Author Archives: Mark van Harmelen

Robust systems

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: February 1, 2013
How pleasing to have a potential client, a developer who knows us and our work well, sitting in our office, discussing a startup and work for the startup, saying words to the effect of: “I’m sitting here talking about this job because I know the systems you build are robust.” Thanks @spotlightkid, you made my [...]
Posted in projects, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Analytics for Higher Education

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: December 4, 2012
We’ve just finished a lengthy spell of research and reporting that has culminated in three publications in the CETIS Analytics Series. These are: Analytics for the Whole Institution: Balancing Strategy and Tactics with David Kay of Sero Consulting Analytics for Learning and Teaching Analytics for Understanding Research Links in the list above point to individual [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

libUX: Improving user experience in libraries within UK HE

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: September 24, 2012
Here’s a report (pdf) we wrote for SCONUL on future user experience of libraries in the UK Higher Education sector. Notably, the work here includes a small ethnographic survey of UK HE student perspectives on the constraints and affordances of e-libraries by Dave Randall of Unique Adequacy Ltd. We recommend more work of this kind. [...]
Posted in announcements, libraries, reports | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Paper prototyping: mLibrary 2012 presentation

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: September 24, 2012
Various participants at M-Libraries 2012 asked for a copy of my invited presentation from today. Here it is for download. One thing that I don’t touch on in the presentation is the variety of prototypes that could be constructed, the talk only covers paper prototyping, and, particularly, not wireframes, low and high fidelity prototypes. Each [...]
Posted in seminars and keynotes | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Product Launch: Gradient e-Assessment

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: September 10, 2012
On the verge of the ALT-C 2012 conference in Manchester, Hedtek are proud to launch Gradient, our new e-assessment system. Gradient provides solutions for tests, assignments and exams, and supports multiple formats, including for handwritten answer books. Gradient offers: A superb interactive experience for markers Faster and more consistent marking. Enhanced student learning through personalised, actionable [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Statistics: we’re doing well !

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: September 1, 2012
Since we started out developer blog five months ago we’ve added 36 posts and had more than 4,600 page views; on average 33 times a day. Over a similar time frame our open source gems have been downloaded almost 3,800 times. Meanwhile, our main site (you’re using it) is getting about 1,500 visitors a month; [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

First paid Moodle work

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: July 25, 2012
One of our part-time staff is a Moodle Committer (ie someone who helps look after Moodle source code). Together we are doing our first Moodle job, a small extension to the Moodle Web Services interface. Somewhat noise in the scheme of things, but it helps a friend company, and we’ll contribute the resultant code back [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The FishDelish Project: Open linked data for species description

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: April 25, 2012
Events today made me realise that we never blogged about FishDelish here, a project that we performed June 2010 to July 2011, in partnership with the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science (UMCS) and the FishBase Information and Research Group Inc (FIN), a not-for-profit NGO.
Posted in announcements, architecture, education, projects | Leave a comment

Finished Jorum contracts

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: April 16, 2012
Hedtek are pleased to announce that they have finished their third contract for Jorum, an Open Educational Resource repository run by Mimas, a JISC funded National Data Centre. As the major part of that work we designed and developed a very clean user interface to replace Jorum’s rather arcane and frustrating user interface. The new [...]
Posted in announcements, architecture, education, open source, projects | 2 Comments

Hedtek’s new developer blog and some newly open sourced gems

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: April 11, 2012
Announcing that we’ve started a developer blog for notes on the technologies we use, experiments we have performed, etc. One post is on Ember.js , which we are using in a current development project.  As part of that project, we have recently open sourced four gems that we are using to help us deploy Ember in [...]
Posted in announcements, open source, projects | 1 Comment