Collaborative Tools Project

My attention was drawn to the City of York Council who publish their payments to suppliers for 2012 as ' Open Data'  as a collection of comma separated files ( CSVs ) which you can then import into, god forbid Excel or Google Spreadsheets. That's very nice except, the CSV files are split into ten files. They are presumably month files ( I wonder where the other ones are?). Also, I found that the columns weren't regular - meaning that in some files, the Amount was in column 7, and column 8 in others. There is also a lot of repetitive data in the spreadsheets, making them quite big to work with. All of this makes it difficult to browse and combine the data. It's almost as if they really don't want you to read and understand it. So I thought I'd share how I coaxed it into something more useful in terms of understanding the data. The City of York Council are of course free to do something like this if they like, it only takes a few minutes - or they could pa...

I went to an interesting workshop run by Simon Davis this week looking at using Google Apps in Education. I was there to demo Google Hangouts and unfortunately had a heap of technical problems ( my laptop battery died... oops! Note: never believe it when your battery says it has 2 hours of juice ). Luckily, I had a Hangout I'd prepared earlier. The best bit for me was Catherine Shawyer (right) showing how, in Education, they were using a variety of Google Apps with elegance and gusto. They used template Google Sites for portfolio work (shown below). They found the sheer reliability of Google Apps was hugely important given their students loss of trust having used other tools and simply lost work by accidentally clicking the back button or similar. Usability really matters. But their most enthusiastic use was in using Google Sites for the hugely valuable process of self assessment. Typically, this previously took place on paper that became increasingly dog-eared and was o...

This week, I saw presentations from students performing qualitative research in Archaeology. The focus of their projects was an Android/iPhone heritage app called York's Churches which   has been developed to encourage people to explore the life and history of York city centre churches. Go get the app for Android or iPhone  yourself, it's lovely. The students' projects involved a mixture of focus groups, ethnographic work and Google Forms with iPads to gather data. The projects were mainly looking at how they might better raise awareness of the application with tourists and what improvements mi The Google Forms and iPads were used in various ways, including... As a data capture tool when surveying members of the public They were used to demo the application on the street The forms were used to ease the transcribing of data they recorded with pen and paper, which might be questions that they answered themselves ( for example, "Did they se...

The Idea +Sara Perry  in Archaeology has been using Blogger to support a project in which her students create an "object narrative" that tells us the story of a museum exhibit. The project, in flipping the students' perspective around on the objects on display gets them to think differently about museums and exhibitions. In a workshop, each of the students, having chosen an object ( from a crystal skull to a penny to a bike to a Christmas bauble etc ) were guided through creating a blog and began telling their object's story. What We Did We created a central aggregator blog that subscribed to the feeds of each of the students' blogs, creating a point from which the students, and Sara could easily get to each of the latest posts. We did this using the simple RSS gadget in the Layout Editor. Like this ... The bottom half of this blog ended looking like this... ... creating a useful "Starting Point" for exploring the objects'...

Google's announcement that Google Forms have been refreshed was welcome, it's always encouraging when a company updates a core tool you and your colleagues regularly use.... like say, Blogger. For example. Ahem. Ahem. Anyway, watching the videos about what had changed I notice that they've added the ability to share editing/viewing forms with people. That's great but it's sort of what I come to expect from Google, that nice Share dialog in many ways IS Google Apps. It doesn't feel like an innovation, it feels like a neglected corner being given a spring clean. The relationship between Forms and Spreadsheets has been altered. It's never been clear that when you create a Form a Spreadsheet will magically be created for the results and now you can have a Form that doesn't have an associated Spreadsheet. I'm not sure if they've made it clearer, just different. We'll see. And the demo in the video above, of being able to copy a list of ...

The Problem Tim Saunders, is fast becoming the poster boy for my belief that getting non-technical people coding is good idea. Tim started in the University of York accommodation office and inherited a task of managing students' requests to change their room. This room changing process was paper-based and requires various peoples' agreement and signatures. It resulted in a student having to carry an increasingly dog-eared form to college administrators and back to Tim and then to the old college administrators. It was slow, actively encouraged signature forging and reliably error prone. All the data collected then needed to be entered into SITS, our student database, which involves various charging and set up costs, so it really helps if this data is correct, having being verified by everyone in the chain. The Solution Armed with a some self-taught Javascript using the online learning platform CodeAcademy , Tim thought that the pile of paper forms in his offic...

+Sara Perry  wanted to use Google Hangouts to quickly and easily record seminars for students that can't make it in person and to help with promoting the work of the Archaeology dept.  We decided on using  minimal tech intervention . No requirement to use a certain presentation tool. No microphones etc. Many presenters are easily spooked by extra technology, especially when speaking,  but we also want this to be an easy enough process that Sara will be able to make sure it happens without needing any preparation.   This cheap and cheerful approach also guides the aesthetics of the video, we aren't planning to add titles, idents, logos etc. We tested a MacBook Pro that was close to the presenters pedestal and found the internal mic in that was "good enough" for a small presentation room.  We did buy a cheap webcam and a long USB cable so that we didn't have to use the camera on her laptop. This means the video capture can "step back" a little a...

Each year, around 200 chemistry students perform 20 Lab Experiments ( that’s roughly 4,000 a year ). Each test has a variety of marks to be kept by at least three people, the lab technician ( did they attend?), the tutor ( did they create the right chemistry and hand in their notes?) and the course leader ( are there any exceptions or mitigating circumstances etc). What was previously a paper-based method had recently been made to work in our VLE, but the data captured was in a cumbersome wiki text format. And whilst the user interface was simple enough, the technology was struggling and getting the data collected from the VLE into our marks database required considerable human effort. Working with David Pugh in Chemistry, we looked at using a Google Spreadsheets to collect the experiment data instead. After a few prototypes we have decided to use a very simple ( but quite wide ) spreadsheet to store the data and a web application “front end” for the markers to enter their marks.  ...