20:00 EST

I got this message from Elle.

Just wanted to drop a line and say thank you for the wu-wei download on your site! I've just mirrored copies of Whisper 0.1 and 0.2 on my site, so feel free to grab them as needed.

It's the sparky little micro-CMS that will not be extinguished.

Chemistry template in Stellar

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:11:00 EST

The Department of Chemistry has decided to put more of their classes in Stellar, partly because it makes it easier to move materials into OCW. Their Fall 05 classes, 5.111 - Principles of Chemical Science, for example, sport the new look.

Eileen Huang, the OCW faculty liaison put together the look. The best part is that she did by taking a current Stellar look and simply editing the CSS. She sent me the style sheet and a new header image, and later that day I showed her the new look. This experience more than anything else shows the benefits of moving over to a fairly simple CSS-based layout in Stellar.

New Stellar Listings

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 14:04:00 EST

We released a new version of the Stellar Course management System over the weekend. This is a fairly small release, most of of our effort is devoted to Sakai work, but there are several nifty new features.

One is that the lists of class sites now display the access level for the site. This will save people trying to get into the classes a lot of effort, because they can seek out Public or MIT only courses even if they aren't on the class list. In the past people had to try to get in and see what happened.

All Stellar sites that have a OCW corollary will have a link to the OCW site on their homepage, as another way to open access (instructors can disable this link). See for example 11.423 Information and Communication Technologies in Community Development. Scroll down to the class description and you'll find a link to the OCW site.

Portals and learning applications

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 10:14:00 EST

E-literate has a worthwhile post on portals and learning applications. I left a comment that I will cross-post here.

In a portal like My Yahoo the portlet is not the application, it is a little feed that leads you into the application. Click a stock quote and you leave My Yahoo and got to Yahoo Finance. Yahoo Mail has a portlet but it's just a window that tells you how many unread message you have, if you want to send a message, you click a link in the portlet leave My Yahoo and move to Yahoo mail.

So wouldn't it make sense to develop applications so that they operate independently of the portal, but can send a small preview of their contents over to a portal? Sakai tries to be the portal, and assumes that EVERYTHING happens in that portal, you never leave.

This seems like a mistake, perhaps the best way to integrate UPortal is not to build into Sakai, but export views of Sakai to UPortal via JSR-168. Sakai doesn't need to be a consumer of JSR-168 (I believe that's the current plan) rather it can just export little windows into it's functionality to a larger university portal, that might also include portlets from the school teams, dining services, whatever. That way Sakai tools (quiz and gradebook, say) can share a class website together, and be happily talking to each other, while also each sending a preview to the school portal.

Indiana's Sakai Transition

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 10:14:00 EST

Indiana has an interesting method of moving people over to Sakai. Their installation of Sakai is called OnCourse CL. New classes will default to the new system, but instructors can opt-out and use the original (non-Sakai) OnCourse. Here's their help page: Which Oncourse for Your Course?

It includes a link to a survey instructors can take to see if they should use the Original OnCourse or the Sakai OnCourse. I took it and it said I should stick with the original. Ouch! This survey seems like it would be generally useful to anyone deciding whether to use Sakai. It's well worth checking out.

IU has the most professional well run support and documentation teams I've run into - I guess they need to be pretty efficient to handle 90,000 users.

Linkwalla 0.4

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 21:40:00 EST

The Linkwalla 0.4 release contains some usability upgrades.

The del.icio.us tags input is only visible when the checkbox has been selected (via javascript)
When using the javascript bookmarklet, the user is returned to the page being bookmarked after the link is added.

The user for these usablity upgrades was me, maintaining the Link Feed affiliated with this site. It's great being so close to your user base.

Photoshop Action

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 16:10:00 EST

I don't use Photoshop as much as I used to when i did more graphic design work, but I still use it often as a utility for resizing, saving for the web, etc images for wireframes and and the like. I had sometimes thought that I could probably get a much simpler program, maybe even Preview, to get the job done.

Today I had to process a bunch of wireframes and put them up in Sakai's SVN repository. So I exported from OmniGraffle, opened the set up in PhotoShop and began resizing and cropping. Just as i started the first one, I thought to open the actions palette and record my process. I resized, cropped, saved for the web and closed the document. Then I repeated the action for the rest of the files. Wow that was easy. I'm not going to stop using Photoshop.

Peeved by sloppy HTML

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 09:22:00 EST

You know what peeves me? When people don't put <label> tags around their checkbox labels. Because I like clicking label. I don't want to have to aim for that little teeny checkbox.

Here's what I mean.

See? You can click the label on the first one and checks the box. It also makes it much easier for people using screen readers, or those who are just a little ham-handed, to fill out a form.

Admittedly I only started using label tags consistently in the last 12 months or so, as a result of doing accessibility testing on the Sakai style guide with the MIT ATIC lab. But now that I know to click on the label I do it all the time, both on the web and on the dialog boxes for my computer applications.

So all you HTML jockeys out there, using the label tag is easy and you're just not going to look slick with out it.

linkwalla + del.icio.us

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:51:00 EST

I just packaged up Linkwalla 0.3 - adding the major new feature that when adding a link, you can send a copy along to del.icio.us. It was my first time using web services, but I feel I'm touching the edge of Web 2.0. I can't wait to try something like this with the Sakai/Stellar API. I just hope it uses REST.

Permission Denied in Stellar

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 15:00:00 EST

We've added a new access denied page to Stellar for people who are successfully logged in, but aren't on the access list for the class. If they failed to log in at all, they get the old page which has tips about logging in and using certificates.

Example: Barbara teaches 5.356 with Joe and Maria on the membership list.

Dorothy is an MIT student and has logged into Stellar but when she tries to get into 5.356 she gets the permission denied page, which gives her the option to email Barbara to request access.
Douglas is is from Miami University and has no Stellar account. He tries to access 5.356 and gets the old permission denied page that explains about certificates and such.
Joe's certificate is in great shape, he can log in no problem.
Maria has an old certificate that's no good. She fails to log in and gets the same permission denied/certificate info page that Douglas saw.

The main goal for the new page is to make sure that Dorothy doesn't have to call the help desk, explain that her certificate is fine, have them check and see if she's on the membership list, and be told that should contact the instructor. Instead she can contact the instructor immediately.

The new page is live now - and it's been used to request access from instructors 5 or 6 times already.

Here's a sampling of messages I've seen going to instructors.

I was wondering if I could obtain access to the Stellar site for the class called Fields, Forces and Flows in Biological Systems. I am a Master's Student in Electrical Engineering and I am very interested in this class. I would like to see if it matches my expectations and if I should take it in the Fall. Thank you!

I pre-registered for this class for Fall of 2005 and would like to get a head start by looking at the materials available. I think it will provide a good opportunity to see what the class is about and help me make an informed decision about my classes.

I would like to request access just to understand what computational and system biology course is about. Hope that you would allow me to view this website for about a week. Thank you.

What this says to me is that not only are we saving the help desk from getting calls, but we're making it easier for students in interact with instructors, and take action further their own learning.

Mighty Mouse

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 13:37:00 EST

I'm just not that excited about Apple's new mouse. For years Apple has insisted on a one button mouse. Now they have a multi-button mouse, but the insist on having it look like a one button mouse. I'd take my Kensington Studio Mouse over that Mighty Mouse any day.

Moving to Cambridge

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 10:27:00 EST

My family is moving in to Cambridge. One of the big draws is living close to MIT, so I can walk to work. I'm going to save about 40 minutes of commuting time each way, giving me 6 1/2 hours a week to do something more enjoyable than negotiating the MBTA. Time is so valuable - it's going to be amazing.

One confusing this about having lot's of calls in to mortgage brokers and such is that all that spam I get about interest rates and "your application has been approved" seems possibly relevant. Of course when I see the messages are sent to by 'people' with names like "Amateur U. Walleyed" (that's a real one, I just got it) I'm pretty sure it's not really about my financing.

REST APIs and Basic Knowledge

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 20:14:00 EST

I'm adding a feature in Linkwalla that let's automatically add links to your del.icio.us account when you add a link to Linkwalla. I'm doing this using the del.icio.us api.

Figuring out the API was simple, and writing a function that would add the link was simple. The hard part was figuring out the first sentence line from the API description:

Everything in /api requires HTTP-Auth.

This is a problem I often run into as an wannabe programmer. I can figure out how some fairly fancy stuff works, but there are these little pieces of assumed knowledge that take for ever. I mean every body know how to make HTTP-Auth work, right? I spent hours googling, reading and rereading function descriptions of PHP.net, reading up on HTTP headers, and on and on. I found a great guide to using the del.icio.us API and thought my problem was solved until I read their explanation of HTTP-Auth:

del.icio.us is a login-based system, and uses HTTP-Auth for authentication.

That's it! Finally late last night I was searching through PHP books on O'Reilly's Safari service (free access to Safari is perk of working at MIT) and I found the answer in the book Upgrading to PHP 5. All I had to do was format the Delicious URL in a funny way:

http://username:password@del.icio.us/api/posts/add

Voila. I had it working in 30 seconds. So now I know. It took many hours of wasted time, but I'm a better nerd for it.

By the way, I've tried working with a SOAP API before, and REST is a piece of cake in comparison. I think it's definitely the way to go for Sakai services, if only because we have a goal of letting fuzzy-headed self-taught web developers like myself link their scripts into Sakai, and asking them to figure out SOAP puts big barrier in the way.

How Moodle is better than Sakai

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 09:58:00 EST

Well for one thing there's an O'Reilly Moodle book now. Not a full-scale animal book, just a tree, but still, that's pretty impressive.

Charles Kerns from Stanford recently wrote up a list reasons why Moodle is more pedagogically oriented than Sakai. It's hard to extract from what was a long multi-quoted email chain, but I hope he writes it up and puts in [Sakaipedia](http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ENC) some time. Here's a interesting quote:

"...we have positioned Sakai as an institutional solution; moodle is a teachers' solution."

There's still hope that Moodle and Sakai might work together. Chuck Severance and Jim Farmer from Sakai recently met with Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's tribal chieftain, in Washington D.C. You can watch Chuck's video from the event.

Fresh links via linkwalla 0.2

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:37:00 EST

You can now subscribe to an RSS feed of links to interesting tech-related things I've seen on the web (it's linked over on the right of the screen). I subscribe to about 100 RSS feeds, and many of the links that pop up in my links will be found elsewhere. I may throw in the odd Stellar site or site that someone emailed me about. These are sites that worth a look, but i don't have the time or inclination to write blog entries about.

This also a way for me to use linkwalla, my homegrown open source software for sharing links. I can't run a PHP app on web.mit.edu, but I'm running it on my laptop and synching the feed onto this site using a cron job. In preparing to this I made enough improvement to linkwalla to post version 0.2 on Sourceforge.

Students Adding Images

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 09:51:00 EST

Students should be able to upload images to use in slideshows they create using Stellar Images. This became clear to me while talking to Susan Slyomovics, and anthropology professor and photographer, who has students create photo exhibits as a final project for her class, Photography and Truth.

I've mentioned before that I think Stellar - and Sakai - tend to focus a bit too much on how instructors use the software. There are fairly few opportunities to students to more than passively receive information from the sites. Students should be able to add resources to the class materials page, for example. I'm hoping the Images tool will help us break the habit of focussing on the model of professors lecturing to passive students, and allow for some more collaborative teaching and learning.

We could achieve these goals quickly by using the Flickr API to add creative commons images and images from user's own accounts to the set of browsable collections in the Stellar Images.

Specs for Stellar Images

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 11:02:00 EST

I just posted some initial specs for Stellar Images. I've been getting many urgent requests for more detail on what the tool will be. I've been a little hesistant - we're stillinterviewing instructors, and working with a small team on a tight deadline I want as much flexibility as possible. But the time has come - these are plans for our initial proof-of-concept. The plans are very likely to change, and I'll keep updating the page here.

Ten years!

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 09:18:00 EST

It's hard for me to even imagine this is true, but as of today I have been working at MIT for ten years!

When I arrived I thought I'd work here for a year or so while I figured what I wanted to do. But the Institute just sucks you in. I've always been encouraged to discover what it is I want to do and do it here at MIT, my job description always trying to keep up with my passions (and often lagging behind by a few years...).

So thanks for the decade, MIT. And thanks for the extra week of vacation I get this year, too.

Some simple freelance sites

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 14:33:00 EST

I've designed a couple of simple websites for athletically-inclined friends.

I completed the site for Caroline Hallisey, Olympic speed skater, a couple of months ago. Caroline, whose mom is a project manager here at MIT, was on the Olympic team in Seoul (1998) and Salt Lake City (2002). She is the fastest woman speed skater in the USA, holding three records. Sounds like Caroline has excellent chance of appearing in the XXth Olympic Winter Games Turin, 2006.

I just recently launched a site for Beth Erlichman, a personal trainer in Boston. I've been getting training from Beth, and she managed to design a workout for a someone little time or inclination to exercise.

Half a Slideshow tool

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 22:23:00 EST

This Signal vs. Noise entry mentions their idea of releasing "half a product." That is scaling back scope as much as possible and releasing a minimally useful application that you can then build and improve on.

That's the approach we're planning for our Stellar image tool (it still lacks a final name, which makes it hard to publicize). It's really hard to keep the scope small, because there is so much excitement around using images in teaching.

The current plan is to release a proof-of-concept this Fall, where a proof-of-concept means a pilot with no pilot users. The initial tool will search against multiple repositories and keep copies or references to the images the user selects in Stellar. This should be enough exercise our tool a bit and start getting some quality feed back from MIT instructors. We'll expand the tool later to include better organization, annotation and presentation abilities.

Here's an exciting tidbit: We're planning to integrate dSpace, MIT's digital library.

I'm on vacation now, preparing to go camping and leaving the laptop at home. See you next week.

Open Education Conference

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 09:06:00 EST

I found a notice for the Open Education Conference in Utah while cleaning out my spam filter. Sounds great, I've been working on ways to promote sharing and openness in Stellar. I assume MIT's OCW will be there - I see there is an "MIT Meeting" by invitation only in the schedule.

Stellar site downloads

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 11:28:00 EST

One of the most requested enhancements for Stellar from faculty and students was to be able to "download a copy of my site." We did some interviewing to dig into what that meant. The baseline requirement seemed to the ability to get a download that includes all of the files that have been uploaded to the site, so that the instructor or student can keep a sort of personal archive of the class materials.

In our initial release we will likely include only the files, meeting the clearest requirement. Based on community response, we might add the additional ability to get a copy of the full website as well.

On clicking a link to download a copy of the site's files a zip file will be start downloading to the user's computer. Once unzipped, the user will have a directory with the site's course number. Here's what's in the directory:

Folder for every topic

Folder for each kind of file

Individual files

IMS content packaging xml file
readme.txt

Homework and class materials share the same topic structure in stellar, so we can load them into the same folders based on topic name. The Folders for "kind of file" include 'lecture note,' 'reading,' 'solution,' 'syllabus' etc. Instructors should get all files. Students should get most files, but electronic reserves will be replaced by a text document containing the citation for that file (this not what the students want, but its the most we can do while staying in the bounds of MIT's fair use policies).

The IMS content packaging file is there to facilitate other kinds of use - it may be possible to use that file to import the materials into another course management system, or into DSpace. We're going to include it at the encouragement of the CWSpace team.

The readme file will explain the directory structure, and give more context about how to reuse materials.

There is a lot more we're not doing - we're not downloading discussion board messages, student submissions, membership lists, custom Stellar pages, the class description and more. Those issues are trickier, and not something we heard a call for. We'll see if the initial ability to download a site satisfies of people realize they want more.

