Mapping the News

Posted on March 11, 2011 by

Client: Biology
Tools used: OpenCalais, Javascript, ColdFusion, Google Maps, Yahoo Pipes

Project Description:

A faculty member in the Biology department teaches a course on the conservation of endangered species. He was looking for a way to engage his students by showing them that the topic under discussion is a contemporary issue, with related events being reported on with some frequency.

Our first step was to identify news feeds from Google and other web sites reporting on wildlife trafficking events. We uses Yahoo Pipes to collate these feeds into a single RSS feed and then displayed that feed using a widget embedded in the course’s web site. As far as visualizing the worldwide impact of such events a text RSS feed only goes so far. It was then that we came up with the idea of “it would be great if we could see these stories on a map” and “it would be great if this could be done automatically”.

There are a few tools out there that attempt to do this automatically but they are either cumbersome to use, slow to respond, cannot be embedded, or just don’t look very good. So we decided to prototype our own version.

Using ColdFusion to process the RSS feed into individual news items we then pass those items to OpenCalais. OpenCalais is a free service that performs “semantic analysis” on any text that is passed to it. Basically, it pulls out and tags people, places, institutions, and any other meaningful piece of information from the text. Once OpenCalais processes on of our news items ColdFusion then scans the response to see if any “geonames” were identified. If so, we pass the geoname back to OpenCalais and it conveniently returns us the coordinates of the location.

We’ve set the coordinates ColdFusion code to fetch and process this news feed once a day. Any news item that gets successfully geo-located is stored in our local database. Now, when someone visits the “news map” page on the course site a little javascript magic shows the news as points on a Google Map. Clicking on a point provides the user with the title, leader, and link to the news item.

A next step for this project would be to allow for faculty/student self-service for new news feeds and embedding in their own blogs, wikis, LMS etc.

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Portfolio Categorization

Posted on March 10, 2011 by

Client: Child Development
Tools used: WordPress

Project Description:

Using the WordPress category function to sort posts by state standards.

Would-be teachers in the Massachusetts public education system need to demonstrate an understanding of the state’s professional standards for teachers. That’s why one of the Child Development instructors came to us to ask if there was an easy-to-use way for her students to create online portfolios that would highlight to prospective employers the work her students are doing that support those standards.

In this case we felt that WordPress would provide the perfect solution.

Each student was given their own WordPress site based on a template that contained pre-defined pages (e.g. resume, teaching philosophy, about me) and a “category” for each of the standards. The students have free reign to modify their site’s look and feel, add/remove content etc. in ways that make it their own. As long as they keep the the pre-defined categories and save new posts to with the appropriate category selected then the site’s run themselves. We also included a “category widget” in each of the sites. A site visitors can then easily list the posts that student has made relating to a specific standard.

Here is an example portfolio site.

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Random Assignment

Posted on March 9, 2011 by

Client: Italian
Tools used: ColdFusion


Project Description:

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to one of the Italian instructors about her clever use of Voicethread (more on that in a future post). As a performance of understanding she asks her students to create Voicethread videos using their newly acquired Italian language skills as a narrative. Not only does each student create their own video but they also have to provide feedback, in Italian, to five of their classmates. Her question to me was “Do you have a clever way to assign students to each other randomly? Ensuring that each student receives feedback from exactly five individuals.”

I immediately made this a more difficult problem than it had to be as I started thinking of ways of using a random number generator and keeping track of who is assigned to who in a variety of arrays etc. Silly me. A quick consultation with one of our far more experienced developers made me feel like a complete dunce. Since there are no other factors in who has to provide feedback to who all you do is get a list of the students, for each student in the list, assign them to providing feedback to the next five students on the list.

This could easily have been done manually but why do that when you can write one piece of code that will take care of any future requests of this nature. And it’s nice to do a bit of coding now and again, even if it’s low level stuff.

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Embedding music into your blog/wiki/course site.

Posted on March 8, 2011 by

A few months ago the site Grooveshark was brought to my attention (via one of my favorite music discovery sites.

According to Wikipedia, “Grooveshark is an internationally available online music search engine, music streaming service and music recommendation web software application, allowing users to search for, stream, and upload music free of charge that can be played immediately or added to a playlist.”

Grooveshark is my “go to” place when I absolutely need to listen to a particular track by a particular artist, like, right this instance! It seems to have everything. Because of the sheer number of copyrighted songs on the service I was a bit concerned about the legality of it. Again Wikipedia,

Operating in similar fashion to other online services like YouTube and Vimeo, Grooveshark requires users to indemnify Escape Media Group for any losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses arising from any breach of the Terms of Service or any allegation that user uploaded content violates intellectual property rights. Users have complained about the unbalanced indemnification protections found in Grooveshark’s EULA. Despite these concerns, no user to date has faced legal action from Grooveshark or third-parties.

That being said, share music that you don’t have copyright to at your own risk.

As I said, there’s a huge variety of music on the site and the good folks at Grooveshark provide an excellent way to embed individual songs and mult-track song lists into you very own web sites. I could image instructors in the humanities wanting to use songs to illustrate particular musical styles, concepts, etc. doing just that.

