Visualisation session at the CETIS conference. Thoughts and resources.

By dms2ect | January 18, 2012

We are 34 days away from the CETIS conference. On day two I have signed up to a session on Social Network Analysis and Data Visualisation being run by Sheila and Lorna. I'm really looking forward to the session as recently I have been thinking about visualisations, what they mean and how they can be used in the most effective manner and I have found understanding them quite difficult. I am only just getting my head around the area and hope that the session might be a hub for the experienced to share some of their protips. I thought that by airing some of my questions and sharing some favourite resources might be a good way to get the tips rolling in and a conversation going before the event. I guess that everybody at the session will have his or her own interests and questions and I would be interested to know what these are.

Tips please

Some of the questions I have:

  • When are visualisations useful, when are they not and what makes a good visualisation?
  • When is a visualisation more then a bunch of lines connecting things?
  • What models sit behind the visualisation?
  • How do you find and validate good data, particularly data about social networks?
  • What are the most effective ways of visualisation, any tips on development environment?

Resources

I’d also be grateful for any resources you think might be useful. I’ll start with two I’m working with at the moment.

  • A github repository belonging to Adam Cooper with examples to find emergent trends and “weak signals” in paper abstracts.
  • A handy book that aims to “introduce the principles of statistics and modern statistical analysis for a non-mathematical audience”. Does it well and introduces R at the same time.

Looking forward to the session and a protip from me.

Posted in visualisation | 5 Comments

Notes on badges

By dms2ect | November 24, 2011

If you haven’t heard about Mozillas Open Badge Initiative, a great explanation and round up lives on Rowins blog. As Rowin points out that badges ‘draw upon widespread use of badges and achievements in gaming‘ and as somebody who has many badges and achievements in various game systems I can’t help but wonder if some of the problems that have cropped up in games might cross over into the Open Badge Initiative. Some early thoughts:

  • Nobody wants to complete a level using only a hyperblaster

    • Badly designed meta-goals can ruin an experience, some players will attempt to do all the tasks asked of them to get as many as the badges, achievements or points as possible. Is it fun completing any levels in quake 4 with only a hyperblaster? No, but it gets you a badge. Would learners do pointless tasks just to get badges, should we worry about loss of intrinsic motivation?

  • Bribery

    • Early in life a Microsoft console a game publisher realised it had a bad game on its hands. The answer to get gamers to part with their cash was to it would give them a full set of achievements in 3 minutes. Would users go for a product because it’s the quickest way to reach get a badge?

  • Badge Inflation

    • Achievements just aren’t enough anymore, as soon as games started giving out easy achievements gamers wanted more. How about a virtual hat? Now gamers are checking that their new game has extra avatar awards as well as achievements.

  • Bypassing the rewards system or creating a new one

    • What happens when developers read on a blog that bribery and badge inflation are a problem on your host platforms badge system. Some developers just create their own.

  • As punishment

    • Although now I like the term "useful indicator for characterizing an unknown" (see comments)

I think that badges are a really interesting idea. But maybe its worth thinking about other reward systems and the effects badges/achievements have had after implementation.

Posted in assessment, portfolio | 5 Comments

Developing a web analytics strategy for a distributed organisation

By dms2ect | November 2, 2011

For as long as I have been a web developer with CETIS we have relied on analysing server logs to give an indication of traffic sources and visitor trends. This approach existed long before I joined CETIS and seemed like a logical way of doing things, CETIS has had many web servers and many different developers have installed different tools and resources and since they were all using the same servers and producing the same style logs it has been a reasonable method of producing comparable stats.

While this method of collecting stats has stayed the same over the life of CETIS, the direction of CETIS and the environment that it finds itself in has changed over time and a need for a new strategy has become apparent.

Challenges from JISC CETIS and the environment

  • JISC CETIS is more distributed from a technical point of view

Historically CETIS has had access to physical servers that sat in a server room somewhere in a University. A recession later and shifts in University policies mean that the abundance of resource is no longer available. While there are lots of external providers are happy to help you produce a flexible service and tie you into their hosting packages it does raise issues. Do we have access to server logs?  Are the logs the same? If not then are the stats produced similar to the stats package we use? Can we even produce stats?

