Collaborative Tools Project

I used the MIT App Inventor site to create an Android app that... Uses the camera to take a picture and saves it to the device's gallery Let's you select a picture from the gallery The image is converted into base64 and uploaded to a web app Additionally, it also sends rotation and lat/lng coordinates and lets you add a textual comment as well. This Android app sends it to an Apps Script web application inside a Google Spreadsheet here . The web application saves the image to Google Drive, makes a thumbnail of the image then gets the latest 3 thumbnails from the sheet and returns it.  Inside the Android app is a WebViewer component that displays those images, that gets updated once the image is uploaded. It's not pretty but it works. This app wouldn't be possible without the TaifunFile, TaifunTools and SimpleBase64 extensions. Thanks, all. The App Inventor code is here .  You can import an .aia file directly into MIT App Inventor. There was some tricky stuff, having to...

Just completed another project where 40 students used (old) Google Sites (because they are Apps Scriptable) as Portfolio Sites. Each student gets a copy of a template site. After they have worked on it, and the deadline has arrived, they are given a COPY of their site (and made EDITOR), and they are removed from their original site. If the student wants to invite a personal Gmail account to this new site, and then that personal Gmail account makes a Copy of it, it is removed completely from the york domain - meaning when the student leaves, it won't be deleted. They can keep it forever. They THEN can, if they choose, upgrade their site to New Sites and make it look a bit fancier. If you want to do this, make your Template Site in Classic Sites, then... File > Make a copy , fill in your students https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qojHKcmaMyxyzHd8HNxgm2OEMSgBbg_i4PmYT53qkQU/edit?usp=sharing   edit the code Tools > Script Editor where it says CHANGE_THIS  Here are th...

About me   My Work At University of York A list of old projects here including a Marking App,  an iPad app and 3Sixty installation. Scraping "Sugar Tax" information from UK Government sites then running with semantic and sentiment analysis. Playing with scraping Box of Broadcast transcripts, and automatic MoviePy editing.   Chapbooks in the Borthwick on Glitch in Django Remix here:  https://glitch.com/edit/#!/chapbooks Including the Augmented Reality Christmas Jumper Orchestra.

Working with Andras Sztrokay we had another go at a booking system. This time it was to enable staff to book out a number of iPads over a number of days. You select the days you want, then select the Booking menu. Andras did an amazing job. It even creates a daily bookings sheet so you can see who has which iPads. To see this in action, go  here  and  File > Make a Copy (I won't be able to support you this is just provided to maybe give someone else a leg up, good luck!)

I'm feeling a shade nostalgic today, because later I'm running a digital creativity session on coding with Livecode, which could be said to be an evolved descendent of my first geek love, HyperCard. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSMsJFylC4xTI3St0LQa_tk9Z8YZnmh0yLWbJbU3cALsDheoSzzqVCVi1dOiimZdNLAggqF0goM9at9/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000 The ideas and values I originally fell for,  its ease of use, a "you can too" approach to coding, open sauciness and a community of edu-focussed sharing, and it being free (or cheap) still hold true today. There are still enough of the things I remember in Livecode to make it worth sharing with the world, make Livecode worth learning even today. Like a cult movie, it's always a pleasure to return to.

PLEASE DON'T ASK ME TO DO THIS FOR YOU :-) THIS IS JUST PROVIDED FOR INFO... At the University of York we have had an issue with Blogger for years , in that, when a user leaves the university and their account is deleted, although a blog post's text remains, and the blog itself, every blog post's image is LOST because they are stored somewhere in that user's account. I tried using command-line based scraping tools, like HTTrack to get a blog as static HTML files, but could never quite configure them to get all the content, the local images, the remote images but control the crawler enough not for them to wander off and try and download the entirety of YouTube. I tried scraping tools . I tried half a dozen aggregator tools. I tried process-oriented tools like IFTT. No joy. I tried writing my own scraper in python and failed. They moved the oAuth goalposts. I tried using Google Picasa (which they then shut down). I wanted to maybe use another servi...

Today I stumbled across some similar tools that really help with visualisation. They take the approach that you start drawing and then attach attributes of your drawing to data (typically an uploaded .csv file). To get an idea of the field, Adobe have Project Lincoln, which is fun to watch, but with Adobe products I often discount them because they aren't cheap and readily available as a teaching resource. The video has lots of whooping, but shows the concept well. The tool that has blown my socks off is Charticulator    because I was able to upload .csv of trees that contains lat/long information and make this. Not only can you "see" the line of trees along University Road, the trees are coloured according to species and the heights are mapped to the heights in the data. Still a novice with the tool, I wondered how I might create a key, so I created a new visualisation that mapped the Y value to species and the X value to matur...

Rather than blog about my recent work, I thought I'd try Google Sites. I'm not exactly sure why, but a Site does have the ability to break things down into pages, rather than creating ONE HUGE blog post, or an unconnected stream of related posts. There's stuff about Google Apps to create web applications or improve processes,  Livecode multimedia authoring and a little visualisation stuff. Anyway, here it is: https://sites.google.com/a/york.ac.uk/tom-smith/2014-2015-projects

A week or so ago I went to the Wuthering Bytes conference in Hebden Bridge. The event had a maker/hacker/thinker angle I was keen to snoop into, to find out what people were up to in this strange world that seems to have blossomed whilst I wasn't looking. The presentations began with Prof. Danielle George , who I heard being interview on Radio 4 on the way in to work about her work with radio engineering... from looking deep into space, to controlling jet engines to monitoring field moisture levels for effective agriculture. Next up Stephen Jagger , gave us an amusing history of an audio engineering company, making microphones and mixer desks for the BBC. My favourite part was about the white lie they told to get their biggest gig.  Leila Johnston , in unbelievable shoes, shared her work with Hack Circus, a publication that tackles a "geek" subject, but strangley, before it is published always mutates into an art event, and focal point for ...

Following a short presentation about online apps we're looking at at York, Michael Charno got in touch and said.. The following are apps that we use at the Archaeology Data Service: * Asana [ https://asana.com/ ]: Its a really simple task management app that enables task allocation, commenting, prioritising, creating deadlines, etc. Its free for use amongst 10 colleagues, so we've been fine with it so far. * New Relic [ http://newrelic.com/ ]: Systems analytics software for understanding where problems exist in servers/web applications/interfaces. Obviously more useful for people managing servers or web applications, so might not be widely useful. However if the university was going to get a license we'd happily join in! * Slack [ https://slack.com/ ]: We used the free version but quit after we found ourselves moving to the 10,000 message limit quickly and didn't want to purchase a license. We haven't replaced it, but would certainly start using it again if the un...

Photo credit : Chris Bull www.chrisbullphotographer.com pictures@chrisbullphotographer.com +44 (0)7968440920 Last week I spent three days at the Association for Learning Technology Conference (#altc) in Manchester.  It’s been a good few years since I’ve done the conference thing but I was looking forward to totally immersing myself in ideas and learning from people's’ experiences. The conference themes were: Harnessing the power of the crowd – collaboration and connectivist learning Learners as agents of change Open educational practice Participatory approaches to the development of learning technologies Social media in learning and teaching The Emergent Themes - What It Really Was About For me, the standout sessions and the ideas that seemed to permeate most of the conference were: Learning Analytics Research and reports regarding User Centred Methodologies and Pedagogies Novel approaches and research to learning  i.e ...