Ruby Corrections

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 10:54:00 EST

iPod Windfall

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 22:01:00 EST

Apple continues to post massive iPod profits. Their shares jumped 11 cents on the news. My stock portfolio consists of 10 shares of Apple stock so that's a buck and dime right in my pocket!

O.K.I.'s Distributed Content Demonstrator

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:09:00 EST

O.K.I. was honored at alt-i-lab:

This year's Distributed Content Demonstrator was a resounding success, taking top honors at alt-i-lab 2005 in Sheffield, UK. Participating in the demonstrator were Giunti Interactive Labs, HarvestRoad, Mac Learning Environments.org and the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.).

This is the work we're planning to build off of for the Stellar slideshow tool. We will search across multiple repositories to retrieve images for use in online learning. This Fall we'll be gathering a "lightbox" for a class. Next Spring we want to use that light box to assemble presentations, both by instructors and students.

What about Ruby?

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 22:17:00 EST

But what about Ruby? This guy seems to really like Ruby compared to Perl. And after watching this Ruby on Rails video, anyone would want to spend a few days getting to know Ruby.

Note: This is a continuation from recent posts on Perl and Python.

Python correction

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 20:57:00 EST

Steve Githens wrote to set me straight about Python:

Python is an interpreted scripting language like Perl, which you can compile if you want to, but other wise you just run "python script.py" like you would run "perl script.pl". But it's much more object based, so you can compile it if you want using other tools (and to Java using Jython, or .Net using IronPython). If you just need to get work done, you can completely ignore all of python's object oriented support, and just get to work parsing files and outputting html or whatever.

Python is nice to because you can run it in an interpreted shell, so you can just play around. This makes learning it fun and exploring easy.

Apache has a mod_python much like the mod_perl, but it's definitely not as widely installed on common servers as Perl and PHP servers.

I've been using Python for a few months now, and I don't have any real complaints. I think it looks cleaner and not as obfuscated as Perl. And because it's close to Perl in popularity, it has bindings and modules for most everything. But like you said, it doesn't seem to be installed on everybody's web servers yet.

Just thought I'd plug the language that been growing on me as of late.

So there you go. Python does warrant more research next time I get energized about learning another language (could be tomorrow, could be a couple months, who knows). Steve has been doing interesting Sakai work with Python.

Maybe not Perl

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 21:46:00 EST

OK maybe not about the Perl thing. Check out this essay by Tim O'Reilly answering the question is Perl relevant any longer? It strikes me that answer that half-hearted from someone who is such a famous user and supporter of Perl means that maybe it isn't so relevant.

I imagine my Perl-lovin' colleagues would think that it really doesn't matter - as long as it's useful to the task at hand. I've found learning Perl to be the easiest of any scripting language I've dabbled in. But I've done the most work in PHP. because while Perl's been easy to learn PHP has been easier to apply.

I'm not considering Python and Ruby as strongly because they are compiled languages and run off their own special web servers. Not sure that that matters, but it makes it hard to create something I know any web host can can support.

SO where are my training hours best spent? I'm not sure. At this point I'm planning to focus in on MySQL this Fall, since it is generally relevant to any of these scripting languages.

Correction: Steve Githens corrected my false impression of Python.

Another Correction: Michael Han corrected my false impression of Ruby.

Scripting Dilletantism

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 10:44:00 EST

I'm thinking about learning perl again. I got discouraged by some of my colleagues dismissing Perl as a dying language. But our colleagues at harvard and University of Washinton seem to be doing some great work with Perl. I could take Practical Perl this Fall. Surely it would be useful.

Compare Sakai to other platforms

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 20:13:00 EST

Vivie Sinou reported that the Edutools website finally includes Sakai in it's comparisons.

To check out the Sakai 2.0 report, go to: http://www.edutools.info/course/ (right column)

To do a comparison between Sakai and another system:

Go to: http://www.edutools.info/course/

Click on "Compare Products" (middle fat button at the top of the page/below header)

Click on "By Product Name"

Check "Sakai 2.0" and "Blackboard 5.5 and click on "compare"

You can do the same with other platforms.

Sakai Core meeting day 2

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 13:57:00 EST

We're back maybe just slightly hung-over from dinner and after dinner meetings that lasted long into the night. I'm going to try blogging the meeting like yesterday, though once we get into wire-framing I'll be fully occupied by that.

9:15: More on the licensing issues. The issues are mostly around javascript widgets, which have iffy homemade licenses. This project really needs some skilled javascript developers - this comes up again and again. Any volunteers?

9:40: Talking about mobilizing resources for sectioning work. This is much bigger project than Chuck Severance (lead of the Sakai architecture efforts) had originally realized - there's a good chance that this will be the one visible change for Sakai 2.1.

10:00: Talking over whether to try to deliver the full gradebook, with categories, percentage weighting and statistics, or just a section-aware gradebook. Also can we make the announcements and email tools section-aware, since they are older 'legacy' tools from CHEF. The tools team isn't talking making a section-aware resources tool a high priority, which some find surprising.

12:05: We've been really cranking on what we are currently calling the "Membership Tool." You can see a sample wireframe of the class roster (PDF - 41k).

12:35: Our highest priorities for adding "section awareness" to tools are:

Announcements
Gradebook
Samigo
Email

Second priority:

Assignments
Discussion
Resources
Syllabus

1:55: OK, the official meeting is over. This was a good Sakai meeting, because unlike the usual meeting it was tightly focused on one topic, sectioning. Next time all these people meet will be in Austin in December, though there will be smaller team meetings in the interim.

Liveblogging the Sakai meeting

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 17:16:00 EST

I'm going to live blog the big core schools Sakai meeting at MIT today. Expect typos and incomplete thoughts.

9:00: Early conversation around pedagogy/learning design. Charles Kerns has been waving the banner for pedagogy since the beginning of the project, he's going to be retiring soon.

9:30: At the conference we ought to have an orientation for newcomers.

9:50: Negotiations over the date of the 2.1 release. It's based on the start of Spring semester at schools that are planning to deploy 2.1, working backward from that. Sounds like code freeze October 15, QA complete November 15.

9:55: We decided to make all discussions in confluence public, so that anyone interested can see what we're working on in Sakai. This is really a response to criticism we've hear about Sakai's closed development process.

10:00: A 2.01 release is on track for a July 15 release. It contains many bug fixes (though not all open bugs). There's big debate over how it's determined which bugs are 'blockers.' Also how to make it clear that some bug fixes are available at the head of Subversion.

10:15: Talk about licensing, and being clear about the license for contributed code. I really can't get into licensing conversation. I know it's important, If you're interested here's more on the licensing issue.

10:30: We're reconvening. The board has left the room, designers and developers are gathered together to talk about sectioning.

11:10: Every school defines sections in a different way. At some schools (IU, UMich) the section membership is defined by the registrar, at some schools (MIT, Stanford) the sections are defined by the class. There's a lot of talk around terminology.

11:15: At Indiana instructors are teaching 4 versions of the same class simultaneously, and this what they call sections. So the instructor would like to have one website for their four sites. The students should use the site as if it is just the site for their course. This is quite different then what we do at MIT.

11:40: I'm talking and listening too much here to write much. We're covering some variables (sections can have leaders, sections can have meeting times and places, etc).

11:50: In naming sections, we might consider doing this automatically. Create a set of labs and we'll name them Lab 1 through Lab 10. Or name them using the instructor name, or based on the meeting time.

12:05: We're back to talking about treating sections as subsites, or having sections in separate sites that are aliases of one main site. I really don't think this is a user-friendly approach (even though it's pretty close to what we do at MIT). It's easier on programmers, but not on the people that use tools.

12:20: Lunch at last!

1:10: Were going through the draft sectioning specs item by item with the architecture team.

1:30: This is useful, but fairly agonizing. Thank goodness I got a latte. We talking about having "types" of sections (e.g. labs and discussions) in one class.

1:40: We should think of this as a "class roster" tool. It would be generally useful for instructors to have this tool even if they have no sections. They can see who is in their class and add new members. Just like the membership tool in Stellar. It would also allow for creating managing sections. I am excited that we all, programmers and designers alike, agreed on that. This is big (though I've been reminded we're just having a discussion here).

2:05: I think we decided that this tool we're working on will designed to handle formally defined sections, as opposed to the more informally defined groups. (see my earlier entry on the distinction between groups and section).

2:15: The programmers have taken over the discussion for a while, getting into the whether this is roles based or permissions based, is it tool level or application level. Queries vs. permission checks, AuthZ vs. Course Management API. I'm waiting to hear those magic words "Let's take this off line."

2:25: Section awareness in tools initially will mean things like filtering the student roster in the gradebook by section, or in the announcement tool deciding to send an announcement to only certain sections.

2:30: We're getting clear that the section doesn't have it's own URL. A student goes to own class site, and it shows them information based on which section they are in.

3:25: We've had a long break. In someways breaks are the most important parts of these meetings. We're all repeating what we heard to each other, and cementing the decisions we've made. Time to get back to work though, and start doing some UI work. I probably won't be blogging this part as much.

5:00: This has been great. We put a rough flow diagram up on the blackboard, then went through our requirements, writing each requirement on a post-it note and then sticking it to the flow diagram. We've got a good rough cut at how the too will work right now. Tomorrow we'll break into teams and make wireframes on the blackboard. We're all bringing to bear the experience we have working with instructors on our current CMS. This is how I thought the tools team would work when I signed up 18 months ago.

Linkwalla on Sourceforge

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 23:24:00 EST

My little PHP hobby project Linkwalla is now on sourceforge. I've got a lot to learn about how sourceforge works, but for now I've got the files hosted there for download.

Sections and ad hoc groups

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 23:19:00 EST

There is a lot of work going on Sakai to bring sectioning and collaborative groups into Sakai. These items have been on the Sakai tools team requirements list for Sakai since the very first meeting in Indianapolis, February 2004. we're now defining functionality, but I think a lot of confusion arises in the design from collapsing sectioning and ad hog groups into one user interface.

First some definitions:

Section: Sections are primarily an administrative device. Sections are assigned instructors (Section leaders). Section data is often supplied by the registrar, and students often register for a section when they register for the class. Sections tend to be tied to a meeting time and place. Sections are used to distribute work in the gradebook, announcements and email are often sent to just one section, and assignments may have varied due dates based on section meeting times.

Ad hoc groups: Ad hoc groups are primarily a pedagogical device. Ad hoc groups don't have a formal leader, in fact students may form groups on their own. Ad hoc groups are usually used to foster collaborative work. Ad hoc groups of students might have a shared workspace, or turn in an assignment together.

Section/Ad hoc group Bundle: It's hard to get a good label for this concept. One class may have several bundles of sections or Ad hoc groups. For example, a class might have a bundle of 4 sections, a bundle of 20 project teams (ad hoc groups), and a bundle of 8 lab sections. There may be rules around the bundle - for example it sections might have a maximum size of 30 and students may switch while the labs project teams have a maximum size of 5 and the membership is assigned by the TA.

Sections and Ad Hoc Teams answer very different user goals. The rules that define them are quite different. In order to simplify the interface and make life easier for our users it may make sense to treat them as separate tools, and prioritize them separately.

Note that MIT & Stanford took created sectioning tools. We didn't support Ad hoc groups, just sections. In addition we only had one section bundle. The class can set up sections only - no labs or other types of sections. (some one from Stanford may correct me on this)

Sectioning is baseline required functionality for a course management system. MIT, Berkeley and Stanford have all said they cannot release without. It's my impression that people are genuinely surprised to learn that Sakai doesn't have sectioning yet. So it's a high priority, but it's not exciting. No one will say "Sakai is innovative because it has sectioning." But if it's not there they will say "We can't use Sakai because it doesn't have sectioning."

Ad hoc groups are exciting - when we call Sakai a Collaborative Learning Environment, this is the sort of thing we have in mind. If we deliver this, it will enable a lot of exciting possibilities in new tools. At MIT we've heard calls for this sort of functionality for years. Unfortunately it's been pushed of as we work on basic administrative tools, like sectioning.

Road Trip

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 20:20:00 EST

Big chunk of the ed tech and multimedia staff at MIT got on a minibus and took a road trip down to Yale today. This was a reciprocal visit, the Yalies had come to see us a few months ago. We talked about Sakai and uPortal, of course, since both schools are involved in that work. Yale is already piloting Sakai and plans to pilot another 100 classes this Fall - much larger pilot than MIT is planning.

One benefit of the trip were seeing the way their teams work, reinforcing some professional contacts. I'm very interested in the work going on at Yale's library and I got sneak peak at some proposals in that area. It was also fun to have a change of pace, and spend a few hours driving around in the nerd bus with our team.

Being open in open source work

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 16:48:00 EST

Here's an interesting blog entry by Graham Attwell titled "Moodle and Sakai - Open Source alternatives?"

He notes the difference in the perceived openness between the Moodle and Sakai communities. I've seen some of the hostility toward Sakai here and there around the web, compared to the affection felt for Moodle.

Sakai planned in advance to have the initial "seed" application built by a few "core" universities who had each built their own course management systems in the past. The application would then be handed over to a foundation and become a more trditional open source project. We are nearing the end of those initial two years.

It's interesting that Sakai has been so good at generating positive buzz, and also at generating criticism. I think the secret to both was having a closed core group that reveals it's progress periodically.

Going forward it seems that it's going to be really improtant for Sakai to successfully transform itself from a closed core group to a truly open open source project. I'm reasonably optimistic - the change is starting already. Sakaipedia is a good indicator of Sakai's growing openess.

The MIT License

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:38:00 EST

When I release Linkwalla via sourceforge, I'm going to use the the MIT License. I used to just have it in the public domain, but this license offers the most of the benefits of the public domain, but gives me a little protection as well.

By way, here's why I'm calling it "linkwalla." "-walla" is a common suffix in Hindi, usually used to denote a persons occupation. For example "dhobi" mean's laundry, so a "dhobiwalla" is a launderer. "Chai" is tea so the "Chaiwalla" runs teashop, the "taxiwalla" drives a taxi, etc. So it seemed right for a an application whose job is to manage links.

It's also a film term meaning "a sound effect imitating the murmur of a crowd in the background." Which seems like an OK metaphor for the constant stream of URLs I see passing through my inbox.

Return of the PHP Hobbyist

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 21:13:00 EST

I recently announced a beta version of my linklist-building PHP app Linkwalla, and implied that I'd be stopping development. The part about stopping development was pure poppycock, like promising that I will never itch a mosquito bite. In fact I already went back and improved the RSS feed.

I decided to go on sourceforge and see who else is working in this area. There were quite a few. The main ones being:

PList, which looks nifty but requires a MySQL database. My vision is database-free - totally XML based. The installation instructions should be: Just unpack it and it works.
PHP Linklist, which is XML based but seems to be more geared to static link lists, than the date based technorati-style link list with RSS feed that I envision.

So I think I'm going to start my own sourceforge project. Who knows maybe if I ask for help someone will pitch in. Basically I have fun doing it, and see no reason to deny my nerdy pleasures.

Flash Fatigue

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:36:00 EST

It didn't take long. I got really tired of Flash this week. My big 3 complaints:

Scripts all over. I had actionscript on this button and that button, scripts on several frames in their own "as" layer, scripts on movieclips, scripts on frames within movie clip timelines. It's crazy to keep those things all over the place.
Windows everywhere. I am accustomed to coding in BBEdit, where I've got a window full of text an little tray of the related text files I'm working on. Pretty simple. In Flash there are so many palettes, plus the stage and the timeline and my super sized script window, that I need an external monitor just to fit them all.
Compiling. What a drag to have to compile a swf file every time I want to see how it's going. Especially as the swf file gets bigger.