Similarly JISC CETIS is moving away from bespoke code when there are popular services that do the same thing and this raises similar questions.  What stats do the services produce, are they comparable with other services, is there an API and will we have to pay to access what we’ve collected down the line.

  • JISC CETIS is more distributed from a people point of view

Staff in JISC CETIS are technologically savvy and have our opinions on the services and techniques that we like. While I think it is a good thing to have such a technically diverse organisation trying new and exciting things it is also a problem from a stats analysis point of view. Are staff hosting their blogs, events and resources on cloud services and if so how do we measure the use of these resources?

  • A call for more sophisticated analytics

In JISC CETIS there is an increasing call to know more about the things we do and how they are used. It is important for any organisation to respond to its environment and the questions we are asking ourselves about our resources are becoming more and more complex. Log files can only give you so much information and it seems that Javascript solutions are needed to answer these questions. Recent improvements in solutions such as Google Analytics offer real in depth analysis of your web traffic and resource usage

Implementation Woes

A simple step that we have taken is to start to role out javascript tracking  with Google Analytics over the CETIS services, but even that simple act starts to highlight issues. The first thing we noticed was that visitor numbers were hardly comparable. Some early thoughts on why this might be:

  • Google Analytics is more intelligent when it comes to what is and isn’t a visitor or a bot
  • Google Analytics is Javascript based and will not count anything if the tracking code is not executed for some reason
  • The hacks for Google Analytics to track binary files and RSS are not very good.

A hybrid solution

Despite the changing environment and early hiccups I feel positive about working towards a new web analytics strategy. I wrote this in an attempt to get my head around the issue and I think now I have some key starting ideas. I think that a hybrid solution is required as javascript solutions are more portable and answer more complex answers but are difficult to implement in such a distributed organisation and are held back by some of the limitations of javascript. I feel that we have to become more intelligence about how we analyse the data, my view is that analytics should be taken with a pinch of salt and that it is not about how high the figures are but about trends in these figures and that a good strategy for CETIS would be to identify places in its online resources with stats that can be compared and trends identified.

Finally I think that as organisations become more distributed and stats become more personal a web analytics strategy becomes more of an individual responsibility. I’m not quite sure what an effective strategy where analysis of individuals resources trends is helped to steer the organization as a whole would look like.

More to come...

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Validating XCRI 1.2 with Schematron

By dms2ect | September 23, 2011

I’ve started writing a Schematron ruleset that can be used to validate your own XCRI-CAP document so that you can get something that looks like this.

Validation

You can grab my work so far from google code. So far the ruleset only checks the core elements but I intend to work on it further soon. If your new to schematron you I recommend a scan of the schematron site and should be able to work out what to do with the ruleset by following the instructions on an old post of mine.

If anybody feels the urge to update or improve the ruleset please feel free too :)

Posted in learning opportunities | Leave a comment

Playing with canvas and webgl

By dms2ect | April 21, 2011

I finally got around to playing with the HTML 5 canvas element and attempted to build a quick game to compare the process to my past experiences of Adobe Flash.

I was quite surprised with how much I was able to do using only canvas, WebGl, the gamma JS library and some example code. I was able to create:

  • Platforms
  • A controllable entity that the ‘camera’ follows
  • Enemy objects with collision detection
  • Dynamic Lighting
  • Multiple Levels
  • Basic Textures
  • Entities from COLLADA files

Although I was amazed that I could do these things the process wasn’t easy, it was a lot of work to do many of the things that I would take for granted in flash.

Fortunately there seems to be an explosion of libraries and game engines built using these standards that will make the process much easier and if you do want to create a game using canvas I would recommend not trying to reinvent the wheel and sticking to one of these. Although with there being so many of these engines popping up it’s quite hard to tell which ones will gain the most popularity.

