Busy, busy, busy!

Hi there!

Here's what I've been up to over the past couple of months...

MA Archaeology & Sustainable Development:

This is a new MA which requires 8 or 9 online modules, one of which I have just finished today. It involved scanning approximately 60 articles of varying length (10-100+ pages) which took ages.

CMIT

I'm invigilating the ECDL exams again but alas, no Talking Technology this yerar due to falling student numbers. The culprit is the new student module booking system which means that students book their modules easily online and so don;t come round to CMIT to talk to us!

Distance Learning

Student numbers have dropped here too but I'm still currently tutoring the Beginning Java and Progrmaming with VB.Net modules.

Royal Albert Memorial Museum

Tony at the RAMM has asked for a new website on the recent Beauty exhibition. SHould get underway with this soon

Geevor Infomine

Just about finished the infomine and now ready to move onto the e-leanring site. Oh yes...there's more!


So, lots of balls in the air at the moment. On the fun side, I donned a pink wig and raised money for Breast Cancer Awareness last month and am looking forward to our Christmas party in December.

Until then though...more work!

Bye for now

Ian

New Academic Year

Oh yes, it's that time again. AFter working on the Geevor project for the last month I've suddenly realised that the new semester is just around the corner...yikes!

So, there's currently 16 modules to update for WebCT and 3 completely new ones to design and load up. Plus, I'm off to Ireland for 10 days at the end of the month.

So, if you don't hear from me for a little while...that's why!

Better get on with it.

Ian

Geevor Mine Project

Hi,

It's mid summer now which means that the university workload decreases slightly for a month so there is time to get on with other projects. One of which is the 'Geevor Infomine'! The Geevor mine is a museum down in Cornwall based at an old Tin Mine and they want a web based information system in the museum for the visitors. That's where we come in. I'm currently developing this for a series of touch screen computers, attempting to allow users to quickly find out about objects on display.

Here's the current look:



The boxes move around the screen to get the visitors attention as theyt pass and there are links to increase the text size, show more information and change exhibitions in the museum. It's got the thumbs up so far so we'll se how it goes.

The museum also want a public website with the same information, but a slightly different look since they infomine doesn;t work particularly well in Firefox. However, since it is only to be shown in house, this isn;t a problem.

More soon!

Ian

OU Update

Hi again,

Just a quick opporuntity o update the blog on what's been happening with the OU lately. I've got a couple of students residing at HMP Shepton Mallet this year which has been a bit of an experience due to the OUs policy that all students receive 6 hours face-to-face tuition. So, twice now I've made the journey up to Shepton and sat down for a couple of hours with my students, who are doing well and on course to pass!

I've also given two 'normal' tutorials and attended an afternoons worth of presentations in Bristol last Saturday on plageurism and student retention which were both very interested. Essentially, plageurism is handled in different ways depening on the level and the studetn and the best way to hols onto students is to ring them up at the start of the year. Too late for that now but I might do a little experiment next time round.

Finally, Barbara, my staff tutor sat in on the tutorial last week and I'm pleased to say was very impressed with my presentation, more so that the interview board the other day ;-)

Bye for now

Ian

New Job?

Hi,

I went for a new job a couple of weeks ago, it was in the Skills Team which is part of the Education Enhancement department here at the university. It was a bit more money and up at the main campus. I attended the interview porcess and gave a couple of presentations plugging my experience as a web developer. However, I did get the impression after a while that it wasn;t technical know-how they were after, but rather more experience of training and university diplomacy.

SO, I didn't get it, which is all well and good because I was seriously considering turning it down had I been offered the job (honest!). The interview panel seemed to think that investing time and money in advanced e-learning techniques wasn't justifiable where I think that Exeter should be at the forefont of e-learning...it's what students expect nowadays and I wouldn't be content just throwing stuff up onto WebCT so I could tick a box. That's not how I work.

So, the best result for everyone I think. I've always been happy in ELaC at St Lukes and I'll be here for a while yet. We do cutting edge web development here. Why did I ever think the grass was greener?