Admittedly most of my trouble comes from being new to something. I would find ways to keep my actionscript external and edited in BBedit, and mostly in one place, and written in a way that makes compiling faster. But that's not easy, and I'm also still troubled by using a development platform owned by a corporation. It just doesn't feel right.

I think I'm better off redoubling my efforts to improve my DHTML skills, and couple those with PHP to make dynamic web apps.

I am a statistic

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 09:45:00 EST

I took this survey for bloggers being one by a rade student at the media lab. If you have ablog you might enjoy taking it, too.

Craig @ work

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 09:18:00 EST

Craig Counterman has joined the still nascent MIT blogosphere. This is great because Craig is my most trusted source for technical wisdom, I can't count the number of epiphanies I've had talking to Craig.

He's also extremely funny. One of his inaugural entries on Beaver Engineering has forever changed the way I see beavers (and software engineers).

The endangered blink tag

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 23:01:00 EST

Wow! You always here the sort of cliched jokes about using the <blink> tag. But it's been years and years (and years) since I've actually seen one in the wild. But check out Ann's Home Stay! Not only is there a blink tag, it's being used for the site's navigation. What a find.

(Web design aside, I am seriously fantasizing about a trip to Ann's Home Stay. I loved Kerala when I was there, and the place looks swell.)

Slideshow pro discusses new Stellar tool

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 13:36:00 EST

We're planning a very limited pilot of a tool that uses images in Stellar this Fall. Based on early feedback from the faculty, it sounds like there is a need for tool to assemble and present slideshows. This is interesting - it's related to the demise of the slide projector (Kodak has stopped production of their projectors and their slide film). I'll be blogging about slideshows a lot in the next few months. Jean and I met with David Jones, a professor of the History of Science. David taught STS.003, the Rise of Modern Science, in the Spring. He builds image-rich lectures, using Apple Keynote to arrange and annotate the images he has found on the web. Like everyone we've heard from he's a heavy user of Google Images. He also finds images through various government agencies, the Smithsonian, the National Library of Medicine and through contacts with other faculty.

The biggest drawback to his current method is vagueness around intellectual property. He mentioned concerns and confusion around copyright issues several times. He has no way of knowing if it is OK for him to distribute the images has has found on the web without permission. Most of the images are pre-1920s or are taken from government agencies, so are theoretically in the public domain, but it's never absolutely clear. As a result of this confusion, he has a beautiful collection lecture notes that were not accepted into OCW because of IP concerns.

The other major issue he faces is image quality. Google images are often of inferior quality, and it is difficult to sort out the bad ones. Images from other sources are often too high in quality, and he needs to down-sample on his own using Apple Preview - a process he doesn't quite understand.

He has 1,710 images related to STS.003 in a folder on his desktop. He titled them himself and uses Apple Spotlight to find them. He does this because he often reuses the images, and doesn't want to have to find them online again.

He also uses video clips, and would love to be able to search for historic moving images.

In his slides he often juxtaposes multiple related images - though he says this is a feature he could live without. He does this because it's easy in keynote and it cuts down on the total number of slides. Also in some cases several images on one page can be used to tell a story linking them together.

In additional to the descriptive text students see on each slide, he keeps notes for himself to use in the during his lecture. Having descriptive text appear with the slides when students review the lecture notes is important to him.

During the midterm exam he showed 5 images he'd used during the lectures and asked student to identify 3 out 5 of the images. He said this made it clear who was paying attention during lectures.

In the Fall he's teaching the History of Medicine, and plans to make the presentations for this class image-rich as well. He said be willing to review our progress and do some testing of the tool we create later this summer.

Based on this conversation, it seems clear Stellar Slideshow should:

Make copyright information clear (this may be the greatest success factors for our effort)
Export IP info to OCW
Resize images appropriately for the screen.
Allow instructors to add text notes to the image
Provide a single search field (like Google)
Make it possible to search through all of the images a professor has used in the past

Cookie Monster

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 23:13:00 EST

Here's an interesting article on cookies (the browser kind, no the yummy kind). See, Marketers love them, but consumers are getting into the habit of blocking them are or deleting them all regularly.

I am one of those consumers. Much to the irritation of anyone who borrows my laptop, I Have my machine set to confirm all cookies as the come in, and I delete most of them. It's little slow doing it that way, but I learn a lot about how cookies set cookies. I am the kind of person the marketing could work on - the sites could convince me i should take their cookies.

I don't think the marketing will work. Because unlike me, most people don't want to sort their cookies separating good from bad, so they just delete them all on a regular basis.

One thing that worries me is this:

The tool uses features in Macromedia Inc.'s popular Flash software, which is used for designing and viewing animated online ads, to secretly make backup copies of a user's cookies before they are deleted.

I've also noticed Flash being used to get around pop-up ad blockers. I'm afraid that if this abuse continues, people may start blocking Flash content. Since I'm sort of romancing the idea of Flash development right now, I'd hate to see that happen.

Linkwalla: Simple link list

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:09:00 EST

I'm releasing my latest output of my PHP/XML hobby. I'm calling this thing "Linkwalla" - it's a way to keep a list of links on your website.

Download Linkwalla (zip - 30k)

From the Read me:

README - LINKWALLA - Version 0.1 - June 17, 2005

Hi! Thanks for checking out this script. I am releasing it to the
Public Domain, meaning you can do what ever you like with it. I'd
be honored if you use it and mention my name, but that is purely 
optional.

REQUIRES: PHP 5

FEATURES:
 - Build a list of links. Sort of like del.icio.us for your own 
   website, but without the social tagging. 
 - Add edit and delete from the list
 - Runs off a XML file - no DB needed
 - Comes with a javascript bookmark for adding links on as you 
   see them
 - Creates an RSS feed of the links as you update the list. 

INSTALLATION: Just put everything on the server as is, and it 
will work. The default password is "pw." You can change it at
the top of the "dw_functions.php" file.

DIRECTIONS: Hopefully pretty self explanatory. Click "log in" 
at the top of the page to get started (default password = "pw").
Then you'll see links to to add remove and edit links. The 
bookmarklet will make you're life much easier.

This is the Beta release, but don't expect any new releases soon. I'm going to take a break from PHP for a while and maybe get back into Flash ActionScript. But you never know.

Steve Jobs Commencement speech

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:01:00 EST

Steve Jobs (who never graduated from college himself) gave this fantastic Commencement speech at Stanford. I'm all inspired. I've always been interested in mortality as a motivator (there's the secret message behind that tattoo on my arm), and he put's it well. Kudos to his speechwriter.

HarvestRoad Hive

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 16:46:00 EST

I saw a demo of the HarvestRoad (ASX:HRD) Hive repository today. Hive is a digital repository aimed at learning, created in Australia with large installations scattered around the world. I've seen 3-4 digital repositories demoed in the last few years, and this is definately the most impressive.

Wrapping up: Product, platform, style guide

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 16:41:00 EST

I've come to realize that much of the of the concern over the Sakai style guide comes from the misconception that the style guide is the Sakai's total solution to user interface design. In fact it's just a guide to help designers in disparate locations create tools that are consistent with one another in their layout and interaction.

The style guide is just a tool, and using it certainly doesn't guarantee a good user experience. The efforts in Sakai by and large have been architecture driven, and deadline driven - UI has been low on the list of priorities. As a result many of the tools in Sakai feel like "proof of concept" tools. They weren't designed and tested before coding began. Applying the style guide to them retroactively is putting lipstick on a pig. Even now there is a rush to create new sectioning and resource tools for v2.1 that will mean developing those tools without user input or user testing.

The rush is understandable - the framework has to be a priority because Sakai won't work without it. And the deadlines are very very tight. But I hope as we move into 2006 we can start taking a look at the functionality in Sakai and take the time to do it right.

This relates to the earlier posts on whether Sakai is a product or a platform. Most of the work is going on at the platform level. This explains the 'proof-of-concept' feel of the tools in place now. Unfortunately users don't interact with a platform, they interact with the tools, so the tools are what people talk about.

I hope that as the platform stabilizes, the larger organization of schools working on Sakai will be able to collaborate on creating tools for Sakai, which can work together well thanks to sharing a style guide. We'll hopefully be developing lots of tools at MIT - I hope that the tools we get from other schools will not only be able to 'plugin' technically, but also work seamlessly in terms of user experience.

I think I'll take a break from writing about Sakai for a few days...

Style Guide

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 22:27:00 EST

Somebody added this note to the User Interface page in Sakaipedia (note the page is in a Wiki so the quote may change):

Right now the sakai style guide is about defining interface conventions. This is a good thing for the programmers and for the consistency about tools, but it says nothing of visual style or the overall user experience we want our students and faculty to experience.

The style guide's primary aim is to provide the people who use Sakai with a consistent user experience. So the rules around interaction are very much in the tradition of design patterns. For example the style guide entry on forms describes where and how to arrange the buttons:

Under the form, aligned left.
Submit button left most, cancel button right most.
The submit button highlighted with a thick dark border.
The cancel button takes you back to the referring page, without saving data.

That's not very exciting stuff, but it's handy for designers (and programmers) who want their tools to be consistent with the rest of Sakai. I know from experience people get driven mad by buttons being in a different places and order as they move through an application.

Even though that's not exciting, I think it's fair to say that it does say something about visual style and overall user experience. I found it very useful in designing the gradebook, and heard good things from other UI designers applying it to Sakai tools. I wish the style guide had been part of Sakai 1.5, and that it were more thoroughly applied to Sakai 2.0.

I'm eager to hear any specific feedback on the style guide. I'm watching this page closely, hoping to get some constructive criticism.

Sakai Test and Quiz

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:01:00 EST

Stanford's Daisy Flemming demoed Sakai's Test & Quiz tool (aka Samigo) this morning. Samigo has a complex user interface - but the pay off for that is that's it's got some complex functionality, especially it's templates and question pools.

Templates are a set of default settings for new assessments. One could set up templates for pop quizzes, for self-tests, for open surveys, etc. Question pools are, well, collections of questions. Those questions can also included user feed back based on the answer given.

It seems like the complex and configurable nature of Samigo's templates and question pools could be great for instructional designers, or particularly motivated instructors. I'm hoping we'll see some interesting reusable materials come out of Samigo.

Great taste! Less filling!

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 12:45:00 EST

I've had some great responses from my post on whether Sakai is platform or product.

Florian Gnägi, lead developer for OLAT, wrote in on the product side. He pointed out that "Users should be able to export a course and send it to a friend to import on his own installation and it should just work." But that becomes difficult if there is no standardization around tools, the friend in his example would have to have the same toolset enabled to make the import work. He also pointed out what waste of effort it is to have a community duplicating efforts by developing 6 discussion tools with overlapping features.

I also saw this response from Michael Feldstein, writing in on the Platform side. He's got the dream of Sakai serving as a common base for all sorts of Ed Tech tools, that instructors could use to build on. "Their goal should be (like Moodle) to lower the skill requirements for tool building to a point where technically-inclined teachers can participate."

I still want both. I want good tools and a platform to build on. In a way I see the tools as part of the platform. Take the gradebook: It's a tool, but it's also a standard service. As a budding tool developer I benefit from having a standard gradebook to stick my grades in. Or at least in knowing that whatever gradebook is there will use a standard grading API.

The Moodle example is interesting. I recently set it up here to experiment with, and it didn't come with 5 discussion boards, just one. I'm sure there are other Moodle discussion boards out there, but someone picked one to include with the download.

And hey, what's with all this "Sakai brahmins," "top-down driven and CIO-driven" and "technocracy of developers" stuff? Does Sakai have an image problem or what? It seems like every open source project has people who decide what get's included in a release and what isn't (Martin Dougiamas isn't a brahmin?). I know I am of signifacntly lower caste.

Search widget

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:02:00 EST

This site has an interesting search widget: http://www.dealazon.com/

Click in the search box and the advanced search features appear. It looks like a nice way to stop the advanced search features from cluttering the UI, but having them available without needing to jump to a new page.

Here's some commentary from the designer. This might be handy for the Stellar Image browser we're developing.

I found this via my Technorati tags. This is just why I added them.

Usability Test Archives

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 13:48:00 EST

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox today recommends that all usability groups keep an archive of old reports. He's got a good point, but it doesn't strike me as an urgent priority. It would be hard to pull new information from those old usability reports after the site has been revised. If usability suggested some form labels were unclear, and we changed the labels, that old information isn't too fresh any more. Usability reports are really interesting in their specificity to a specific application in a specific release.

I do wish our usability here at MIT kept those reports, mostly so we would have a record of the reasoning behind some of our changes. But it would be so labor intensive to pull that reasoning out, I'm not sure we'd do it.

This one note, though, does strike me as urgent:

Individual findings can be generalized to usability guidelines once you observe them repeatedly. One of the most powerful ways to increase your usability group's productivity is to develop customized guidelines for your specific type of user interface.

It's these guidelines, kept in something like, say, a style guide that really help streamline the development process. Also, at the SEPP conference last week, several people new to the projects asked for the justification behind style guide decisions. That rationale wasn't recorded, unfortunately. it was based on the combined heuristic reviews of UI designers and usability professionals from 4 universities. Wouldn't it be great though, to have an archive of user test reports to point skeptical developers at.

Platform or Product?

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:05:00 EST

Is Sakai an open platform for developers or an integrated product for instructors and students? For me that is the big unanswered question from last week's Sakai conference.

It seems like the optimal answer would be "both." Downloading Sakai should mean you get a place to upload files, a calendar, discussion board, gradebook, membership list, etc., and that those tools work well together (e.g. an assignment's due dates from the gradebook also show up in the calendar, or that an new file posted can be publicized with an announcement).

Sakai should also have the APIs in place so that skilled individuals or small teams can build innovative tools on top of Sakai - and be able to take advantage of the infrastructure provided by the core tools. A new lab notebook tool could take advantage of the class membership list, for example.

The conference ended with a Q&A session with the Sakai board members. I asked how decisions about what's included as the 'core tools' will be made. The response I got from one board member was "I'd like to see Sakai include six discussion boards. The user can try them all and decide which they like best." No other board member disagreed.

That's been bugging me ever since. Even assuming that each school's IT department will pick a default set of tools (a possibility mentioned by the board member), does it make sense to have Sakai include every tool built? Can there be no standards for inclusion? If I'm developing a new attendance-taking tool that I want to be able to post grades, what do I do if there are 6 gradebooks?

The keynote speaker at the conference was Brian Behlendorf talking about how they run the Apache project. Apache was frequently touted during the conference as a governance model that could be used by Sakai. But Apache is a very different product than Sakai - the user interface for Apache is a plain text configuration file. It's users are the same people as it's developers. I think the people looking to Apache as a model for Sakai see Sakai as a platform, not as a product.

The same logic goes behind the idea of shipping Sakai with 6 discussion boards. Don't like any of them? Build your own! The assumption is that the user is a software developer.

I think a shared software development platform for educational technology would be a great thing - I'm not knocking that. But it will be a shame if Sakai becomes another first rate open source software project with a second rate user interface.

UI Design Patterns

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 17:05:00 EST

Oliver Heyer pointed me to a white paper put out by Yahoo on using design patterns for UI design. Yahoo has a variety of teams working in a large somewhat decentralized organization (e.g Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Travel, etc.). The Sakai is similar in that it has a diverse widely distributed group of designers working on a variety of interconnected tools that plug into the same framework.

The paper has influenced my thinking on the Sakai style guide (Sakai UI design patterns? Sakai Interaction Guide? What's the best title for this document?) I hope we can clarify the style guide by expressing it as a set of design patterns.