Here’s how:

1. Go to: http://widgets.grooveshark.com

2. Pick a widget style.

3. Choose a song.

4. Copy the code provided.

e.g.

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Speech to Text Transcripts

Posted on March 7, 2011 by

Client: Fletcher
Tools used: SpokenMedia

Project Description:
From time to time I’m asked by Tufts clients if there is any way to automate the creation of a text transcript from an audio file. Recently the media in question was in the form of a DVD recording of a lecture.

My first port of call for a request like this is the SpokenMedia service at MIT. These folks have developed an application that attempt to do just that.

They ask for video files (e.g. avi, mp4, mov etc) but I’ve uploaded MP3 files also.

In this case I first had to have one of my colleagues help me rip the audio off of the DVD file (thinking about this now I should have just used a DVD ripping tool to migrate it into a mp4 video, oh well). Once I had the file I followed the directions on the SpokenMedia upload page.

Note: once you’ve uploaded the file you have to email mckinney (at) mit (dot) edu as the email confirmation component does not work as advertised.

Also note: The system is VERY sensitive to audio quality and the accent/enunciation of the speaker. Obviously, the better the audio and the more clearly the speaker speaks, the better the transcript.

Clients requesting this type of service tend to say that “something is better than nothing” so we go ahead anyway!

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Vet School Mini-Symposium

Posted on October 22, 2010 by

MediaMarkup Examples

WordPress

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Spark presentation at Vet School

Posted on April 22, 2010 by

Today I gave a presentation to folks at the Vet School. The gist of it was an overview of the Spark website and tools. There were only a few faculty members in attendance but those that were there were very interested in what the Spark site had to offer. WordPress and Adobe Connect were the big hits but there was also a great deal of interest in wikis and MediaMarkup.

The take away sound bite from the participants was “we did not know that UIT offered such a range of tools”. Spark has been around for almost four years now. We really need to get better at spreading the word.

You can download the PowerPoint file here.

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Rapid development of database driven web site using WordPress

Posted on April 14, 2010 by

One of our latest consultations was with the Office of the Vice Provost. They publish the Research @ Tufts online newsletter, a component of which is a list of Tufts’ funded research projects. Presented in this fashion the list is quite cumbersome and unwieldy for easy browsing, searching, and discovery. It is hoped that providing easier discovery will help promote connections and collaborations amongst faculty and scholars.

After discussing a number of solutions (e.g. a custom programmed website, installing some kind of e-journal system, leverage our digital library system) we settled on building a prototype using our new WordPress installation.

WordPress proved to be an excellent choice to rapidly put together a proof of concept. The steps taken were:

1. Created a new WordPress blog and manually authored some posts. One post per project abstract and it’s associated metadata (e.g. principal investigator, sponsoring organization, duration).

2. Used the WordPress export feature to create an example XML file.

3. Once we understood the format of the exported file we set about creating an import XML file in the same format.

4. This file was created by scraping the HTML of the newsletter pages and then outputting the data gathered in the appropriate XML format. This not only included post information but also included a list of two category types: PIs and Sponsors. We used ColdFusion for this. The prototype contained about 100 abstracts.

5. Imported this file into our new blog. The import took care of creating a post for each abstract and associating the correct categories.

It worked well. With a little more tweaking of the theme and widgets the client will have a dynamic, searchable website with little effort.

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Simple web-based data collection using Google Docs

Posted on April 9, 2010 by

UIT-AT is often asked to provide support for web-connected database solutions. Unfortunately, more often than not, we can’t take these problems on because they don’t fall within our scope (e.g. technology to support teaching, learning, and research). Usually its more in the office administration scope.

So, for those clients, here is one simple solution for managing data-collection via the web. Google Docs to the rescue.

Someone else has written a great blog post on how to use the tool so you can read about that here.

The basic features are:

  1. You can create a custom form with as many fields as you want by selecting labels and format for the input of each field.
  2. Once you have created the form you can copy the provided “embed code” that will allow you to then embed the form in you web site, wiki, blog, etc.
  3. When a visitor to your site fills in the form the data is saved in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
  4. Google Docs spreadsheets provide you with the usual spreadsheet functions such as data formulas, graphs, sorting etc.
  5. You can set up your spreadsheet to automatically email you whenever a new entry is submitted.
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At NERCOMP WordPress Univeristy SIG

Posted on April 8, 2010 by

Today I’m at the NERCOMP WordPress U SIG.

I’m impressed by how many of our peers are using WP for a whole variety of use cases and its generating a lot of ideas for how to enhance the UIT-AT service. I’m looking forward to putting the finishing touches on the Spark WordPress tool over the summer months to launch fully for “back-to-school” in the Fall.

http://digress.it/ looks like an interesting plug-in that could enhance student/faculty communication of feedback on writing assignments.

http://ocaoimh.ie/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/ – also looks good as way to create a blog that aggregates entries across blog.

WordPress.com rep talked about what’s coming with WP 3.0. Some highlights:

  • Custom post types (e.g. assignments, tests, events) and custom taxonomies (e.g. department, course ID, professor). This might be just the ticket for the Ed Voice wiki replacement.
  • Merging WP + MU = WP 3.0
  • Custom menus.

Things I didn’t know about:

  • Post templates (individual styling for posts of a certain category).
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