Ian

Electrician Website

Hi again,

Another project I'm working on, this time for a private client, is to produce a website for an electrician. It's still in the draft phase but here is a screenshot as we stand:



This produced an interesting conundrum since the client requested the use of flashing light bulbs in the design but, try as I might, I couldn't work them in. Still, the project is not over yet!

I've used images and fades to present the different services offered by the company as a more modern way rather than relying on textual links. I find that this works particulalry well on a home page, but for the pther pages I'll produce links with smaller images so they don't clutter the pages up or take anything away from the important information.

Hope you like it.

Bye for now.

Ian

Work Update - History of Education Bibliography Website

Hi,

Lately I've been working on the backend user interface and database structure for a new website which categorises articles on the History of Education. A couple of colleagues are looking after the front end (the part that will be publicly available over the net) but my job is to create a set of pages for the data entry. I don't have to enter the data itself (which is good because there are 3000 postcards worth of it).

So, the trick here was to read the specifications and what the clients actually wanted to do with the site and then get the database in the correct format to hold the data so the querying could be done properly and efficiently.

I used PHP and a MySQL database, accessed by SQLYog to develop this and here's what it looks like:



I worked closely with the administrator (who would be entering the data) and the academics in the School of Education who, effectively, are the clients to create a database and web interface that is easy to use and will store all of the data in a format useable by my colleagues here in ELAC who will be running the SQL queries on the data via the websites front end. So you see, a lot of things to think about. This is sometimes the trouble when working as a cog in a larger machine. When a team of developers work on a project it's really important to keep communicating so you don;t end up with a database good for the administrators but poor for the front end or vice versa.

If you're interested, here's the link of the main website:

http://dll.ex.ac.uk/hoebibliography/index.php

Ian

New Semester = New Modules

The end of 2007 saw the first semester of the academic year draw to a close. So, I've been frantically marking assignments from the Beginning Java module and the VB.Net module. Again, the start to the year has exploded with the amount of work afoot.

The new semester has seen 3 more distance learning modules begin, Talking Technology: my new face to face module and M257: Putting Java to work, with the OU. ECDL has also begun and then there's the History of Education online bibliography project which involves entering the data from 3000 postcards into a MySQL database and producing a front end worthy of the School of Education. Other institutions have attempted this before but the outcome has always seemed rather basic and amateurish in my opioion. With the new Web 2.0 ideas of user collaboration we are using tagclouds where users can enter there own tags and so build up a tag cloud of there own. You see the site is about journal articles that the heads of school has categorised themselves. But what if the users disagreee with the categorisation? Then they can make there own = Web 2.0.

It's like a wiki really...hurrah, I've finally found a use for one!

I've also got plans to look further into the use of JSP and speech recognition, plus using one of the flat 'tablet' PCs which you can write on. A couple of my colleagues use these and seem to get on with them quite well, especially in meetings when you want to record notes easily and safely.

So, that's what I'm up to at the moment. Back soon.

Ian

An example of what a website can become...

Hi, I helped a colleague out yesterday who was having trouble with his departmental website. On the face of it, it's a good site. It looks quite good and is fairly easy to navigate, although it has a low of content and could use a better menu system. What I found really interesting though was it's use of so many different server side programming langauges. The site generally uses ASP but some of it is written in Javascript which was never really used very much and some in VBScript which although was used greatly (and was the first language I learnt) is not used so much today since the release of ASP.Net.

There is also some CGI stuff using Perl which is completely outdated now. The most useful thing to do here would be to start again using PHP. The design could then be changed to give a better nav system and the current data still used since it is stored in databases. However, this would of course be at a cost but worth it if the site was required to expand.

So you see, by getting different developers to bolt new functionality onto a site you end up with a beast that is very hard to decipher. It's best to plan from the start what you want to do, how you want to do it and figure out as best you can what might need to be added to it in the future and work this in somehow. It's called scalability and is a very useful concept in web design.