Great Java Code talk

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 14:21:00 EST

I'm attending a talk by Ray davis from UC Berkeley on how the gradebook was written, going through all of the tricks needed to do good coding using JSF and Sakai APIs and such. It's really interesting, and the reason is that Ray is is a really smart intelligent presenter. I know very little about Java, but he's talking in away that I can learn some concepts, and some one who actually is a Java developer would learn a lot. This talk should really be seen by any programmer doing tool development for Sakai. Unfortunately, I think the wrong people are here, because this talk is head ti head with some other big programming sessions, like the meeting of the cross language DG.

Speaking of Discussion Groups, the UI DG was an exciting conversation today. There seem to be lot of people in the SEPP who want Sakai to use a User Centered Design Process, in which tools are designed and tested with the people who will use our application before they are coded (sounds obvious, but it's not the norm).

Sakai Baltimore

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 09:09:00 EST

I'm in Baltimore at the Sakai conference. There are 415 people attending this time, about 100 more than anyone had expected, so it's quite packed. When we presented the gradebook yesterday it was standing room only, with about 15 people standing in the hallway craning their necks trying to catch a glimpse. It's not a very comfortable to run a meeting, but it doesn't make the meeting feel more exciting, as if the whole world were talking about Sakai.

I got a look at Melete. It would be nice to move away from branding individual tools. Melete ought to be called "lesson builder" just as Samigo is now called "test & quiz." Melete a good way to build sequential lessons, with built-in date release dates to enforce pacing. It seems like it would be especially useful for distance learning. Melete's not integrated with other Sakai tools yet, which will is what will really make it spectacular (and quite Moodle-like).

The real advantage for these conferences is the chance to meet so many people working in my field. The little 5 minute chats I have with people from schools from around the world will inform my work in the coming months. Plus I meet people like Jeff Kahn, an OKI developer living in Atlanta who will be helping us build in an image repository browser for Stellar. Out conversation opened my eyes to lot of new possibilities.

Brian Behlendorf is up now talking about how the Apache foundation works, so I'm signing off for now.

Intel chips

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 15:02:00 EST

OK, so Apple announced they are going to use Intel chips, something people have talked about for years. I don't really know what that means. I mean, I know but I'm not sure how it effects me. I am worried they are doing it so they can build even more DRM into their systems (as suggested at Wired). Kottke reassured me it's going to be OK.

I just hope I don't have see a tacky "intel inside" logo on the case of my next PowerBook.

Sakai Face Book

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:26:00 EST

I'm attending the Sakai Summer Conference in Baltimore next week. The organizers put together a little facebook application to let every one post their pictures and introduce themselves. It is kind of interesting to look at now, especially the things people say they are interested in. I'm sure I'll continue to use it during the conference.

This little app looks like it was thrown together in PHP just for this event. There is no authentication, and once you add a photo you can't edit it (which is a shame, i'd like to change my interest list). But that is what is so cool about it - PHP is quick and flexible and they can put something together, and use it for a little while with a limited community. it's obviously popular, and adds a lot of value.

What a shame it is that you can't do something like this in Sakai. If you could, you'd be able to take advantage of Sakai's authentication, so that part would come free. I am eager for the day (which I'm sure will come eventually) when i can write a useful little app in PHP and plug it right in to Sakai.

Whisper reincarnated: Wu Wei

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 21:13:00 EST

I just have to close the loop on these Whisper CMS posts. Adam Newbold quickly released a new even simpler CMS - wu wei (or download the zip from my site). Wu wei's code is easy to read an easy to use. I miss the Textile support that is built into Whisper (even though I prefer markdown). Maybe I'll learn how to add it in some day.

Whisper is back

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 31 May 2005 10:49:00 EST

I love it when something like this happens. Hours after my post mourning Whisper, I got this message.

Hey there! I didn't know anyone really missed Whisper. I'm going to try to dust it off a bit tonight, clean up the code (it surely needs it), and host it again on my site.

Look for an all new Whisper soon!

Take care,
Adam Newbold

And sure enough you can download Whisper from his site. Can't wait to see the next update!

Whisper CMS

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sun, 29 May 2005 21:13:00 EST

Last year there was this beautifully simple content management system called Whisper ("Quiet content management"). I downloaded it and used it for a project for a friend. Couldn't be easier - there was no database, and all that had to be edited was the username and password and it just worked after that.

Now it's gone. Googling it won't do you any good. Even it's creator, Adam Newbold, has only a minimal (really minimal not just aesthetically) web presence.

I was following the message boards for Whisper. It seems like the project attracted some highly skilled programmers and they overwhelmed the creator. He threw up his hands and said "fine take it" and they created what is now lucidCMS a content management system 'inspired by' Whisper. Except lucidCMS requires a MySQL back-end, which throws off the whole simplicity that was so appealing with Whisper.

OK, I have to admit, I'm projecting a bit when imagine what happened to Whisper. But I miss it, I was really excited about it and now it's gone.

Update: A few people googling for Whisper have hit this page and asked me for an update. Good news! There is a new version of Whisper available here.

Update 2:Well the site above is frequently un available, so here is a copy of Wu-Wei -aka Whisper CMS (zip - 4k). I took this copy from Adam's site while it was still available.

Free Wireless in Rozzie Square

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 28 May 2005 20:17:00 EST

I find the idea of universal free (well nothing's free, but tax-supported) wireless internet access really exciting. Boston is slowly taking steps in this direction, largly thanks to the work of city councilor John Tobin. The BostonWAG is great resource for information on wifi in Boston.

There is a Slashdot discussion about a cafe in Seattle that has decided to turn off their wireless during the weekends, because the laptop crowd doesn't spend enough money, detracts from the cafe atmosphere, and generally sits around the cafe way too long.

I often go down to the Emack & Bolios in Roslindale Square to get a Latte and do a little work over the weekend. Their coffee is just terrible, they get my business because of the WiFi. There are usually a few of us with laptops there. I try to be good custumer - buy coffee, smile, and don't sit around more than an hour- basic wifi etiquette. I'd be sad if they turned off their wireless, though I could always use the public library which also has free wireless.

But maybe I don't have to worry. The City of Boston has started implementing a plan to bring free wireless to all of Roslindale Village (aka Rozzie Square). They have an access point in Cutler Park already, so I could sit in Wapo Taco and do my work there. I'm not sure if Mr. and Mrs. Wapo would appreciate me sticking around for some surfing after my burrito, but it's possible. I hope the city is able to keep up with the program. It sounds like Philadelphia has a had a hard time with their wireless network.

I'm writing this entry in the Whole Foods cafe in Cambridge. No wifi here. I hope Cambridge starts work on some universal wifi soon.

Initial impressions of Moodle

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 26 May 2005 22:41:00 EST

Setup and administration

Installation was bit more complex than I'd expected, but it took me less than an hour, including re-learning how to set up a MySQL database.

The Administration pages are well done. I've set up classes, monitored user registration, and designated people as as instructors and creators (creators can create new classes as well as teach them). It's been very simple. I can see the are setting for working with institutional data, which i haven't touched. There are fewer than 10 users on the local installation, so I can't say how well it work for 10,000 users. But generally, I'm pleased.

Class sites are session based. When setting up a class you are asked to decide whether to set up the class based on weekly sessions or based on a number of topics. Then when you get to your class, you treat the sessions or topics there as buckets to fill up with resources (e.g. weblinks, documents, etc.) and activities (quizzes, assingments, more bleow). I've sketched out a proposal to tdo session based class setup in Stellar/Sakai. It really simplifies the process. On the down side, I think it would be hard to use Moodle for "project" sites rather than class sites.

Tools

Choices
Sort of a one question survey, using a radio button. I found myself wishing I could string a bunch of these questions together in one package, and that I could add short text boxes or other types of questions.

Survey
I was all excited to set up my survey, but it turns out I'm given the option of 5 pre-built surveys that can add to my site. They are basically class evaluation surveys, plus a survey for students to describe themselves. If I a degree in education I would probably better understand these surveys and how to use them, but their value wasn't immediately clear.

Assignment
This assignment gave the option to accept a single file as the submission. I could grade student submissions. The only way to grade was using a dropdown box full of numbers - defaulting to 100! Why not have a text field and a little validation? I imagine this would get pretty taxing if I had a large class.

Chat
The chatroom looked like it could be handy for distance courses. It's just not my style though. I've never seen a lot of value in any chat tool.

Lesson
Seems to be a way to build a branching "walk through" of a topic. I haven't tried building one yet, but it looks interesting. the initial screen of options is pretty intimidating - luckily there are a lot of help icons to to help me along.

Glossary
What's really nice about this glossary tool is that students can add entries as well as the instructor, and rate eachother's additions. Kind of a social constructionist wikipedia.

Workshop
This is an interesting tool for allowing students to do peer reviews. it is fairly complex compared to most of the other tools in the site. it's great to have the option of using a tool like this.

So all in all I'm quite impressed by Moodle. I'd like to dig into the tools some more when I get the chance. The UI was often a bit jargon-rich and complex, but still quite usable. I need to look into changing the default appearance, but that looks quite doable.

The View from MIT

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 26 May 2005 22:22:00 EST

This is what I stare at 8+ hours a day. You can see over engineered way I keep track of my to do list. (click the image to view in Flickr with annotations)

Use of Stellar's Copyright Flag

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 26 May 2005 13:47:00 EST

Craig ran some numbers and dug up alot of greatinformation about how much Stellar's copy right flag is used. he copy right flag is used by the Libraries' electronic reserves documents as well as by faculty who use copyrighted materials on their own. Here's a summary of the numbers

Spring 2004 - Copyright flagged documents

uploaded	3295
downloaded	60149

Fall 2004 - Copyright flagged documents

uploaded	4644
downloaded	113998

Spring 2005 - Copyright flagged documents

uploaded	6101
downloaded	115052

In Spring 2005 it looks like the students in 7.36 Computational & Systems Biology set the record with 5890 downloads. The class with largest number of copyright flagged files was 4.602 Modern Art & Mass Culture with a whopping 395.

Apache Lenya

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 26 May 2005 11:46:00 EST

I attended a presentation of Administrative Computing's Lenya installation.

Lenya is a content management system. Administrative Computing needed a system to manage their documentation - lot's of SAP documentation, plus new documentation for the new payroll system they will roll out in January. They used the report from IS&T discovery project on content management to narrow their choices down to Lenya and Macromedia Contribute. They chose Lenya because it is web based, and has an open source license. They are not rolling it out as a service outside of IS&T, it's just a way for their documentation staff to maintain web pages.

Lenya uses Cocoon and XSLT. All of the content is stored in XML files in a file structure - there is no database. Lenya isn't a big fancy repository, the presenter referred to it a s a "file munger." That simplicity is very nice - it's easy to back up or reuse a directory of XML files.

Lenya has three roles: Editor, Reviewer and Administrator. In general Editors are writers who can modify the content of the site, and then submit for review. The review then decides whether to publish. One person can be designated both an editor and a reviewer.

They hired a consulting company (Coyne Consulting) to help them modify Lenya so it uses Certificates for authentication. they also replaced Lenya's built in search engine with Google.

It editing mode Lenya's UI is a thin bar with 4 dropdown menus. The website navigation, and links are fully functional. When you click edit you have the choice between a couple editors, but with the BitFlux editor you can edit the page directly on the screen. Very slick DHTML work.

Another nice feature of Lenya is that it will publish static sites via FTP (or SCP) to AFS lockers. So it's good solution for groups that want to maintain sites within web.mit.edu.

SimpleXML

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 24 May 2005 21:59:00 EST

I wanted to take a moment to sing the praises of the SimpleXML functions in PHP 5.

When I did my work on Docwalla I used PHP with the XSLT extension. I got a lot of milage out of XSLT, but after I built a variety of applications of Docwalla (wishlist, link list, transcript and FAQ) I could see that it was a pretty labor intensive.

I decided to revamp the Docwalla wishlist in PHP 5, to try out its new XML capabilities. It's just great - I've parsed wishlist.xml as a nicely formatted HTML page, and created an edit form to edit any of the 'wish' nodes in the XML file. I can do this with about 20% of the code it took me to do the same thing with PHP 4 and XSLT.

It's been a little confusing. It's weird how usually the XML nodes are treated like PHP objects, but once XPath is used they become arrays. And I've had to pay attention to typing - it really matters if a variable is a string or a integer sometimes. But it's fun puzzling it out. I guess that's really why I'm doing it.

Stellar access denied page

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 24 May 2005 13:34:00 EST

I mocked up a new access denied page for Stellar. This is the page that pops up when people are successfully logged in, but aren't allowed to access a class website.

Access issues were the biggest category of Stellar-related issues reported to the help desk. The general response form the help desk once it is clear that people have logged in successfully is to tell the person to contact their course instructor. Hopefully adding a contact form rght to the error page will cut down on the calls made to help desk.

Type writer widget

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 23 May 2005 22:13:00 EST

Checkout these tiny little widgets for Apple nerds. Some look they could be handy, some are just ridiculous. Like the one that plays makes typewrite sounds as you type. I'm using right now. It's really really annoying. Yet fun.

Open source user centered design

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 23 May 2005 10:17:00 EST

From an email exchange between Chuck Severance (one of the leaders of Sakai) and Martin Langhoff (one of the leaders of Moodle). Martin Langhoff writing about Moodle's usability:

But if a particular part of Moodle has a bad UI that's OK: if enough people use it, we start getting "usability" fixes and patches, and it soon gets better ;-)

Maybe that's the approach Sakai's UI designers need to take - making improvements after release. On the down side, it's reactive, and it means we release a product that is not polished. It is not the UCD process we've held as an ideal, in which tools are carefully researched and designed before they are coded. It's also hard to do when your customers (faculty and students) have high expectations, and your team is used to delivering top quality polished work.

Our efforts to improve Sakai globally using a UCD process to some extent assume a controlled top-down approach. I'm pretty sure the writing on the wall indicates less centralization, not more. If we are to lose that control (and we never really had it), then we need to learn how to do guerilla usability.

I think that means we need to working more tightly with programmers, and possibly brushing up our own coding skills. We need to do fast testing, and reflect those test results in code quickly. This is one area where Moodle's PHP code base is a huge advantage - designers can start mixing it up in PHP with out steep learning curve and let the more skilled programers improve the code's usability and scalability once the tool proves itself.

If we're not involved in coding, it would still be a good idea to check stuff in. One's credibility in open-source land really seems to rest on what's getting checked into the repository. We've started checking in our materials for the style guide and did the same with the Gradebook specs. I think it helps to be playing in the same playground as the programmers.

I don't know that there's any easy answer here, but I'm trying to imagine a how open source user centered design works, and these are some initial thoughts.

Update: Check the enthusiastic user reviews of Moodle in this article from the SFSU newspaper.

Collaborative text editing

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 20 May 2005 16:05:00 EST

Marc Brierly from Stanford and I have been cleaning up the Sakai Style Guide CSS. We had a couple lengthy phone calls this week to go over the CSS file and make edits. What's great is that we were using SubEthaEdit to edit a CSS file on my laptop together. I could see Marc's cursor moving and editing, while I did the same. Some times we were editing the same line, and meeting in the middle. It's amazing how well it worked once we got warmed up.

Another thing that helped is that the files were stored in web accessible directory on my laptop, so we could both see the results of our edits in a web browser.

I still favor BBEdit for my day-to-day text wrangling needs, but SubEthaEdit rocked for this specialized need. Not bad for a free app that took about 90 seconds to download and install.

Now if there was only an app that would let me have Palo Alto weather here in Cambridge...

