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.