Category Archives: announcements

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. [...]
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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.
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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 [...]
Also posted in 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 [...]
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Hedtek now has a dream team

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: February 2, 2012
It’s been a while, in fact a couple of years since Dave Workman and I decided that we wanted to employ more developers. As essentially a two person company, Dave and I used to bemoan how we couldn’t find anyone that we wanted to work with. From experience with one company we used to outsource [...]
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Third consecutive Jorum contract

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: February 2, 2012
Mimas at the University of Manchester and Hedtek recently signed the third consecutive contract for Hedtek to provide technical assistance to Jorum.
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COMP61511 and learning Ruby

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: September 18, 2011
This is a post that may disappear from this blog, it’s for COMP61511, a postgraduate course unit that we teach annually to postgraduate computer scientists at the University of Manchester. This is a course that will be unlike any others you have done in your education to date; co-operative peer-assisted looms large: you end up working [...]
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JISC personalisation projects survey and synthesis

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: January 9, 2011
Hedtek and Sero Consulting Ltd were recently commissioned by JISC to perform a survey and synthesis of the outputs of JISC-funded  personalisation projects. The results of this work appear at personalisation.jisc.ac.uk. A total of 25 funded projects were examined. Project outputs included analysis, user research, prototyping, service development and examination of key technical and operational issues. [...]
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Project award: fishDelish

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: June 8, 2010
We are very pleased to have a strong role in the fishDelish Project awarded to the  University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science by the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC). Our co-partners in the project include FIN Inc, a not-for profit NGO that has created and runs FishBase, a 400M hit per annum species-specific database. [...]
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Project award: ourWikiBooks

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: June 8, 2010
We are very pleased to have a role in the recently announced ourWikiBooks Project awarded to the Manchester University’s School of Computer Science by the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC). The project will  investigate student authorship of textbook material: “OurWikiBooks will undertake co-development, with teachers and GCSE and A-level students, of a new digital collection of key [...]
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