Section filters

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 19 May 2005 14:41:00 EST

Over on his folk music, indoor horticulture and Sakai hacking blog Steve mentioned the practice of undercover requirements gathering. It's funny I do the same thing whenever I'm chatting with a student or instructor.

He says the one thing people say when he mentions BlackBoard is "Why can't I make the gradebook show only the students in my section."

The sad news is Sakai isn't going to help him for now. It really broke the gradebook team's hearts when we realized Sakai would not support sectioning in Sakai 2.0. But there is hope. I working with others on the Sakai tools team to design the UI for managing sections and groups in Sakai, and members of the architecture team are approaching it from the other direction. So I'm still hoping that by Spring 2006, we'll have our section filtered gradebook.

Buzzword Bingo: Ajax Patterns

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 19 May 2005 11:00:00 EST

I've been reading a bit about Ajax and Design Patterns, and now there is a site that pulls them together: AjaxPatterns

Looks promising, for the day when I finally start using Ajax. I may start using it in the new simplified PHP5 version of Docwalla I'm working on. I would also try out these PHP underpinnings for Ajax.

By the way, here's the best description of Ajax I've seen - it gives better examples than most.

My colors are HOT

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 18 May 2005 16:33:00 EST

I just saw a post on the top ten hot colors. And the burnt orange gracing Inline Comments is one of them. Does this mean I need to pick a new color? I kinda like burnt olive but it's on the list too...

Moodle community on Sakai

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 18 May 2005 09:37:00 EST

It's not just the Sakai community noticing Moodle, you can read the discussion of Sakai on a Moodle discussion board (you can login as a guest). When the discussion isn't in a rat hole about PHP's scalability, it's really interesting. They give Sakai a good thrashing.

Not just a course management system

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:05:00 EST

I have seen repeated notes in Sakai discussions that say Sakai should be more than a course management system. This often comes with the implication that a CMS is "commercial" "corporate" and "mass market." Check the responses to the Moodle vs. Sakai post on Sakaipedia for some examples.

What's wrong with being a course management system? Why is it better to also be used for research projects? What's so incredible about research project management systems, that course management systems are insignificant in comparison? Is this part of the school of thought that suggests faculty who do research are much more than prestigious than those who have to actually teach?

If I buy a refrigerator I want the it it to be a really good refrigerator. I don't want it to be "more than a refrigerator, it's also a microwave." If I want a microwave I'll get a good microwave.

Technorati tags

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:32:00 EST

I installed a Blosxom plugin that adds Technorati tags to the end of each post. I'm doing this because I'm interested in how folksonomies work and it will give me an easy way to see what others are writing on the topics I write about.

Sakai vs. Moodle - Again!

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 17 May 2005 15:25:00 EST

Here's a little gem. The creator of Moodle writes in Sakaipedia about why moodle is better. And refers to himself in the third person. I can't say I disagree with him.

Sakai tool distribution

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 16 May 2005 09:45:00 EST

I wrote this message as part of an email discussion on a sakai list. The thread concerned how and whether a centralized Sakai organization should decide to "accept" new tools.

I think it's helpful to think of Sakai as useful tool, not as code. What would it mean to have an "Apache model" for tool development? Apache is a fantastic piece of software, but the user interface is a big long config file that you change with a text editor. Doesn't seem like a great example of how to make tools for use by students and instructors.

If we're talking about tools that non-technical people use for teaching and learning, we need to focus on having a coherent toolset that's easy to use. We make a toolset easy to use by having tools that work well together (e.g. I expect a quiz I create in one tool, to show up in the gradebook) without too much overlap (e.g. If there's a homework tool, a dropbox, and an assignment tool, where do I turn in a problem set?).

Your comments about tools illustrate the mindset; we want to listen to you, but in the end we (the tools team) will decide. I hear that from vendors."

Focussing on the people who use the software, not just those who create it, is not inherently corporate. Our motive is not profit, it is simply to serve our communities well. If Sakai is to release tools along with it's framework, then some group of people will need to decide which tools those are. That decision should be made based on how the tool contributes to the overall experience of using Sakai.

This should not discourage any developer or institution from doing creative new tool development. The "flowtalk" example is perfect. The current discussion and email tools have some real drawbacks. This tool seeks to answer that challenge and do the job a bit better. There's no permission needed to make a new tool, or to distribute it.

Some tools will be selected for the standard release, some won't. As a tool developer I'd be really pleased to have a new tool included in the standard release. I would also like to see Sakai offer a browsable catalog of all tools written by SEPP members, so I could share niche tools without having to manage distribution through MIT, and so I could seek out highly rated tools that meet our own needs. But I'll develop new tools for MIT whether they get distributed through Sakai or not.

A genuine Open Source contribution

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 13 May 2005 12:39:00 EST

On my family website I use WordPress to run the updates. On the the sidebar I use have a list of the movies in my Netflix Queue that is powered by a WordPress plugin called MyNetflix. MyNetflix is a nice little RSS translator that takes the items from your Netflix Queue's RSS feed and posts them as a HTML list.

When the initial version came out, I contacted the author with a few suggestions on how to code the XHTML that the list produces. Not a huge contribution, but changing the copy I'd taken for my own use, and wanted to share with the creator. A few months later, and I've been credited in the release notes for the new version. Nice.

I've been working on an big Open Source course management system for well over a year, and I put my wishlist/faq/linklist software in the public domain. But this feels like my first real contribution to open source software because I did it as a volunteer, and I only contributed small chunk of the effort.

Open Source

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 11 May 2005 15:51:00 EST

Steve from Northwestern University wrote in to point out that I missed a key point in my earlier post Sakai vs. Moodle.

I think the important thing is that these projects are open source.

If someone is stuck at a University that is using Sakai and really wants PHP bindings, or the ability to run Moodle Components, or has a problem with it that is driving them nuts, they can go in and fix it (not saying they will, as it is a huge time commitment).

If someone is stuck at a University using Moodle and wants to use a scripting language like Python with better OOP support they can go in and do this.

If existing CMS's like Blackboard were open source I think that people stuck using them would have already invested a lot of time in fixing them.

The fact that these are Open Source projects gives much better prospects for future interoperability. These products aren't at war like commercial projects might be. There is every possibility that they will use standards to trade data freely in the future.

Beginner's Mind in Web Design

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 11 May 2005 10:50:00 EST

I had the pleasure of watching 21 presentations by people who had just learned how to build a webpage during a 5 week course. They each presented the homepage for an imaginary website. The results reminded me of the web back in 1998 or so, when large numbers of people were learning how to put up a web page and say a little about whatever topic interested them.

Pick a topic you're interested in

There were sites on historical figures, a site of keeping tropical fish, two on the activities of separate quilting groups, and one a gathering place for former residents of the now abandoned colony of the planet Snowcross. The key is to pick your interest and just go for it.
Steal images

If you need pictures for your website, just surf the web until you find a good one, then copy it. This was so totally the spirit of the web in the 1990s. I used to look everything on the web about the town Bodh Gaya in India back then, and every site would have the same photo. And I had a copy on my site, too.
Whatever works

Tables, CSS, font tags, whatever gets the job done quickly. You should be able to put up a complete website in about 4 hours, so don't waste time coding. Just believe that browsers are forgiving, and so are the people who use them.
Link generously

The web is all about linking. Fill your navigation bar with links to other websites. At the very list have a prominent page titled "Links" where you offer links to all of your favorite websites.

The sad thing is, pages like these, that were so cool in the 1990s, look so odd now, it seems don't get created anymore. But we now have web applications that take advantage of the best parts of this "beginners mind" in web design. Wiki's like wikipedia allow anyone with a passionate interest in something to start contributing it to the web. Blog sites like Blogger and LiveJournal, where I think a lot of newbies now go to get started, are a quick way to be generous with links, write about your passion, and generally get stuff up quick. Sites like flickr, with it's built in options creative commons licensing, let people share images.

Tablet-based mac

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 11 May 2005 10:32:00 EST

I'd like something more mobile than a laptop to lug around. But I want it to be a mac. I was daydreaming about a Apple handheld computer, but maybe a tablet mac would work...

Internet Audio

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 10 May 2005 09:46:00 EST

Alan Levine posted an entry called "Internet Audio: Can You Hear/Talk to Me Now? Good." about using Skype, podcasting and iPods in education and all that nonsense. Actually, having read and listened I am now persuaded it's not all nonsense, maybe you can learn things from your iPod. Maybe I'll start using podcasts to cram even more information into my brain instead of using my iPod to just relax a little.

He's got quick audio recordings of ed tech scenesters talking about how they could use their iPods and how they'd be used in education. You can listen to me being skeptical, or even better hear Phil Long wax eloquent about how he has his life wirelessly networked for music using AirTunes , multiple iPods and his BMW.

Ajax summit

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 10 May 2005 09:14:00 EST

I can't believe I haven't received my invitation to the Ajax Summit yet. True I have no experience either designing or developing using Ajax techniques, but I'd like to and I am sure I could come up with something interesting to say under pressure.

Bose headphones

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 06 May 2005 15:03:00 EST

My colleague Anna is letting me use her Bose QuietComfort Acoustic Noise Canceling Headset. Now that's a pair of headphones. When the music is on I can't hear anything but the music. I can see my coworker's lips moving but I don't know what they're saying. Are they talking to me? I guess if it's important they'll throw something.

The morning flew by as I concentrated on a form validation script. When I finally took off the Bose QuietComfort Acoustic Noise Canceling Headset my phone was ringing, and I hadn't been hearing it. The world seems so loud and chaotic now.

Comments

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 06 May 2005 12:00:00 EST

I added added a contact form to this site, and it's found following the "comments" link at the end of each post. I used CGIemail to make the form work and I popped in a validation javascript I put together.

The script is pretty simple (you can see it here). Here's how you'd use it.

Put a copy of the script with your web page
Link the script to in your form's HTML page by adding a script tag like this: <script src="contact.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Add this attribute to your form tag: onSubmit="return checkForm('name,email,subject,message');"

That's it. No change to the Javascript needed.

The words separated by commas are the "id" attributes of the fields you want to validate. The script checks that those fields are filled in before it will submit the form. Should work with any valid HTML form. It only checks if the fields are filled in, it's doesn't have any additional checking to make sure the email address looks right and such. I only care that the form is filled out, in this case.

Feel free to take it and use it yourself. I'll use it as a base to do some simple form validation in Stellar and other EDDG projects.

Moodle vs. Sakai

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 03 May 2005 11:19:00 EST

I wrote a post about Earlham adopting Moodle on my old weblog. I still get occasional comment there from people championing Moodle. Moodle obviously has an enthusiastic community, especially in New Zealand.

I can still drive myself batty thinking about what would have happened if the Sakai project had poured it's resources into contributing to Moodle rather than starting with CHEF. It's a pretty pointless exercise, though.

I'm hopeful that as Sakai becomes an open source product it will have an enthusiastic community of it's own. it's already starting. The Sakai conferences are very exciting, there dozens of schools eager to start developing tools with Sakai (not to mention the hundreds that want to use it). People outside the six core schools are already building Sakai tools and loving it.

Still what if we'd started with Moodle, and I was be doing work in PHP...

P.S. I withdraw my comment about Moodle being less scalable than Sakai, and apologize to all the Moodle and PHP lovers I offended.

QTVR of ancient Roman exhibit

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 02 May 2005 16:18:00 EST

My colleague Joanna Proulx designed an excellent QuickTime VR presentation of an exhibit about Ancient Rome (Use your cursor to click and move through the museum and explore hot spots).

Mark Brown said:

We now feature a recent multimedia project designed and produced entirely by EDDG's Joanna Proulx. This MLN project is an excellent example of the advanced multimedia capabilities that we offer our clients -- a virtual museum exhibition that allows viewers to browse an entire gallery and gather information from combined visual and text sources.

I HIGHLY recommend taking a look to get a real sense of the clarity and richness of the final product. It's very cool!

Sent to a colleague in Brazil late this evening

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 11:20:00 EST

Hi Rosangela,

I'm at a sakai meeting in california. Today the programmers announced they would have their final meeting in cambridge, England.

The designers need to respond, so over dinner we brainstormed. At first Florence, Italy led the nominations. But Europe has already started picking up Sakai. Asia is just too too these days, so we decided South America had to be our destination. At first Chile and Argentina were proposed because of their wine growing regions and skiing.

But Brazil! The open source capital of the world! It must be Brazil! Since the people around the table were 40% from California, 40% from the American Midwest and 20% from Massachusetts, we had only hazy knowledge of Brazil's cities so we had to limit it to the country in general.

It was only the wine talking. We'll probably meet somewhere dull (like Baltimore). But interaction designers agree, Brazil is just the coolest place in the world these days. Thought you should know.

Ben

I heart wireless

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 11:16:00 EST

I am sitting at a cafe on Satnford's campus, drinking my latte and wriing this entry. I'll then publish it here from my table, using Stanford's pervasive wireless network. I've been able to do this for year, but I still think it is just so cool.

I've been thinking of going to the next meeting of the Boston Wireless Advocacy Group because I do think Boston has some progress to make in this area.

Serious Competitor for iPod

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 09:27:00 EST

I'm not much of a gadget hound, but I've been reading about the The Nokia N91 and it seems like the first serious competitor of the iPod I've looked at. It's also a phone and has email and web capabilities and a 2 megapixel camera.

The killer feature to me though, is that is allows you to swap music files with other people using bluetooth. It would be like siting your iPod next to some one else's and getting a copy of that song they were telling you about. Brilliant.

I just wonder if they will really be brave and make bluetooth file sharing easy to use and unlimited. Apple has limited the usefulness of the iPod and iTunes in order to make their music store more atractive to the industry. You can only connect your iPod to one computer, for example, and there is no way to access your music files on it's hard drive except through iTunes. I think a company that offers a multi-gig music player, but without those limitations, making it even easier to share music, would have a hit product on their hands.

Sakai Notepad

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:35:00 EST

There are some tools in Sakai that can work as stand alone tools, but are in many ways a service available to any other tools. The gradebook, for example, works by itself, you can add new assignments and enter grades for them, but it really comes alive when used with other tools like Exams & Quizzes. A student taking a quiz gets a score that is sent to the gradebook to be stored and used for calculating the course grade.

Other tools work this way. Dates could be scored from any tool to the Schedule, materials from Resources should be available to attach to any announcement, discussion post, homework assignment, etc. Yesterday we scoped the sectioning tool and agreed that a list of sections should be available to any tool that might use them. In the Announcement tool it might be possible to only share the announcement with sections meeting on Thursday for example.

Well I thought of possible tool that would work mainly as a service to other tools early this morning. This year is the 25th anniversary of the post-it note. The post it note's real potential showed when the engineer working on it decided to take one and stick it on some one elses report, write a question on it, and return to the author. The note was attached to the report, but also seperable.

In teaching, instructors often leave notes for students. My teachers have often left notes jotted on top of papers, for example, which in big class might be the most meaningful contact I have with the teacher. Instructors also take take notes about students that aren't shared - in the gradebook we'd like include a way for TAs to leave a note explaining their rational for changing a grade. There are shared notes describing the value of reading (the description field of a resource), or a private notes about how well questions on an assessment worked. Maybe it would be interesting for a CMS to keep track of all these notes.

A notepad tool could be used on it's own, a place to jot notes about the course. But it's real power would be to collect an organize all the notes taken about students and materials and the course in one place, where they could be viewable by date or by topic, where they are indexed and searchable. You'd have a log of the course with little to no additional effort form the instructors.

