The Australian government has recently announced plans to introduce a website to provide “information on student characteristics, test results and sources of income”
I think it would be tremendous if the government also specified that the raw data behind those reports should be made available, either as a data dump, or via APIs. That would enable crowd-sourced deep analysis of the data, as well as an exciting set of mashups.
As far as I know I haven’t seen any discussion of this aspect of the proposal. I believe this is much more important than what form the official reporting ends up taking, because it would enable individuals and groups to present their own reports, highlighting what they believe is important to them.
The NRMToolbar site is a “set of online tools and databases to make it easier for NRM (Natural Resource Management) professionals to find and share relevant information.” The search on this site is a good example of the capabilities of OpenDSM. For example it lets your decide which repositories or content types to search, and - unlike many DSM installations - is configured to use the “Wait All” strategy for waiting for search results. Most installations use the “Wait Fast” strategy, which means that the engine will wait a configured amount of time, and then display all results brought back at that point, with a link which allows you to retry getting more results. “Wait All” means that the overall search can take longer, but will be more comprehensive because it has waited for all results.
One thing I’ve been working on over the past few month has been preparing OpenDSM for release as an open source product (See Jerry’s blog for more details). It’s been an interesting task - DSM is a mature product with years of development behind it. That has the benefit that it is stable and well tested (it has supported millions of searches per year for a number of years now), but the code wasn’t designed with modularity in mind.
Now we’ve worked though that I think it will be useful for a lot of people. The OpenDSM page on the education.au website links to some of the places it is currently used, but probably understates its usefulness. For example, it comes an OpenSearchadaptor, as well as a Solradapator, which means it can be used to federate results from any number of OpenSearch and/or Solr servers together with a number of different sorting strategies. Other adapters are also available.
The latest version of me.edu.au adds support for XFN: The XHTML Friends Network. This makes it possible for tools to automagically link your multiple online identities together.
XFN uses a system of claims and verifications to determine how online identities are linked together. Claims are made using HTML links, using the rel=”me” attribute. If the target site has a link back to the origin also using the rel=”me” attribute that claim is said to be verified.
Why is this important to the education sector? It is a critical building block needed to create distributed ePortfolios.
Tool support for XFN is still in the early stages. Google has provided critical momentum by developing their Social Graph API (note that this relies on updates to Google’s search index, which at the time of writing hasn’t occurred for me.edu.au). Plaxo has an demonstration application; the Online Identity Consolidator. This does work with me.edu.au - the output from processing my profile can be seen here.
While the OLPC (the “$100 laptop”) has had plenty of media attention, perhaps Literacy Bridge (the “$5 MP3 player”) is equally deserving:
We are building the Talking Book Device, a low cost audio player and recorder, for children and adults in the developing world. Children and adults will use the device for literacy learning and knowledge sharing.
I’ve just done a new release of me.edu.au. This doesn’t have any large new features (we want to give it a chance to bed down before adding stuff), but there are a couple of minor enhancements which are worth highlighting.
Secondly each community has its own RSS feed, which can be reached by appending “/rss” to the community’s url. For example, the web2ools community has RSS available here (They also support RSS auto-discovery, so your browser should display a RSS icon which you can click to see that RSS).
There’s a number of bug fixes (eg, the image on your full profile screen will no longer get expanded to 200×200 pixels), but hopefully they aren’t the kinds of things too many people have noticed!
me.edu.au seems to have had a pretty good response, with lots of useful feedback coming in.
A small disclaimer: this only represents my opinions, not necessarily the opinions of the whole me.edu.au team at education.au. Any time I say I’d like me.edu.au to include a feature it means only that -I’d like it to. As a team we have to make hard decisions about how best to deploy limited resources - we need to choose which bugs to fix, which feature requests to implement, and which new services to add to me.edu.au. Your feedback helps us in making those choices, because without it we just do what we think we should do, and frankly - you are in a better position than us to decide what would help you best.