Ok, that's enough of a rant for now. As I said the site doesn;t look to bad from the outside, but from a programming view point...

http://www.swslim.org.uk/

Ian

Facebook

One of the most used social networking sites on the web is Facebook. I'd say that well over half of all students use Facebook regularly and some instituations have even started setting up their won groups for freshers so that they can meet people via the site before ever setting foot at the university.

I'm currently creating the University of Exeter's first Facebook application to inform students of important information from the site's profile section. Since I imagine more students use Facebook than the University's own site, this seems like a good way to get our information across.

Facebook apps are written mostly in PHP and hosted on the developers own server. However, the real power of Facebook development coes from using the data provided by the site, such as profile information or friends details. This can be done by using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) which is run on a 'canvas' page. These pages can then update the info seen on the user's profile page itself and there is even a hack to be able to change all users profile pages who have the app installed. Very powerful stuff!

I'm continuing to develop this and meeting with other academics later this week. It has the go ahead from the head of school so expect the University of Exeter on a Facebook near you soon.

Ian

Start of the New Academic Year

Hi,

The new academic year is about to start and this year I've been asked to teach a new moddule - Talking Technology - which, as the name suggests, invites students to present a 30 minute seminar on an agreed topic chosen from a list of computing issues. The range of topics cover cyber terrorism, internet security, social networking sites and virtual worlds like Second Life (something that I've got to try...but have never quite found the time!).

I've also been put forward as an invigilator for our ECDL (European Computer Driving License) module which requires students to pass an copmputer based test in real time (as opposed to going away and completing it like an assignment).

Both of these courses are offered through CMIT, Creative Media and IT, who are based in the Queen's building on the mainsite so I'll be going up there quite regularly from now on.

So, with these new modules and my four distance learning courses I'll be very busy with teaching over the next two semesters. But, I wouldn't have it any other way!

Ian

Work Update - Web forms

Hi,

Now that things have quietened down during August, I've been left with a web project while my co-workers have hotfooted it out of the office to take advantage of the warmer weather.

The web project involves a set of forms, each of which send the user's input to a database before moving onto the next form. In subsequent forms the user is asked to choose some of the input from the previous forms and extend upon it or remove it from a summary that is compiled at the end.

So, I now have the task of designing the database structure before writing the code to save the input in the database and (this is the difficult bit) offering previous input in subsequent forms.

Believe it or not, this is an excellent task, one that stretches the web developer to use all of his or her knowledge. It's really chased the boredom away form the long summer days stuck in the office!

I'll let you know how I get on.

Ian

Visual Basic.NET

One of the modules I tutor is called 'Programming with Visual Basic.NET' and as the name implies, it covers all of the basics regarding the VB.NET programming language using the Visual Studio IDE. It's a good course and always attracts a lot of students, mostly due I think to the freely available IDE and the monopoly than Microsoft have on the worlds software applications.
You can use VB.NET to construct windows like applications and get them to interact with MS Office software such as Word and Excel. The language is also used in a slightly different form (Visual Basic for Application) in these MS Office applications themselves, particulalry in Access.

Anyway, due to a colleague's illness I've been marking the assignments for the 'Advanced Programming with Visual Bais.NET' module over the past few weeks which deals with connecting to databases and working with larger, multiform projects. It's taught me a lot more about the language and how powerful it is.

So, if you don't know VB.NET it's an excellent, versatile language to learn that can be used with to enhance any MS Office appliaction and more. Plus, there are plenty of jobs in it!

Ian

Book Review: DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith

I've been looking for a new book for the 'Progrmaming with Javascript' module that I teach for the University of Exeter since the present course material is a little outdated and it's getting more and more difficult to update it every year.

After a great deal of research, the book I've chosen in DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. It's very up to date, even though it was released in 2005, and focuses on scripting in the Document Object Model rather than just teaching handy Javascript code like other books I studied.