IBM joins Sakai Project

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 18:23:00 EST

Wow. I just saw the news that IBM is joining the Sakai project. From the press release:

Patrick Carey, IBM Business Consulting Services' higher education leader, said, "IBM believes the Sakai Project holds great promise for higher education. We believe in Sakai's vision and want to help build the community or 'ecosystem' as we like to call it, that will enable the long-term success of Sakai."

It also mentioned that IBM will contribute developers and work on open standards for Sakai. I can't wait to see how this impacts Sakai development. I've just arrived in California for a Sakai meeting, I'm sure we'll hear more in the next few days.

The Gunning Fog Index

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:50:00 EST

Check out the Readability Test offerred by Juicy Studio. The Gunning Fog Index for "Inline Comments" here is 8.80 - slightly more complex than Reader's Digest, way more simple than the Wall Street Journal or even Newsweek. Either I'm doing a great got at keeping it simple for busy readers, or I don't know any big words.

Flying with wires

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 17:58:00 EST

I'm going to be spending most of the week in California, traveling for Sakai. I've done a lot of traveling in the past year, and recently I've come to sort of enjoy it again. I travel with a lot of electronics, and have fun working on my laptop, listening to my iPod, etc. I get some good work done when I'm flying.

I'm a pretty obsessive light packer, but still about a third of my small bag is devoted to my laptop and selected peripherals. I also end up with quite a few cables, (iPod, cellphone, iSight, the monitor adaptor, headphones) plus the small peripherals themselves. Here's a tip I have if you are a nerd traveller like me.

I pack all of cables and little gadgets in a small zippered bag with a mesh top. When I get to the x-ray machine I take it out of my big bag and let it run through the machine on it's own. That way if I get pulled over for having a suspicious mass of metal and wires (which happened to me on my last flight out of Detroit), I've got the suspicious bag out already, available for inspection. Given the ritualistic insanity of airport security rules, they only search the small suspicious bag. If I keep in with everything, they are required to pull my whole bag apart. If it's all by its lonesome they just look at it, maybe do a couple swabs for suspicious chemical, and I'm on my way.

Infinite Mile

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 14:31:00 EST

I'm happy to say I'm being given an Infinite Mile Award. When I received the notice I'd received the award I bareley glanced at it before deleting. With all the travelling I've been doing I get notes about Delta Sky Miles, United Milage Plus, AAdvantage Miles and WorldPerks Bonus Miles, so something about "Infinite Mile" just went in the bin with the rest of 'em.

I didn't realize what it was until someone sent me a congratulations note. Now I'm very honored and excited, especially knowing that people went to the trouble to nominate me and write up a proposal and follow through with the process, without me even knowing about it.

Minimalist Presentation

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 09:52:00 EST

I made a presentation about Stellar to the MIT Libraries on Wednesday. There was a really strong turnout, and I got a lot of questions, a couple of invites to meet with teams in the Libraries, and several Librarians requesting Stellar sites to experiment with. That's just the kind of results I'd hoped for.

I have a sort of canned Stellar presentation that I have used in a lot of places. Maybe it's just because I'd done it so often, but it was starting to really feel boring. There are some graphs (which I like) and there lots of slides with bullets (which seemed dull). So I changed the slides so that with the exception of the agenda and a couple of graphs, they are all titles only. Sometimes I had to break bulleted one slide into two or three, some times I just kept the title and moved the bullets into the notes. Plus i added some new slides just for this audience. Here's the presentation as a Flash movie.

I think the titles-only style worked quite well. It freed me up to walk away from my laptop during a slide. I know what I'm talking about so I just use the slide that's up as topic, and improvised based on the topic. I think this let me pay more attention to the people listening, so I could get a better sense if they were following along, bored, confused, excited, whatever. I also suspect it meant the audience could focus on what I was saying rather than reading the slides.

I give demos when I speak, and I wish had an easier way to switch between my presentation and the demo. My plan for the future is to save the presentation as a flash file and open it in a browser. Then I can keep the presentation in one tab, and the sites I'm demoing in other tabs. Using keyboard shortcuts to move between tabs I'll be able to move fluidly between presentation and demo.

Digital Repositories and Course Management

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 14:37:00 EST

What's the first easy step we could do to integrate an digital repository like MetaMedia or DSpace with a course management system like Stellar or Sakai?

Start by just going one way

I'd suggest that you start by being able to pull materials in from the repository. Repositories ten to demand a bit of work before something is added in, because the want good metadata since they will be storing these materials for a long time. Course management systems are designed s that instructors can add materials as quickly as possible. So start moving materials in the easier direction: Repository → Course management.

Use whatever metadata exists

There's no reason an instructor looking for materials for their course should be confronted with a black screen. We know quite a bit about the class they are teaching. It's title, it's department, whether it's for undergraduates, etc. Use that to make suggestions. So as soon as an instructor clicks "search the repository" they get a page with the traditional search box, but also a list of suggestions. "You are teaching the course Ancient Rome so you might find these resources handy."

Encourage instructors to add more metadata to their class, so they'll get better suggestions. Then when they day comes that we're ready to add materials from the course management system to the repository, we'll have a lot class metadata to plug in.

Once that initial step is done there are many more possibilities (creating special collections, student collections, federated searches and on and on) but this simple way to pull course materials from repository would be a great first step.

Blink UI

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 17:38:00 EST

I listened to an MP3 or Malcom Gladwell's keynote at SXSW during my lunch break today. He was talking about his book, Blink, specificaly about how people make quick decisions, and how we could do it better.

One conclusion was that people make better decisions when given less information. This is in direct opposition to our cultural assumption that we do better gathering all possible information before deciding something. He gave an example of ER doctors who need to quickly decide whether some one suffering from chest pains is having a heart attack. Researchers discovered that Doctor's accuracy is much higher if they are only given 4 pieces of information - EKG, whether the pain is persistant or intermittent, and a couple others. All other information - the patient's history of heart failure, if the patient is obese, if they'd been up all night smoking crack, etc - only clouded their success rate.

So I wonder if this has a good equivalent in UI design. In most projects I work on the people using the tool are generally busy and speeding through the use of this tool or website as quickly as possible. So my job is to show them as little information as possible for them to pick which link they will click next, or for them to get accomplish their current goal. In the case of the grade book, we need to show a teacher the right amount of information for them to judge the performance of their class or an individual student. Should they give student X an A- or a B+? Was the midterm too hard?

How will I know if I'm providing the right info? Should I show them photos of the students, or does that introduce a possibility of unintended bias? It's pretty intimidating, especially since I honestly make my decisions on what include in the UI based on my own 'blink' judgements. I draw on my experience, and the information we gathered form the requirements gathering process. Is that information too much or too little?

I just convinced myself to read that book.

One Big Company

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 13:31:00 EST

I'm off for ~~Marathon~~ Patriot's Day, I just had to comment on today's big news. Adobe has purchased Macromedia. I was so shocked when I heard that on NPR this morning.

I don't really use Macromedia products any more. I haven't touched Dreamweaver in over year, since I decided that templating should be built into the code,not controlled by a designer's application. I used to love Flash, but we weren't getting a lot of work in that area, so I moved away from it.

I use Adobe Photoshop quite a bit and Illustrator occasionally. But even there, I feel no need to upgrade, what I've got works fine. I have to use Acrobat, but use it as little as possible because it is an ugly bloated beast of an application.

So the merger doesn't impact me immediately. But it does effect the industry - I think there was something to gain from the competition between these cpmpanies. Neither seems to have innovated much in the past few years, so maybe their competition had run it's course. Still, it's wierd to have one superpower in multimedia creation software.

Some companies don't get basic UI design

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 20:49:00 EST

I just installed a Thule roof rack. I saw a card in the package saying they'd send me a couple free issues to Backpacker magazine if I went to Thule.com to register my rack.

Once I found the product registration page I had a problem. All of their questions use radio buttons. It is as if the designer didn't know about checkboxes. For example here is one question:

For which activities will you use your THULE rack?

Biking mountain
Biking, road
Canoeing
General loads/camping
Kayaking
Sailboarding
Skiing
Snowboarding
Surfing
Triathlons
Other

Hello? It says activities plural, and I plan to use this rack for both kayaking and camping. But I had to pick one. There were tons of little errors like this. I mean if they are going to the effort to exploit personal information, they could at least get all of it. I guess they'll never know a lot of wonderful things about me.

Situated Software

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 15:34:00 EST

I re-read Clay Shirky's piece on Situated Software on my way into work today. It echoes my interest in small software projects. This interest of mine is ironic because I spend most of my work life working on a huge multi-instituiton course management system, designed for hundreds of thousands of users I'll never meet.

But I still love the projects we do in EDDG for smaller clients like SMA and CRE which have an intended audience of a few hundred. They are nice products, that people really use and enjoy. And the projects end - it's really nice when a project ends.

I bore my colleagues with this mantra, but I continually wish we could do these smaller projects using "LAMP" (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP[or Python maybe])as a platform instead of "STOJ" (as in "stodgy" - Solaris + Tomcat + Oracle + Java[it's probably not rally solaris any more - but changing that would ruin my acronym]). It would be a lot esier for less supremely skilled web developers (like myself) to work on these projects, they'd be easier to maintain and faster and cheaper to build.

Sakai Style Guide examples

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 20:42:00 EST

I moved the the Sakai style guide examples to a new home in Sakai's CVS repository. They had been living in the tools team's Sakai website.

There are many advanages to having the Sakai style guide examples in CVS.

Sakai developers will get them delivered fresh to their development machines periodically
The tools team members working on them can take advantage of versioning
Sakai kept messing up the HTML in the files
I find it much easier to add things to CVS on the command line than to go into a website, download a file, edit it, go back to the website, and filling out a form to replace the file.

Northwestern's Sakai style

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 16:42:00 EST

I just saw this blog entry showing off a new Sakai 'skin' for NorthWestern University.

In the future we're planning to change the way the style sheets work. We'd have 3 levels of style sheet.

Default - The default styles that come with Sakai. You shouldn't edit it, and it's required.
Tool - Individual tools (e.g the announcement tool, the gradebook tool, etc) will have their own style sheets. These are optional, but it allows the tool developers to add new styles if they need to.
Institution - This is the institutional style sheet. It is linked after the default and tool style sheets, which means that following the CSS rules for precedence, you can override any styles in in default that you want to change. This is where an institution's (or a departments, or whatever) designer would do their work.

The nice thing is it gives the institution complete flexibility, without having to touch the main style sheet. We use a similar approach in Stellar.

Later: Gonzalo Silverio just pointed me to the instructions for skinning Sakai in case you want you try it yourself.

Pin Oaks on Mass Ave

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 10:09:00 EST

I just saw an email going around about the Cambridge Public Works project to improve Mass Ave from the river to the beginning of Central Square.

The email was about trees. They plan to rip out the trees the trees now in place (this being Cambridge the email noted that healthy trees will be replanted, so we need not worry about cruelty to flora) and replace them by planting 100 Pin Oak trees. Why Pin Oak's I wonder? They get really big, so maybe that would be nice, but I'd be worried about them getting crowded against the buildings. And all those acorns. And you have to hope they aren't using southern saplings (the quote below is from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources

In urban areas, Pin Oak suffers from a quirk of commercial nursery production, in that most trees originate from southern sources with very acidic soils, and when transplanted to neutral or alkaline soils, suffer tremendously from leaf chlorosis with a resulting loss of vigor. The lesson still not learned is to use local seed sources for growing trees, when there will be a problem of any type.

I just hope these trees are tough. I know from my own childhood that life on Mass Ave can be evil.

USB is like duct tape

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 09:50:00 EST

I recently purchased a USB cell phone charger from Zip-Linq. I'm constantly running out of phone chargers at inopportune moments, mostly because I forget to charge it when I'm at home. And I realized I am more likely to be near my laptop than near an outlet. After all I'm within 50 feet of my laptop 95% of the time. It's always ready to give my cell phone a quick jump. The cable is so compact it's no problem carrying it around.

Because of the modular design of the cable, I can also use it to charge my iPod. And it came with an adaptor for a car's power source. So I can charge my iPod and phone when I'm in the car (which is about 0.5% of the time, but still).

It's just a little a cable, but it's really making me happy.

Talk to the people who use your website

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 21:15:00 EST

We learned that students wanted to 'shop' for classes on Stellar through some advisory group meetings and through the support logs. So the development team got the mandate to find a way to make it easier to shop for classes. There some early ideas being shopped around. We could make the syllabus, the first assignment world readable for the first couple weeks of the semester, for example.

Jean Foster arranged interviews with a couple of the students who had asked us to make shopping easier. She asked them an open question: "How do you shop for classes now?" And what we found was that they were looking for classes much earlier than we'd expected, and they are of course looking at the class as it was taught in earlier semesters.

See, we'd been focussed on how to help students look at the class in the semester they will take it. But they know materials aren't in place early enough (something we'd worried about too) so they already tend to look at archived courses.

Suddenly we have all sorts of new options. We can look at how to open access to archived courses. Even better, we can find ways to link our content to Open Course Ware. OCW is basically an archive of classes, and they've got about 1100 in place now. So there's a pretty good chance that we can point people shopping for a particular course over to OCW. If an archived course is limited access, and most of them are, we can dynamically generate a link to the appropriate OCW class.

I'm not sure what we'll end up doing, but talking to the students has opened up some more elegant solutions. Imagine if we'd developed a nice new technique to look at what little material is available for new classes, only to find after launching that the students weren't looking there. Interviewing users is such an obvious and easy thing to do - but it's amazing how often it doesn't happen.

Google Sattelite maps

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 09:34:00 EST

Just heard about Google satellite maps.

Enter your street address,
Click Search
Click Satellite in the upper right corner

You can drag the map around with your mouse, zoom in, zoom in out, etc just like with the regular google maps. Amazing.

Gathering Student Input Through a Weblog

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 15:27:00 EST

The ofice of the Dean od Undergraduate Edication is using a Movable Type weblog (which I've set up for them) to gather input from students. Student Discussion on the Undergraduate Educational Commons was set up back in December. The point was to understand how students felt about the changes they are proposing MIT's curriculum.

I'm not sure how they advertised it, but their calls for input received scores of replies. The comments are eally interesting to read, you get a real impressions of how MIT students feel about the required subjects list.

Next week the committees report will be psted, and more comments requested. this time the page will be spotlighted from the MIT homepage, so there will sure to be a lot of response.

BBEdit 8.1 (Now with theme song!)

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 12:59:00 EST

I just installed BBEdit 8.1 which now includes SubVersion. I have no use for Subversion, but I wish i did. i still would like to set up my own repository to keep track of various projects I'm working on.

The other weird thing. I looked at the About BBEdit screen and if you let it scoll all the way to the bottom, there is a link to the BBEdit Theme Song which is just the dorkiest folk song every recorded.

That was worth the price of the upgrade all on it's own.

Pretty Stellar RSS Feeds

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 11:53:00 EST

I used the approach I used here to prettify Stellar's RSS feeds. For example here's the RSS feed for 9.036: The Visual System.

RSS feeds are turned on for all current Stellar sites now. I can't wait to see the usage stats at the end of the semester. My instinct tells me they'll be pretty popular.

New Simmons Courses

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 13:48:00 EST

The Simmons has announced new courses that will be MSLIS program (in which i am enrolled). Looks great - I wish they'd switched over earlier. I'm keen to take the new Human-Computer Interaction and XML classes, as well as the Digital Libraries class which is not new, but getting an update.

Sakaipedia

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 14:59:00 EST

Mark Norton set up a wiki he's calling the "Sakaipedia". I added some information on the Sakai Style Guide. I hope it catches on an turns into a great resource on Sakai - there is already quite a bit in there thanks to Mark.