Now that’s out of the way…
Firstly, my post on RSS & APML support produced a number of comments. The most common request was RSS support for communities. To me this seems like a sensible thing to support, and I don’t see any problems in getting it implemented.
Also related to communities was Kerrie’s post on making online communities work. Kerrie’s correct - building vibrant communities is very important. We see me.edu.au as primarily a way to network with other individual educators - it’s all about me! me.edu.au communities are designed to me much more “lightweight” than edna groups, and really grew out of the work we did in an edna proof-of-concept project we did early in 2007 around community forming around tags in social bookmarking system. However, we don’t expect what we have now to be the final version. For instance, we are addressing some of the issues we see in the groups user interface. The next release - in early January - will re-organise the tag cloud to take into account the number of links and messages in each community instead of just the number of people.
Graham Wegner wrote a nice post about his introduction to me.edu.au. In the comments on that post there’s an interesting discussion about whether me.edu.au is a “walled garden” or not. My view is that it isn’t - it’s true that you need to register to use it, but apart from that we’ve been very aggressive in a policy of embracing the internet. We’re not in a position to replicate all the useful tools around - our vision for me.edu.au is to try to draw attention to the ways people are using those tool.
John Larkin wrote a thoughtful comment in response to Graham’s post, too. It’s worth reading, but to respond to some of the issues raised:
Image resize issue: Yes, it’s a bug, and should be fixed in the next release (we’ll use the 100×100 image on the full page).
Fractured communities based on misspellings: Yes, it’s an issue we are aware of. We hope the suggestions (as you type on the edit interests screen), along with the improvements to the community browse screen (see above) will help this.
Feed addresses that start with “feed://”: I’m not too keen about supporting this actually. The “feed:” uri scheme is a non-standard extension, which breaks a significant number of browsers. Postel’s Law says we should support it, but I think its a fairly low priority. I think it is more important to support feed auto-discovery so when someone enters a url for a blog it will discover the RSS feed.
Finally, Mike Seyfang points to his Web2ools community - I think he’s looking for some feedback.
It’s Christmas tomorrow, which makes it the perfect time to mention two easter eggs [1] in me.edu.au.
Firstly, RSS output support for your activities. This lets someone else subscribe to what you are doing on me.edu.au. To see this go to your public profile (mine is http://me.edu.au/p/nlothian) and then append “/rss” to the address (eg, http://me.edu.au/p/nlothian/rss).
These are still early days for APML, and as such there aren’t a lot of service providers supporting it and even fewer applications that can make use of this data. So, the hope in providing it for Ma.gnolia is that it will help stimulate development of APML-powered services that can offer us new ways of looking at what we do as we travel the web.
That’s a sentiment we can echo here.
So there you go - two presents for you from me.edu.au. We aim to have a new release with a few bug fixes early in the new year. In the mean time, let us know what you think, either here or in the me-edu-au community.
[1] I guess they don’t really meet the definition of an easter egg, since they aren’t jokes. However, they are features which aren’t documented anywhere else as far as I know.
As part of a recent leadership program here at education.au Simon (no blog), Will (no blog) and myself took the opportunity to develop a concept for a new style of search engine, designed to supplement the edna distributed search engine with better support for querying structured metadata.
We designed a new type of search interface, using query refinement to guide users to their goal, rather than the traditional advanced query form. This was accomplished using the open source Solr search engine (hence the name - Johannes Kepler discovered the laws which govern the movement of the planets in the solar system. Yes… we know it’s kind of a geeky joke.)
Using the OAI-PMH protocol we were able to harvest metadata from a number of open repositories around the world.
In our test system we ended up with 2.2 million records from around 40 repositories. Thanks to Solr we’re still able to do sub-one second searches on most queries.
(please visit website if this movie doesn’t work in your blog reader - or if you don’t see the movie at all)
We have implemented KeplR as a Javascript application, which means it can be places on any third-party site with a single line of Javascript. It is also possible to restrict the search to a single repository - or combinations of repositories - which means that site specific search engines can be implemented with no coding. I’ll save a demo of that for another post.
