Not 2008 any more
It's been quiet here of late, but I've been keeping busy otherwhere.
CARET has a splendid new website, and if you are reading this within a fortnight of me posting it, we are currently hiring.
SeriousChange also has a revised website, and I'm looking forward to working on a much richer and more informative version in the coming weeks.
I still pine on occasion for electronics, and setting up our Nabaztag at home (along with some RFID bits and bobs, including a Mir:ror and adorable Nano:ztags) was fun. I'm looking forward to controlling our home energy consumption more in 2009, although I still have doubts as to whether purchasing gadgetry is a helpful solution to this for most people. Our reliable and simple central heating and hot water timer, for which we had been gradually calibrating the timings to give adequate heat without excessive boiler operation, at some point in the autumn suffered a power cut. We didn't realise this for a while, until we realised that the heating was running late into the night, under the factory default settings. We reprogrammed it with what we could remember of the timings, but it was frustrating that it had gone wrong for some time, and that we had no way to recall the lost settings. Luckily we have a room thermostat too.
At work, I'm involved with the future of virtual learning and research environments at Cambridge, and beyond, with the project to reinvent Sakai, the community source project on which our current VRE is based. Sakai3 (proposal PDF) will be in many ways a whole new product, with a more social and flexible user experience, and a new powerful and scalable back end.
At one level, this seems fairly easy; web-based collaboration tools have been around for quite a while now, and surely such things are well understood and richly developed? But they don't seem to be; most such tools generate huge amounts of complaint and grumbling from their users (although people will, as ever, tolerate a lot of inconvenience in IT). The use cases for education also have a tendency to be complex; there are many kinds of users, and they overlap (a student in one arena may be a tutor in another); there's a vast array of content types and activities you might undertake; you can have thousands of users at one time, all looking at the same or different content in various ways; and all those users will expect a consumer "web 2.0" quality product, with near-instantaneous bug fixing on demand :) As one of my colleagues says, it's not rocket science, but it's not as simple as you might think, either; good to have a challenge. Sakai3 is going to be worth following, as it might yet turn into an advanced platform for data services plus a flexible user interface, which could well be useful beyond education...
CARET has a splendid new website, and if you are reading this within a fortnight of me posting it, we are currently hiring.
SeriousChange also has a revised website, and I'm looking forward to working on a much richer and more informative version in the coming weeks.
I still pine on occasion for electronics, and setting up our Nabaztag at home (along with some RFID bits and bobs, including a Mir:ror and adorable Nano:ztags) was fun. I'm looking forward to controlling our home energy consumption more in 2009, although I still have doubts as to whether purchasing gadgetry is a helpful solution to this for most people. Our reliable and simple central heating and hot water timer, for which we had been gradually calibrating the timings to give adequate heat without excessive boiler operation, at some point in the autumn suffered a power cut. We didn't realise this for a while, until we realised that the heating was running late into the night, under the factory default settings. We reprogrammed it with what we could remember of the timings, but it was frustrating that it had gone wrong for some time, and that we had no way to recall the lost settings. Luckily we have a room thermostat too.
At work, I'm involved with the future of virtual learning and research environments at Cambridge, and beyond, with the project to reinvent Sakai, the community source project on which our current VRE is based. Sakai3 (proposal PDF) will be in many ways a whole new product, with a more social and flexible user experience, and a new powerful and scalable back end.
At one level, this seems fairly easy; web-based collaboration tools have been around for quite a while now, and surely such things are well understood and richly developed? But they don't seem to be; most such tools generate huge amounts of complaint and grumbling from their users (although people will, as ever, tolerate a lot of inconvenience in IT). The use cases for education also have a tendency to be complex; there are many kinds of users, and they overlap (a student in one arena may be a tutor in another); there's a vast array of content types and activities you might undertake; you can have thousands of users at one time, all looking at the same or different content in various ways; and all those users will expect a consumer "web 2.0" quality product, with near-instantaneous bug fixing on demand :) As one of my colleagues says, it's not rocket science, but it's not as simple as you might think, either; good to have a challenge. Sakai3 is going to be worth following, as it might yet turn into an advanced platform for data services plus a flexible user interface, which could well be useful beyond education...