Robust systems

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 day.

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Analytics for Higher Education

CETIS Analytics Series coversWe’ve just finished a lengthy spell of research and reporting that has culminated in three publications in the CETIS Analytics Series. These are:

Links in the list above point to individual download pages.

Crazily, for someone who would like some free time to follow up diverse interests, my mind has now been drifting to two larger writing projects, one a book on the use of Personal Learning Environments in Formal Education, and the other a book on Agile Methods, tentatively called Shuhari, about steps to mastery of agile practices.

We shall see what actually gets written, most of Hedtek’s time is now being taken up by steps close to the release of our assessment system as a webservice.

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libUX: Improving user experience in libraries within UK HE

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.

From the executive summary:

This report surveys some of the changes that are affecting or will affect users’ experience of library systems (libUX) within Higher Education.

Factors germane to libUX are surveyed in a changing landscape section of the report. These include hardware and platform issues; most importantly, library system use will be changed markedly by adoption of mobile technology, in part driven by decreasing cost and increasing hardware capability. Discovery is a problematic issue for future libraries; their traditional role in providing search facilities is being undermined by global search services including Google and Google Scholar. Further, the increased prominence of electronic resources (including e-books, online serials, and Open Educational Resources) will change the ways libraries need to operate.

It is proposed that various measures need to be put in place to ensure that libraries can respond to these changes. These measures include implementing libUX roles within libraries, including providing training to develop staff placed in these roles, meaningful involvement of users in the development of future library systems, and appropriate funding.

Results of a small ethnographic survey of school leavers and university students and their perceptions of reading, study, and university libraries are included as an appendix.

The report was commissioned by SCONUL, with funding from JISC.

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Paper prototyping: mLibrary 2012 presentation

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 has its own advantages, probably the subject of another post if asked about in the comments.

While paper provides significant examples, particularly for encouraging participatory design, at Hedtek we have moved on from paper protyping, preferring to deliver working code and UIs as part of our agile practices. Hey, different stokes for different folks! We are lucky enough to have skilled developers who can modify delivered functionality and user interfaces to order.

But this agile practice is not always the case, recently I’ve been sketching and, through sketches, exploring interfaces with one of our clients who wants to break new ground in computer-supported decision making.

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Product Launch: Gradient e-Assessment

Gradient main marker page

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 student feedback.
  • Feedback is structured for student use, even by less motivated students.
  • Easy reuse and adaption of past feedback.
  • Criterion referenced assessment
  • Faster marking turnaround and improved feedback helps improve National Student Survey scores on assessment and feedback.
  • Built-in quality assurance mechanisms, including mark traceability.
  • Support for institution-specific assessment lifecycles.
  • Ease of use means minimal training requirements.

See the product description.

Gradient is offered as an institutional system, institutionally hosted or hosted by ourselves, and, in a cut down version (without institutional support, but with our superb marking and feedback facilities) over the web as markitquickly.com.

We’re not stopping here: Future developments will include support for multi-media assessment, peer assessment and Calibrated Peer Review. Ultimately these formative peer assessment techniques will form part of our institutional- and community -focussed Personal Learning Environment.

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Statistics: we’re doing well !

Hedtek dev blogSince 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; average 50/day.

In the last five months we’ve developed our e-assessment system, Gradient. While developing Gradient we implemented some 340 user stories and user interface features. During this, parts of Gradient were re-implemented up to seven times as we learned more about the domain, our solution, and the advanced technology that we need to use to provide simple and easy-to-use application functionality.

During this we have averaged about 1.23 person days development per user story or user interface feature, but this is heavily skewed by longer times at the start of the project. In effect, as the product owner I know at the start of the day that the top for or five stories in our kanban backlog are likely to be in the demo column by the end of the day.

Notes

Gradient is an institutional assessment system that offers significant advantages for teachers, learners, and administrators. adoption.

Gradient (without its institutional features) is  also a web app that individual teachers can use to set, administer, mark assessments and supply feedback to students.  MarkItQuicky runs in the cloud, and is available in beta form at markitquickly.com and (soon) markitquick.ly. Students take assessments via a cloud version of the Gradient Taker Tool or via a VLE (for the latter we are working on Moodle integration at the moment, with BlackBoard following thereafter).

 

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First paid Moodle work

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 to the Moodle community.

More Moodle work most welcome!

 

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The FishDelish Project: Open linked data for species description

A sample fishdelish page

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.

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Finished Jorum contracts

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 user interface was implemented by the provision of a new front-end webservice to handle all user interaction including new navigation and discovery features. The new front end was  implemented in Ruby on Rails, and used the DSpace REST and SWORD APIs to communicate with Jorum’s DSpace core.

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

dev blog title

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 our Ruby on Rails technology stack.

To date, these gems have been downloaded at an average rate of 35/day, with, to date, 467 downloads. That’s good :) .

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