September 2006 - Posts
It's now more or less a month since we launched myCommunity through myLearningEssentials.
A quick summary for those reading this directly through my blog/RSS rather than myCommunity - myCommunity is a new section to our myLearning Essentials online environment, offering staff and students forums, blogs and photo galleries. This blog is part of that service.
Our fairly unique approach is that any member of the University can log in, and automatically get a blog, photo gallery and forum account - no need to ask or fill in any forms.
We decided to just make the service available in the first instance, no advertising etc other than demoing to a few key members of staff, and just watch what happened.
Here's a quick summary so far:
We've had some great photo galleries created by both students and staff. The photo galleries have so far been largely used to display students' photographic work rather than social pictures (parties, social events etc).
The blogs have been use more by staff than students. The primary use has been communicating specific information or commenting on services rather than personal reflection/comments etc, although we've been greatly entertained by the Manic Lemon's dieting stories... The School of Health and Social Studies have made most use, and one blog that stuck me as a great idea was a freshers blog, which students could read before they joined the university.
It's possible that the aggregated view on the front page has a strong influence on the way people perceive and use the blogs.
Use of the forums has gradually increased, mainly by students, and posting have covered a wide range of topics, for sale, questions about clubs, bands, IT issues etc. This looks like becoming the most widely used section of myCommunity.
Now we've got some content we're looking at tweaking things a bit. Our initial idea is to pull some of the myCommunity content on the front page of myLearning Essentials - the latest photos, forum topics and blog headlines, inorder to make the content easier to find for our students and staff.
Any thoughts/comments most welcome!
Relaxing after a tough first week of term reading a noddy guide to Nietzsche I came across a great comment on authors, which I'll paraphrase to answer a question I'm sometimes asked...
Q. Why do I blog?
A. I have found no other way of getting rid of my thoughts.
(sorry! It's been a long week...)
As I noted in a previous post I upgraded to iTunes 7.0 a couple of days ago. I quickly found there was a problem with iScrobbler synching to Last.FM.
Last.FM is a great music social networking site. iScrobbler uploads what you are listening to your iPod, iTunes or other music player, to last.fm. Last.FM then links you up with neighbours with similar tastes, allowing you to explore their collections, charts etc, and often listen to sample tracks - a great way to discover new music. My last.fm page is here:
http://www.last.fm/user/michaeldwebb/Anyway, iScrobbler stopped working with my iPod when I upgraded to iTunes 7 - it just said tracks submitted were too short.
It took a while to find the answer, but there is now a new version of iScrobbler that seems to work fine - its a little hard to find - its available here:
http://www.last.fm/group/iScrobbler/forum/35555/_/169407
I installed the new version of iTunes, iTunes 7 last night on my aging Mac iBook 800Mhz, and used it to install one of the new iPod games.
The most immediate change is to the user interface - not sure if I like it or not yet - it seems a lot more cluttered.
The most fun interface change is the ability to flick through your album covers in kind of 3D rotating carousel type view. It was pretty slow on my iBook though, and obviously only works if you've bought the album through iTunes store (nobody actually scans the cover in do they?!) - I buy most of my music from eMusic so it just showed a blank cover for most albums
The other useful bit is that iPod setting and updates are handled through iTunes - much easier. I updated to iPod software 1.2 on my 30GB 5G with no problems. The main reason for the update was to try the other new iTunes store feature - games!
There are currently 9 games available for £3.99 each. I chose Vortex, a kind of 3D breakout-style bat and ball game set in a tunnel. Works suprising well using the iPod wheel, though the game itself isn't brillant, although it is very polished. The game did hang my iPod once though, so I had to do a reset. If that happens to you here's what you need to do:
- Toggle the Hold switch on and off by sliding it back on forth.
- Press and hold the Menu and Select (centre) buttons until the Apple logo appears.
So do games work on the iPod? Yes, I think so. £3.99 isn't too steep, and I alway have my iPod with me, unlike my DS, so I can see the point of having a few games - the screen is much better than most mobile phones. I'm looking forward to seeing what other games might come along.