The author begins by covering the basics of Javascript before launching into the DOM and using examples to build up your knowledge. Then the author describes some 'best practice' concepts and revisits the examples covered earlier to bring them into line. CSS is also covered later in the book and how this can be altered using Javascript and the DOM.

The whole book is only 12 chapters so the student will not be put off by the number of pages as in some textbooks.

Some points I particularly liked about this book are it's well designed examples (so many books use old designs with fonts like comic sans ms - urrrggghhh!), the use of getAttribute and setAttribute when accessing the elements on the doucment instead of the mor direct old fashioned methods and the understanding that Firefox and not Netscape is now the main contender to IE.

Worth a read if you want to further your Javascript skills!

Ian

Java Powerlinks for WebCT

OK, something I've been workig on that is quite interesting is a Java powerlink for Exeter University's WebCT VLE (Virual Learning Environment).

Essentially, a Powerlink is exactly that, a powerful link from the WebCT system to another bespoke system, bypassing the normal user login screens since the login details are taken directly from WebCT. Cool!

It's all written in Java in a particular way to work with the existing WebCT system, which is also written in Java. Since there are not many people at the university that know how to program in Java, I was given the task! The first thing I did was read the instruction manual and log on to the website. There's a whole site devoted to building Java Powerlinks for WebCT since the VLE is used extensively all over the world. On the site, developers from many different countries ask questions and use the resources provided to create their own powerlinks. As you can imagine, this made the job a lot easier!

It's being tested at the moment so I'll keep you updated as to it's progress.

Ian

I'm back

Hi,

After a manic start to the year including getting all of the new Distance Learning courses up and running for the end of January, marking assignments for the Exeter University modules and marking the Open University TMAs (Tutor Marked Assignments) plus an OU tutorial in March, things are finally starting to quiet down.

Hurrah!

I honestly cannot remember such a busy start to the year as this. Still, now that summer seems to have arrived, there should be time to look ahead and plan for the new academic year.

And do some more blogging too...watch this space!

Ian

The OU: Milton Keynes

Hi

I'm due to start tutoring the OU course: 'Putting Java to work' next month and as an induction all of the tutors for this new course were invited up to the OU headquarters in Milton Keynes.

Overall it was a very worthwhile experience. I was able to meet the course team, the staff tutors from Bristol including Barbara and Rita who iterviewed me in September and the other tutors including Anthony Lees who lives in Chudleigh and will be tutoring the Plymouth group. I've got the Bristol group.

So, I'm now looking forward to Saturday's new tutor induction in Taunton and then the start of the course on 3rd February!

Ian

Ultimate Zip - Free Archiving Software

A common problem with running online computing courses is how to ask students to submit their work, especially since many archiving programs are not free (like WinZIP and WinRAR!).

So, here's one that is free. It's called Ultimate Zip and it looks and feels just like WinZIP. You'll be asked to pay for it, but you don't have to!





Take it away today.

www.ultimatezip.com

Apache Web Server including PHP, Perl & MySQL

Hi All,

Web programming is one of my babies. I love it. It's just so satisfying!

What is not satisfying is trying to install the systems that let you do the web programming and using PHP, Perl and MySQL definitely falls into this category.

However, ApAche Friends have come up with a package that easily installs all you need to start progrmaming in these languages. Try the following link...

www.apachefriends.org/en/index.html

...and have fun!

Ian

Adobe Student Edition Programme

Hi All,

Something that one of my colleagues has brought to my notice is that Adobe, who now own Macromedia, offer there web design software packages to students at hugely discounted rates. As far as we can see these should also be available to part time students so if you are interested take a look at the following line...

www.adobe.com/uk/education/students/studentedition

The eligibility details are here:

www.adobe.com/uk/education/students/studentedition/eligibility.html

Also, another colleague noticed that you can also get good rates at Amazon...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_sw_h_/202-8847258-2749429?url=search-alias%3Dsoftware&field-keywords=creative+suite+education&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go

I use Dreamweaver and Flash every day and they really are the industrial standard for web design and animation so if you are interested in Web Design, it may be a thought!

Kind regards

Ian