Fwd: Re: URGENT:Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: ...

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:34:00 EST

Sometimes people should jsut use the telephone. I just got an email whose title was "Fwd: Re: URGENT:Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: ..." I couldn't see the original subject until I opened the message, the string was too long for my inbox.

Sakai Notes

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 13:46:00 EST

Here are some highlights, in no particular order, the Sakai meeting in Ann Arbor. I'm still here at the meeting.

Daphne Ogle's been leading an effort to evaluate Sakai's 'legacy tools' - those tools that were part of CHEF and have moved into Sakai. She's been using 'High Tech Anthropology' techniques she learned at the Menlo Institute.

I missed this part of the meeting, but in the beginning of the day the group sorted through user personas and select 1 primary and 3 secondary personas to use in evaluating the importance and usefulness of Sakai functionality.

Scatter graph plotting use cases (e.g. 'make my site world readable' or 'add announcement') against frequency of use and importance. We based all of this on the primary and secondary personas.

The Sakai website has been relaunched. it's now maintained using the Mambo CMS.

Sakai gradebook now has basic working versions of all pages. Nice work, Berkeley.

Everybody I've talked to on the Sakai team concerned about how much we can accomplish for the 2.0 release in June. Everybody is excited about the amount email activity in SEPP since the release of 1.5. The Pedagogy group is a real highlight.

Chen Qain from UMich did a live demo of how to install sakai on a Powerbook. In just a few minutes she'd downloaded the code and installed it, opened a web browser and showed it running on localhost:8080. Very impressive.

Make magazine

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 10:02:00 EST

There's a review of Make magazine on Kirkville that I thought did a really nice job summing it up. I also have a subcription, and i really enjjoyed the first magazine, though I found the spirit and attitude the most inspiring part. Most of the do-it-self yourself projects were too complicated or time consuming for me.

I do plan to try out the tips on getting more out of my Airport Express

Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC)

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 13:23:00 EST

Just saw that Sakai is linked to on the LINC Resources page.

LINC, like AMPS, spun off from the dissolution of CAES. I see they link to the Good Clinical Practices which is also an AMPS project, so the connection is still there.

Their Africa Internet Technology Initiative looks really interesting. I'm also curious to know more about the CMS they are using to maintain their website.

Update: They are using Metadot. Carol Sardo, who keeps the pages updated, gives it a good review.

NY Times on the 'danger' of open networks

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 08:59:00 EST

The New York times has an overwrought article today titled Growth of Wireless Internet Opens New Path for Thieves. People are communicating and the FBI can't track them down! Gasp! Did they publish this sort of article when the first pay phones were built? It's not a crime to surf the web anonymously. An internet connection is a tool that can be used for good or evil, like a telephone, a car, just about anything. Special limitations on our civil liberties aren't needed.

I find it hard not to suspect the deep pocketed telecommunications companies aren't lurking in the background when I read warnings about the terrible dangers of sharing an internet connection you bought and paid for.

Is my design process too heavy?

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:01:00 EST

I am still lamenting missing SXSW this year - inspiration is dripping from the attendees' blog entries . Jason Freid from 37signals did a new and improved version of the talk he gave at Web Design World in Boston. He is advocates moving right into designing an application's UI, even coding the back end, without going through a long process of scope statements, wireframes and functional specs.

Jason Freid linked to this commentary on his design methods by Khoi Vinh. (That's just a beautiful website, goes right into my list of feeds to read). I share his instinctive caution - I've been burned by the not getting buy in and understanding from all of the players in a project, and all those specs and scope statements really help create a mutual understanding. But I also yearn to be free, to just get it out there and start putting things on the screen.

My Docwalla project has ground to a halt. I was happily planning lots of improvements to the wish list. For some reason i imposed a whole a process on myself, despite the fact that I'm the only person working on it, and it's just no fun any more. This article reminds me that I need to start playing more and working less on Docwalla.

I have similar feeling with the Sakai gradebook. Those wireframes have been changed so often, it's just ridiculous. And little edits keep coming in from my cherished colleagues at Berkeley. I groan when I open that OmniGraffle file again. I am drained of gradebook creativity. I'm alienated by the technology used to code the gradebook - I'm used to being able to tinker with the presentation code myself. Is the only way I can communicate with people who I know and like is through these strangely formal documents. It's hard not to feel weighed down by this endless process.

I'm going on too long. Time to open up that OmniGraffle file and make a few more edits.

Stellar for Librarians

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 15:36:00 EST

This just went out to an email list for everyone in the MIT Libraries.

Please join Ben Brophy of AMPS (Academic Media Production Services) for an update on the Stellar course management system.

The agenda will include:

an overview of what Stellar is

a glimpse of how some classes are using Stellar

a demo of how librarians might use Stellar, either by creating our own sites or by adding value to instructor sites

a discussion about how how librarians might use Stellar, and support online education in general

a sneak preview of Sakai, the open source course management system MIT is developing with Indiana, Michigan, Stanford, and Berkeley

a few words on how librarians may influence the development of Stellar and Sakai

This session will be primarily geared toward subject selectors and anyone involved in instruction, but is open to all Libraries' staff.

Date: Wed. April 20 Time: 3:30-5 PM Place: DIRC

I'm excited about the talk. I enjoy showing Stellar off - it's really pretty solid these days - and one of my big picture goals is to find ways to get Libraries more involved in the development of course management systems like Stellar and Sakai.

Monospace Fonts

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:25:00 EST

I use a fixed width font for in BBEdit and the Terminal, of course. I've always used Monaco, the default setting (I tried using Courier and Andale Mono, but they were no good). But maybe the quality of my life would be improved by a little variety in monospaced fonts. This handy site reviews monospaced fonts. Right now I'm using BitStream. It's kind of jarring after years of monaco, especially in the terminal. We'll see how it goes.

Applying the Sakai Style Guide to Stellar

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:29:00 EST

We're planning to apply the Sakai Style Guide to the Stellar course management system for Fall 2005. This probably won't be a complete revision, but we'll make the easy changes. Since we aren't devoting our full development resources to Stellar, we'll hold off on changes that would require significant back-end work.

It's a way of making a gradual transition. Stellar has a significant user base, but we're planning to move to Sakai. If they use similar user interface rules, the transition will be easier. The shift to the Sakai Style Guide won't be too radical, but it will take us closer to Sakai, from a user's point of view. We're hoping that Sakai will look less foreign when people see it for the first time. So if we can get Sakai to use the style guide we'll be in good shape!

CVS-faux-pas

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 16:38:00 EST

Craig just came over to my cube to let me know I look like a silly designer when I check things into CVS.

I've always checked things in like this:

cvs commit -m this-is-my-commit-message file.html

When I could just do this:

cvs commit -m "this is my commit message" file.html

A java programmer once told me I had to do it with dashes. He told me this after I tried committing without a message and got trapped in vim without knowing how to exit. Was the programmer just hazing me? Marking me as rube so all the cool developers would snicker when they read my commit messages?

Technorati Search

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 10:00:00 EST

I replaced the google MIT search with an MIT search. I was having trouble getting the MIT google to index this site. I didn't want to add a link to the Stellar or AMPS sites, because this is not an official communication from either of those projects. Also Google doesn't index all that often so the results aren't very 'fresh' where as Technorati updates every time I publish a post.

I'll just laboring on Google-obscurity until someone links to me...

TiVo and Apple

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 19:36:00 EST

Salon has an article proposing Apple rescue TiVo. The combination TiVo's life changing feature set, and Apple's marketing and ease of use would be a windfall for both companies, and possibly transform the TV industry. I was convinced.

I've never used TiVo. I've never even looked at one (except perhaps in my peripheral vision). I don't own a TV, and I don't want one. When I'm near a TV it sucks me in and wastes all my time. I can get all the TV shows I want from Netflix. If I had TiVo my mind would inevitably see that hard drive full of TV shows as a massive to-do list. I would stay up late watching stupid stuff like Lonely Planet, Curb Appeal, and Mexico One Plate at a Time just to keep my list manageable.

But I'm also a well known Apple lover. In the last year our relationship has soured a bit as I battle with the DRM on the files I get from iTunes, but I spend much of my life looking at this Powerbook, and I never get sick of the view.

I would be so tempted by the possibilities of an AppleTivo. The joy of synching TV shows onto my Powerbook before I leave for a trip would be so sweet. So let's hope it doesn't happen.

Step away from the server

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 19:34:00 EST

See this is why I must remind myself that I never want to run the back-end of the applications. Ray from UCS just sent around the link to this description of Forty-four grueling hours.

While I don't get most of it, I can still feel the cold-sweaty nervous energy of working around the clock trying not let the customers catch on that you may have made a big mistake.

Flickr to sell prints

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:43:00 EST

So the word is Flickr's finally going to sell prints. I find it reassuring that they will have an actual recognizable revenue stream, and I hope it means they'll be developing for years and years to come. I guessing they'll make some good money from my son's grandparents for a start.

SXSW

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:19:00 EST

Oh how I wish I was going to SXSW Interactive this year. All the cool bloggers are going

I went in in 2002 and came away full of inspiration. It got me into information architecture, blogging, and standards-based web design - areas that are still huge for me. Rubbing shoulders with Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Jesse James Garret, the Trotts, Anil Dash, Todd Dominey, Matthew Haughey and on and on changed the way I see my work.

Maybe next year...

GeekTool

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 20:30:00 EST

One more cool little app: GeekTool

I set it up to display the output of three Unix commands on my desktop:

date "+Today is %A, %B %e, %Y and it's %l:%M"
shows the current time and date
cal
shows this month's calendar
more ~/Desktop/gtd/next
shows my to do list

It's a beautifully geeky aesthetic.

Witch

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 22:17:00 EST

I just installed Witch and I already love it. It's one of those little apps I am going to have to remember to install on any new Mac.

Just like

Quicksilver
Dimensionizer
MarkDown
Wiretap
TrashLater X

And several of the items on this list of menu icons. I love OS X.

Regular Expression of Joy

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:51:00 EST

Whenever I use regular expressions to fix up a whole bunch of pages at once, I feel a burst of nerd euphoria.

The informational pages at the top level of the Stellar website are templated using SSI. For reasons of expediency, we never put in separate pages for each page, even though it's quite doable using SSI variables.

I wanted each page title to match the heading at the top of the text (these are consistently header 2 tags). I had to preserve what ever header material was there already, but stick a comment with the SSI variable info on the top of the page. So after some R&D here's what i came up with:

Search for: \A((.|\s)*?)<h2>(.*?)</h2>

Replace with:\r\1\r\<h2>\3</h2>

Voila. BBedit was churning through pages doing the work of 20 web designers at once.

MIT in Wikipedia

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 10:37:00 EST

I amused myself for about an hour yesterday reading various entries on Wikipedia, reading about various cities, kinds of wine, recent history, etc. Things you do when you don't own a TV.

Anyway, the MIT entry on Wikipedia is great. It deciphered all sorts of lore I hadn't quite understood even after (nearly) 10 years here.

EECS Faculty Lunch

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 16:22:00 EST

Vijay Kumar, Jeff Merriman, and I presented an intro to Stellar to the faculty of of EECS today, and then asked for feedback. We should have budgeted much less time for presenting and more for listening. Unfortunately we had to leave well before everyone who raised a hand had the chance to speak.

Here are the comments that got through.

It's unclear how to save content at the end of the semester
It took me 10 minutes to create a class website, there is no overhead
Problem getting e-reserves into the site from the library the requested papers never got scanned
I'd like the materials to be integrated with a version control system
The class reg lists weren't always accurate, especially section information
When I asked for help I always got a reply within an hour
It was hard to assign multiple students to sections at the same time
I couldn't get into my colleagues' courses. Materials should default to be publicly available
I'd like to have a lab notebook tool students can use like a wiki

I'll forward these on to stellar-suggest. I hope we'll get more by email.

Libraries and CMS development

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 10:44:00 EST

I just read Lorcan Dempsey at OCLC commenting on on Sakai. I haven't read the white paper he's commenting on, but he says:

Interestingly it suggests that some should be "pushed off" to a library effort.

"Pushed off" is really an unfortunate choice of words. Libraries should be fully integrated with course management system development. It's hard to do for reasons I'm still trying to understand - I think has to do with differing cultures.

Ajax is making Javascript cool again

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 17:31:00 EST

I just read Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications, the Adaptive Path article everyone's linking to. Ajax is JJG's newly coined term for "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML."

Ajax is used heavily by some of my favorite web apps - Google Maps, A9 and Flickr. I knew they were using a lot of JavaScript, and that's what's been fueling my desire to learn JavaScript better. I didn't know that much about it though. I still want to learn more. I'll be keeping an eye out for more tutorials. I'm clearly goign to have to add "Get Good at JavaScript" to my someday/maybe list.

Working at MIT again

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 17:21:00 EST

I've been away for a while but I'm back at MIT.

Here are a few things I miss about working at UC Berkeley.

The campanile bells
The eucalytus smells
Eating lunch on the plaza outside dwinelle
$2.10 latte to go
The taqueria truck
Turkey sandwich runs to Cafe Milano
Having meetings on couches
The team

There are some compensations to being back at MIT.

My cubicle feels huge
Believe it or not MIT bathrooms are like health spas compared to UCB's
The pizza is generally better
I go home to my own house
The team

New high in Stellar usage

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 18:26:00 EST

I just got this from Craig.

On Tuesday, we hit 500 users by our metric. We had 2850 unique users logging in that day, 2605 wednesday, 2381 thursday.

Those are some big numbers for us. I was using Stellar at the same time as the 500 on Tuesday, and I didn't experience a performance hit, so the servers are handling the load nicely.

QA and Iterative Development

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 14:58:00 EST

Carol Dippel is doing a presentation on improving the QA process for Sakai using CMM methods.

These methods assume formalized documents through out the product life-cycle. In other words it assumes the QA team will have details on what the application is supposed to do before before the test to see if it does it. Sounds obvious, but it often doesn't happen. Writing specs takes a lot of time, and it's not fun, I've been as guilty as anyone here.

There's a tendency to add in new undocumented features at the 11th hour, because it turns out to be possible. This is hell on QA. She'd rather have the newer stuff slated for a later release, say 30 days later.

She's not advocating a slow bulky 'big bang' approach with massive application releases planned a year in advance. It's that you can have small monthly releases with iterative improvements. This makes QA really workable, because the QA team can find bugs more quickly.

This sounds like an 'extreme programming' approach, nicely applied. Carol doesn't call it that b/c people use the words 'extreme programming' to justify a chaotic unplanned software development (note to self: check out this extreme programming book).

There's a lot more going on in this presentation - this was just one theme I thought was interesting.

Podcasting

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 14:39:00 EST

I finally understand what podcasting is after reading comments on a blog entry.

Ruby on Rails

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 14:35:00 EST

I am constantly seeing links to Ruby on Rails. I'm tempted to spend some time trying it out, but I don't have the time. Maybe I'll ask one of the mirror-Ben's in an alternate universe to spend some time on it.

Generating actors and Tasks

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 01:38:00 EST

I was in a meeting today using a some "High-Tech Anthropology" techniques to generate ideas for an improved resources tool for Sakai. The the most important goal of the meeting was to gather our input fast.

Here's the process:

Quickly write up a brief problem statement in small groups
Brainstorm a list of 'Actors' who interact with the tool (e.g. Instructors, students, librarians, etc.)
Brainstorm a list of actions the actors would do in using tool (e.g. import last semester's class, search repository for class materials)
Categorize and refine those lists
Create a matrix of the two, and in date how often the actors do the tasks (e.g. instructors export sites once a semester, students download files hourly)
Vote on which actions we think would reap the highest benefit for our users
Look at the results of steps 5+6 to pick a few actions to start with to create use case scenarios.