There are other new features relating to TV/films (I've no interest in the current offering there, even it was all available in the UK), and 'Gapless playback'. I guess some people will like that latter (though I liked the comment that I can't now find asking if Steve Jobs was a big fan of 70's concept albums!), but again, can't really see it being a major selling point.
The University held its graduation ceremonies last weekend and we set up a video streaming service so that they could be watched both over the internet, and on a couple of plasma TVs on the Unversity Campus. We broadcast at a fairly high quality, so both the sound and the picture were pretty good.
It seems to work very well, and we peaked at around 50 concurrent sessions, with a reasonably sized crowd watching in the bar - excellent work by a couple of my staff - Roger and Sean.
Here's the techie bit about how we did it.
We decided to use Windows Media Server, which streams in Windows Media Format. The main reason for this is that most users will already have the Windows Media Player installed, and the Windows Media Server is robust and comes free with Windows Server. Windows media server can receive streams from other computers running Windows Media Encoder. We wanted two streams, one of the ceremony and one showing the marquees outside, so we had two laptops with digital video cameras attached. Both camera were good quality - much much better than a web cam. As well as giving a good picture quality this also meant that the audio was very good.
Deciding on video stream quality was interesting. We wanted a really good picture for our plasma TVs, but also wanted the same stream to be available over the internet to standard broadband users. In theory we should have been able to encode the live streams at multiple bit rates to cater for both sets up users, but this requires a lot of processing power - too much for our encoding laptops. We therefore settled on a 555K stream, sacrificing frame rate for picture resolution - we wanted people's faces to be as clear as possible. This mean a resolution of 720x576 (standard PAL) at 16 frames a second. As the camera shot showed the whole stage people faces' were never going to be that clear, but this setup was pretty good (have a good look a footballers' faces when there is a full pitch width shot for example on non-HD Sky/Freeview - you'll probably find that even these aren't very clear, hence the need for HD-TV).
Our theory was that most broadband is now 2Mb rather than 512k, and even if you did have 512k, the 555K rate was only a bit too high, so you would at least get good audio and some sort of picture.
The broadcasts seemed to go very well, and we've now go a setup that can provide a high quality broadcast anywhere there is network socket - we just need to plug in our encoding laptop and camera and we are away. I've you've got anything that you'd like to broadcast then let me know.
We've decided to equip a new small open access area in our Caerleon library with Macs running Windows, which is now possible using Apple's beta bootcamp software.
Why?! Well, we wanted good looking all-in-one PCs for our new library PC area. We wanted it to look nice, as learning spaces should be visually inspiring, and we wanted all-in-one PC's so students had plenty of room for their books etc. We looked at offerings from PC manufactures, and to be honest, they all look terrible, particularly from most mainstream suppliers. We set up a row of different PCs, including the iMac, and asked people which they prefered - everyone chose the iMacs (typical comments - "Wow", "can we really have those!!!" etc). MacOS would probably confuse too many people, but iMacs running Windows seems to be an ideal combination.
They aren't in place yet - we've only just put the order in, but when they are I'll add a photo to show how good it looks.
We are treating it as a small pilot - if we get any problems we can easily swap to PCs and redeploy the Macs elsewhere, but hopefully we won't need to.
We've finally launched MyLearning Essentials version 2 (which is fairly obvious if you are reading this through MyLearning Essentials rather than direct through my blog or via RSS!).
We've tried to keep the bits that people use and find useful, as well as add a host of new features, in particular the 'MyCommunity' Section for blogs, photo galleries and forums.
We've more or less re-written most of the pages to use the latest web development techniques (CSS and Ajax if you are interested in such things) which should give lots of small improvements, as well as making it easier to add features and improve the look in the future.
I'm sure there will be the odd bit we need to tweak, so please let us know if there are bits you don't like (and perhaps even tell us about bits you do!)