While there might be some catching up to do for canvas/WebGL games the quality is increasing at an incredible rate while free libraries and game engines lower the entry level to creating them. While flash might be the weapon of choice for web based game developers now I feel Adobe will have to do something special to keep up.

The game is very basic and was just an attempt to see what was possible, still if you want to play it you can find it here and you'll need the latest chrome/firefox/safari.

Posted in standards | 2 Comments

Thoughts on Agent Based Models and Institutional Systems

By dms2ect | April 18, 2011

Over the past few months I have developed an interest in agent-based modelling using tools such as Netlogo, RePast or Swarm. These tools combined with increases in processing power make it incredible easy to get started and soon sucked me in.

Agent-based models are computation models that are used to make predictions about the interactions of agents in a system and how these interactions may affect the system on a whole. Quite often the systems being modelled are ones where simple small interactions on a low level have a huge effect on the overall system at a higher level such as how greenhouse gasses blocking infrared light might have an effect on global temperature (have a play on the model by Lisa Schultz here!)

After playing with these models I got me wondering about the possibilities of modelling the interactions of agents within educational institutions and how we could use these techniques to explain the emergence of behaviour but at the same time I have worried about how we would validate these models without ‘hard data’.

Here at the University of Bolton we have recently switched VLE to Moodle and it appeared to me that what could seem like a simple process of ‘changing the VLE’ was actually made up of very complex communications and interactions between the staff based here. Using this as a starting point I got together with a colleague and started to create a model that explained how we thought the communications within the University might look and how these communications could be disrupted or improved using technology.

At 2011 Cal Conference in Manchester my colleague Mark Johnson presented the model as a way of explaining how we thought technological interventions could be used to change communications and how this might have an effect on the how the institutions works on a whole.

The model showed the different types of communications between certain groups of people and how these communications could change when they people were placed in different social situations or when technological interventions were made.

Agent Based Model Netlogo
Screenshot of Netlogo's Patch while the model is running

I thought the response from the audience was great, who did not worry about the validity of the model itself but seemed to find the visual representation of how we thought technical intervention may change communication useful. The reaction of the audience at the session made me realise that a powerful aspect of agent-based modelling might simply be the ability to demonstrate what your view on a problem is.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Playing with PROD v0.01

By dms2ect | October 20, 2010

PROD is a project directory-monitoring tool for JISC funded projects; and used within JISC CETIS to aid in programme support. I feel that although the tool holds a great deal of interesting information on projects it is sometimes hard to convey that information to people who do not use the tool on a daily basis. I have been wondering how it might be possible to help disseminate some of the information in PROD to a wider audience. I thought I would start by taking a programme that has a rich array of information in PROD such as Curriculum Design and see how it might be possible to make the information more interesting.

Wordl of Standards and Technologies used in Curriculum Design according to PROD

Wordl of Standards and Technologies used in Curriculum Design according to PROD

One of my experiments was to try and get PROD to generate something visual for users to click and explore. Below is one of my first attempts at getting PROD to generate a mind map for the programme entries in PROD. You should be able to click and drag around the map to get a richer picture of the programme and embed this Google gadget in your own web pages. I think the interface is a little hard to use so you may want to download the XML that can be imported into your own copy of freemind or view the mindmap in a separate window. I hope to tweak the map to include items such as hyper links out to relevant projects and information.

Finally I tried to use the graphviz set of visual rendering tools to show relationships between the different projects in the programme. I haven’t attempted to tidy these up or make much sense of these yet. You can click to get the larger version/

Posted in curriculum design | 1 Comment

FSD Village Pump

By dms2ect | September 15, 2010

The Village Pump is an information hub for activities relating to the Flexible Service Design programme. The hub is a go to place for FSD related articles, events and contact information. Articles in the hub are aggregated from sources using their RSS feed and currently we gather information sources such as blogs, JISCMAIL lists and forums.