The meeting was really productive as we went through the 4 stages. I thought we generated a lot of information and ideas fast, and we started forming a rough shared vision of the task ahead.

We lost focus as the day wore on - we were getting rushed, and there was a bit of confusion over our process, especially step 7 when we spent a lot of time messing with an excel spreadsheet and slowly realizing we were treating qualitative information as if it was quantitative and it just wasn't working.

The day a real success, despite the seventh inning slump. We generated a list of clear requirements for the lead designers, and they also got significant buy-in from the rest of the team. I'd love to try the first 5 tasks the next time we have a client who is sure how to define their project.

Create your own bitmap font

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:48:00 EST

BitFontMaker looks so cool. I can't wait until I have a free hour to really obsess over it.

Trackback Spam

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 01:31:00 EST

My family blog was attacked by dozens of trackback spams today.

Trackback: Trackback is a cool technology for communication between blogs. example: You write something interesting about cheesecake on your blog. After reading your entry, I link to it on my blog, with the additional comment that I think chocolate cheesecake is the best. My blog sends your blog a 'trackback ping.' Then your blog has a link to my blog entry.
Trackback Spam: Trackback spam is when you write a blog about cheese cake, and I send you a bogus trackback ping about an online poker website, so that your site will show a link to that site and increase it's google rank.

I'll probably turn off track back on my site now - because no one has left me a trackback on my site since the early halcyon days when there was still a blogging 'community' (back in 2002). Now trackbacks are for scum leaving nasty links around.

It's like People's Park in Berkeley. I read about this amazing park and garden built by volunteers back in 1968. I walk by it on my way to campus now, and it's full of scary desperate people - you wouldn't feel safe walking through it at 9:00 am, let alone at night. Sometimes a free and open community attracts first the best and then the worst from humanity.

(this blog takes neither comments nor spam, which has it's plusses and minuses)

Javascript

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 17:29:00 EST

This tutorial on unobtrusive javascript looks great. When I first saw those tacky 3D logos I thought I was wasting my time, but the examples are perfect, and the 'unobtrusive' philosophy sounds right on.

Back in 2000 or so I despaired of of javascript ever being useful to me. The browser interoperability issues were too great. When I use it in a project it's either copied whole sale from some site I've googled, or i've cajoled a programmer into doing it.

I know if I learned javascript I could use some very handy UI tricks. I loved playing with ActionScript in Flash, so I imagine I'd enjoy using the current standards based brand of Javascript. Someday I'm gong to go back to javascript school and learn it right this time.

Wireless Access in Philadelphia

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:20:00 EST

The NYTimes has a good article on plans for broadband wireless access in Philadelphia. I wrote a letter a while back to the Governor of Pennsylvania urging him to veto a bill the PA legislature had passed banning the local governments from providing internet access. Obviously bill was written by lobbyists working for the telecommunications industy.

I'm all in favor of interent access becoming a commodity, available to everyone at low cost. It's interesting that the companies involved aren't interested in providing ubiquitous wireless access themselves, they just don't want the city doing it.

**Update**: looks like Indiana is doing the right thing too.

Not responsible

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:46:00 EST

We use basecamp to track our projects, including the Sakai Gradebook. Today I went in to the gradebook to-do list, filtered to see just my tasks, and checked off the tasks that remained. After I checked off the last one, this message appeared:

Ben Brophy isn't responsible for anything

How satisfying!

Gradebooks are complicated

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 19:18:00 EST

We had a long meeting about what happens to unscored fields when an assignment is released. It effects what the student sees, how the final grade is calculated, how the average scroe is displayed, etc. I changed 6 wireframes in the gradebook specs after the conversation.

I always wondered why most course management systems either lacked a grade book or had one that was airly lame. Now i know that it's because they are really complicated. There are so many different styles of grading to account for. Even when you stick to one style, there are lot's of logical implications to changing the way any one number is calculated.

It's going to take two or three releases to get back to the full functionality we'd hoped for. Right now I'm glad to be implementing one fairly simple grading style, and using this first try to work through all of the weird kinks of logic.

Potential Docwalla User

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:39:00 EST

Wow. Somebody just emailed me about Docwalla (Simple XML/XSLT/PHP Micro-Content Management). They apparently have every intention of using it. That would make me so happy.

I'm still working on Docwalla... verrrrry slowly. Every to days or so I spend an hour working on it in the evening. I am slowly making the wishlist truly cool (it's already kinda cool). I got a lot of milage out of my wishlist this Christmas, but i got some feed back from both list managers (Lisa) and end users (our families) about improvements we should make.

Automatic Upgrades

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:13:00 EST

A question came up in the Stellar team about whether we should upgrade old project sites (those sites that aren't ties to a semester) to the latest version of Stellar. We could do the upgrade or we could email them all asking if they wanted the upgrade.

This is a case where I think less choice better. Why ask? Just upgrade them. By asking them to decide and email us we're giving busy people another job to do (not to mention the extra work for the person who has to selectively upgrade sites as the requests come in). I do think it's worth emailing them that the improvements were made - for PR value if nothing else.

I've been using flickr.com for photos. The other day they upgraded their UI, changing the way slideshows work, etc. I haven't heard any one say "Damn, why'd they improve my site with out asking me first?"

Attention RSS Feed Readers

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:04:00 EST

I am moving to a new RSS format. The default that came with Blosxom was the old RSS 0.91 (yuck!). I have upgraded to RSS 2.0. Here's the feed you should use:

http://web.mit.edu/benbr/notes/2005/index.xml

Please switch over. The old RSS feed will no longer be updated. Sorry for all the shifting around, I'm still settling into my new home here. There is a 90% chance this is the last time I'll change the URl until next year.

Also, please take a moment to click the link and admire the attractive CSS styling. Much nicer looking than most RSS feeds you've seen, isn't? If you use a PC, please shoot me an email and let me know how it looks.

Access and User Groups in Stellar

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 14:09:00 EST

Access issues are the thing we get the most questions about in Stellar. I'm thinking about making it more obvious in the user interface somehow.

I wonder if there is away to bring access up more easily, but I think figuring out how to grant access is fairly easy (if improved access is a priority for the next Stellar update, we can check with usability testing). It may be what is needed is away for people to request access.

Most of the reports we get are from people who say they are being denied access unfairly. There are students who aren't on the registrar's list. OCW, SMA or Library staff who are helping of a site. Instructors who want access to an earlier version of the class they are teaching. They have assumed that the developers control access, when really they ought contact the instructors or TAs. So perhaps we need a form they can fill out to request access right in the place where they get the bad news - the permission denied page.

Instructors could then be emailed, or be greeted with the request when they next visited the site. This might make life easier for everyone. People looking for sites won't waste time contacting support. Site owners don't need to find the right form - it's presented to them when they need it. And (this part really delights me) the support and development teams will explain access less often.

Update: I got some feedback from Keith at OCW. Based on his comments, and embroidering them with some new ideas of my own, I'll add a couple details to my plan.

The permissions denied page should only show the 'request acces' form to people who are part of the MIT community so instructors don't get bombarded with requests from the rest of the world.
The email instructors get will contain 3 links:
- Give [requester's name] guest access
- Give [requester's name] higher access
- Deny [requester's name] access
The first and last link would just check the certificate, do the job, and confirm. The middle link would give more options. That way the instructor can process the email in just a few seconds.

Don't Make Me Think

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 17:00:00 EST

I am bummed that I'll miss Steve Krug talk at MIT this week (not to mention Joanna's birthday lunch - big week in Cambridge). Don't Make Me Think was one of the books that really helped me when I was a newbie, and I'm pretty curios to hear what he's got to say now.

Steve Krug, Author of "Don't Make Me Think" Steve Krug was a little-known but highly respected usability consultant until he wrote Don't Make Me Think. This book, written with wit and much common sense, is a product of more than a decade of user advocacy with companies like Apple, Netscape, AOL, BarnesandNoble.com and others. Wednesday February 16, 01:30-03:00pm, 3-133

Better metadata for Stellar materials

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 16:40:00 EST

Classes from Stellar can be imported into OCW. OCW uses a different nav bar. That caused a problem: On the imports the OCW workers had to figure out how to sort a big pile of Stellar 'materials' into their categories of kinds of documents.

To help solve that problem we made the 'kind of document' metadata options for each document added to Stellar match OCW's categories. But instructors weren't bothering to change the default - "readings" - so the problem wasn't solved.

We then made it possible to use the OCW nav bar in Stellar. This presents a usability problem though - students have too many places to look to see if new materials are added. Not a problem in OCW, because the sites are static. But a Stellar user needs to visit the site regularly, and they shouldn't have to comb through many pages looking for the new stuff (the new Stellar RSS feeds will help solve problem). Instructors again chose to stick to the Stellar default.

Last semester we started requiring instructors to pick a 'kind of document' when adding something to materials. There is no default, so they have to choose. I felt a little bad about this, because it slows them down. But guess what? It works!

I just picked 5 Stellar classes at random (admittedly not a big sample when there are 383 class websites for Spring 2005 but I have other work to do).

Each of these classes marked their materials quite nicely. They have a nice diversity of 'kinds of documents.' 9.02 had mostly readings, but on inspection they really were readings. Check this out: every single one indicated which document was their syllabus. That's a big win right there.

3.044 was the only one to use the OCW nav bar, but interestingly they also use the all-inclusive materials page. I'm not sure that's a great solution for usability (that nav bar is way too long) but perhaps they feel they are getting the best of both worlds. I don't think they classified their documents any better than the others. They all did a good job.

Just little user-generated-metadata success story.

iPhoto 5

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 13:13:00 EST

I installed the new iLife '05, mainly so I could check out the improvements in iPhoto. The biggest immediate for me is iPhoto now imports the sort movies I can take with my digital camera. I used to have to use iPhoto for the photos and Image Capture for the movies.

There are also a lot of nice UI tweaks, for example when you go into a close view of an image, there is now a row of thumbnails for the other images in the roll at the top of the window. Clicking 'Done' or clicking another roll brings you back to the catalog view. That's swell.

Another nice touch is the 'enhance' dialog, which is much sexier version of the 'adjust levels' (and brightness, and contrast) that you find in PhotoShop.

There's also some bad news - Export wasn't not working, perhaps becasue I've got a Flickr plugin. After I removed the plugin and restarted iPhoto all was well. I need that plugin though! I've got my fingers crossed that I can find a new Plugin on the Flicker website tomorrow.

Update: I downloaded a fresh version of the FlickrExport for iPhoto and it works swell.

HumaneText

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 02:48:00 EST

At some point I need to try out HumaneText to speed up my XHTML writing. Might be especially handy for this blog.

[See the discussion on 43 folders]()

Update 1: I'm trying it now. Can't get it to work easily. HumaneText (the service, I haven't tried the 'unix filter' mentioned in the comments above) doesn't seem to work at all BBEdit, and I need to try 2-3 times to make work in Text Edit. Doesn't seem like a miraculous time saver so far. I was really excited for it though - it's a great idea.

Update 2: OK, I got it to work well in BBEdit instructions on Daring Fireball. I'm using 'command+shift+>' as the command. I'm not going to set it up as a Blosxom plugin, because I'm so used to writing in XHTML it still feels slower to write in Markdown. I'll try it for a while and see what I think.

In my next actions list: write a markdown cheatsheet in my moleskine to use until it's a habit.

Scheduling updates with crontab

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 16:53:00 EST

I just set up my laptop to do these blog updates for me automatically every 30 minutes. Here's how I did it.

In the terminal type: crontab -e
This opens 'vi' a commandline text editor. ESC i to edit
I added this as the first line: */3 * * * * root /usr/bin/blosxom.cgi -password='mypassword' -quiet=1
escape key, then ':wq' to save and leave vi

If you are reading this, it worked!

Google Template

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 16:48:00 EST

I just added google search to this site, and customized the results page. It was quite easy. I was surprised to see that what method for customizing is a XSL file. You really get a lot of control. I'm delighted.

I've MIT's old search capabilities were nice but it was near impossible to customize the results pages. The new goolge search is going to e great for our clients at AMPS. Now that I now how to do it, I'll have to customize Stellar results pages.

Check out the handy IST info site on Google Search at MIT.

Simplicity

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:14:00 EST

republished from my old blog

I'm moving to a new blog. My apologies to anyone reading, I hope you'll add my new RSS feed to your reader. If you like to read using an old fashioned 'web browser' you can visit the website, now called Inline Comments (it's a geek site, what do you want?).

My new blog is powered by Blosxom. I publish static files from my laptop over to my AFS locker on MIT. This means there are no comments or trackback. I have chosen to strip out a lot of other stuff as well, for example the home page displays only the most recent post. In fact, as I mention in the sidebar, the website is really just a life support system for the RSS feed.

Here's why I did it: Simplicity.

I'd like to continue publishing my notes, for my own record as much as anything, but since I am doing this from work, I can't devote a lot of time to it. With the setup, I write plain text notes and save them in a folder on my laptop. A chron job runs every 30 minutes and adds new posts to the blog in the background. If I write posts when I'm offline, they get published the next time I have internet access.

This is a fast efficient way to publish. As much as I love love love getting comments, they are another channel of communication to keep track of, and I've got a few to many of those. Just email me (note to self - add a cgi-email form to the site). Or blog it yourself, if I know you I'll see it in your RSS feed.

Latte to Go

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:46:00 EST

There's a place in Berkeley where I buy a latte on my way into the office each morning. Once thing I really like about is you just ask for a latte. There are no sizes - not even small and large let alone 'venti' and 'grande.' The only choice involved is 'for hear' or 'to go' (or, since we're in California, 'para var').

Sometimes it's really satisfying to have fewer choices.

Styling RSS

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:08:00 EST

Soon, I will add this tag to my RSS feeds right after the XML-processing instruction:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="rss.css"?>

And create a stylesheet that makes the RSS more human readable. Ideally with a link about how to use it.

Earlham College and Sakai

benbr@mit.edu (Ben Brophy) — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 15:06:00 EST

I got my Alumni magazine yesterday and saw that Earlham is now using Moodle as their Course Management System. I looked at Course Management @ Earlham website and was startled to read they are also piloting CHEF/Sakai.

Their site has student, faculty and administrator evaluations of CHEF as well as a bunch of interesting reports.

Tom Kirk from Earlham listed several concerns with Sakai.

Large universities are driving Sakai development, small schools like Earlham could get lost.
I don't think they should worry there too much. MIT and Stanford have a small school feel to them - mostly small classes with lots of faculty/student interaction. Having gone to Earlham and worked for years at MIT, I don't think the difference is so profound that the schools wouldn't use the same software.
Sakai is written Java, which they don't have in-house knowledge of.
A very valid concern. Not only is it in Java, it's in JSF, an obscure Java specialty. Even Java programmers have a big learning curve approaching Sakai development.
Weak internationalization in Sakai
It's hard to teach Arabic with Sakai right now. I know that the Sakai developers are working hard on this, and it's a strong requirement for the core schools as well - I'm sure it will be resolved soon.

If I was at Earlham I would favor Moodle as well. At least for now.

Indiana is hitting Sakai with 90,000 users this Fall, I don't think Moodle could handle something like that. Earlham doesn't have to worry about scaling too much because they aren't that big.

Moodle's got similar featuresto Sakai, more actually. Neither of them has a truly inspirational UI.

If I were running Academic Computing at a small college like Earlham I'd make the same decision - use the skills available in house to work with a PHP environment they can easily host locally. But I hope they keep an eye on Sakai, it is bursting with potential.