We would like to populate the hub with as much useful information as possible so if you have any suggestions on sources you would like to see aggregated in to the village pump or if you are running a project blog and would like its posts to be aggregated then please comment on this entry with information and RSS feed.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Getting started with the Cloudworks API

By dms2ect | July 15, 2010

The Cloudworks team have been developing an API for Cloudworks to allow developers to create their own visualizations, programs and mash ups. The API currently supports calls to get data and I found this is a great opportunity to test different ways of visualizing and organising the resources within cloudworks for the Design Bash 2010. Sheila MacNeill has created a cloud to store and discuss Cloudworks API tests, my test demos can be found there and the cloud works team are encouraging developers to get stuck in and have a go.

If you would like to play with the API yourself and add your own demos you will need to get an API by signing up to Cloudworks and contacting Nick Freear. There is some excellent documentation on using the API already made available by the Cloudworks team and Nick was happy to provide example code, his PHP example can be seen here (don't forget to change the user agent/api key/cloud id):

Edit: Removed the code since the best place to grab a PHP example is Nicks snippler.

This should get you up and running and is pretty self-explanatory. I hope to turn my demos into something more useful and post some specific examples of things that can be achieved using the Cloudworks API.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Deploying Content Transcoder

By dms2ect | April 28, 2010

I have had a few requests for help on deploying the Content Transcoder on a local machine. The process is simple but has one or two gotchas. I have done this on OS X and Ubuntu but it should be pretty similar  on Windows.

You will need:

Java

Tomcat 6.x As far as I can tell it must be 6+ since the transcoder doesn't seem to play nice with the XSLT processor packed with earlier versions.

Latest snapshot build of the transcoder. You are looking for the latest modified .war file. Once downloaded you will want to rename it transcoder.war

Set up Tomcat

1)You will need to unpack tomcat; I unpacked mine to the desktop.

2)Set permissions on Tomcat directory; I opened a terminal (/Applications/Terminal) and typing something along the following:

sudo chmod -R 755 /Users/david/Desktop/tomcat/

You may also need to set the environment variable JAVA_HOME.  On OS X you may find this guide helpful.  On Windows Right click computer->properties and go to the Advanced tab. Select Environment Variables and add JAVA_HOME setting it to point at the JDK. i.e c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.*

Deploy Transcoder

Deploying the transcoder is as simple as placing the war file into your /tomcat/webapps folder. Tomcat will do the dirty work for you.

Run Tomcat

Tomcat can then by run running the startup.sh script or startup.bat for windows; in your terminal this can by done by  something like this:

/Users/david/Desktop/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

Now you should be able to see tomcat in your web browser at localhost:8080 and transcoder at localhost:8080/transcoder.

Tweek Transcoder configurations

You may want to make some changes to how transcoder is set up. You will need to change the configuration to use Apache Derby instead of the default MySQL. This can be done by editing the file at:

tomcat/webapps/transcoderWEB-INF/deployment.properties

This should be a text file with two sets of properties with the bottom set commented out, you need to switch these around so the files look like this:

#hibernate.jdbc_driver=org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver
#hibernate.username=k-int
#hibernate.password=k-int
#hibernate.default_auto_commit=false
#hibernate.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/transcoder
#hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update
#hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect

hibernate.jdbc_driver=org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver
hibernate.username=APP
hibernate.password=APP
hibernate.url=jdbc:derby:derbydb;create=true
hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.DerbyDialect
hibernate.default_auto_commit=false
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update

Restart tomcat

You may then wish to stop and start tomcat:

Users/david/Desktop/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

Users/david/Desktop/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

On windows you are looking for startup.bat and shutdown.bat

Now you should be ready to go simply by pointing your favorite web browser at localhost:8080/transcoder

Help its not working!

I see tomcat at localhost:8080 but nothing at localhost:8080/transcoder.
If you didn't rename your war you will need to navigate to localhost:8080/transcoder-web-****

I see transcoder but it won't convert packages.
If you changed the properties above and still have no luck the chances are that your JAVA_HOME is not set correctly. Google and a bit of tinkering should sort you out.

Posted in Cloud Computing | Leave a comment