Category Archives: projects

What I’ve been up to

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Happy New Year! It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here. Time to get cracking on those work projects for the new year, both ongoing and new ones. Here’s a brief outline of what I’ve got going on:

Quickbase

The improvements we saw in staff efficiencies over the past year have been tremendous, including:

  • the ability to better track IT requests
  • automated much of the course creation process that had been previously handled manually
  • automated much of the quality assurance process
  • better tracking and automation of permissions, IP agreements, and copyright sources

Over the next few months, plans will be in the works to also integrate budget information, time tracking, and tasks. It’s a lot of work but always rewarding when you get good feedback and see real results in the form of improved use of people’s time. No more redundancies and bloated amounts of time spent on “administrivia”!

Evolution usability testing

This one’s coming soon, and it’s something I’m pretty excited about. I’m going to be working with Mike Brooks on devising a plan for testing our new and improved Evolution student and faculty interfaces. It’s something we’re definitely rolling out in most World Campus courses over the next year,  and we have a good opportunity now to do some usability testing with our students and faculty, and develop a longer term feedback plan for when the new interface rolls out. We’ll be trying out a newish usability testing application, Silverback: http://silverbackapp.com/

Blogs

I don’t really have a specific plan or application in mind here yet, but I’d love to see Blogs@PSU have more of a role in World Campus courses and programs. I’m tinkering with the creation of a “geoblog” similar to the application created by Chris Stubbs over at ETS (and I’ve consulted with him about this), the Geoblog for students studying abroad:
http://geoblog.psu.edu/
I think something like this would be a great way for World Campus students to connect and share. The visual of the map adds a sense of place and connection that might be lost by students just saying text-wise where they live or work. Stay tuned.

Mobile announcements

Over the summer I took a workshop on the creation of Web mobile and native iPhone apps. The workshop only lasted one day so it really only allowed the participants to dabble in this stuff, but I was able to put together a very crude prototype of a mobile announcement app that we could use in our World Campus courses. I hope to refine this prototype a little further and share it with my colleagues.

The Wave fizzled – or did it?

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wave_220x14715703.jpgA few months back I had a “light bulb moment” and wrote about the potential for workplace communication and collaboration that I was starting to see in Google Wave. Soon after writing that piece, I started to see a rapid decline in Wave’s usage among my fellow early adopters. It was easy to see why. Google Wave was available by invitation-only, and this obviously hurts buy-in from potential collaborators. It was also a tad buggy and undeveloped, as is typical in a “beta” offering.

Over the past few months, though, I’ve observed a pickup in interest around Wave, and this was due to a number of things:

  1. Google finally removed the “invitation-only” restriction, and allowed anyone with an e-mail address to be added to a wave.
  2. The development of many more gadgets, robots and other extensions that potentially made Wave more useful.
  3. The development of stand-alone and mobile applications for Wave.
Thanks to these developments and the pickup in buzz (again) I’d observed in the educational technology community, I decided to put last year’s “light bulb moment” to the test. I’ve moved a few of the projects I’ve got going at work into Wave, in the hopes of facilitating focused conversations and collaboration around these projects. I was starting to see just a little traction, and was contemplating my next blog post’s focus on these efforts, when, suddenly…
Google announced it was killing Wave. As in, stopping development immediately, and stopping the hosting of Wave by the end of the year.
What are the lessons to be learned here? Well, it was obviously a business decision on Google’s part. Many successful new technologies follow an adoption pattern of hype/early adopters, followed by a lag in interest (read “flat” or “slow” uptake, or perhaps even a drop), followed again by steady mass adoption. We saw this model perfectly with Twitter – enthusiastic early adopters, followed by a lag, followed by a slow steady mass adoption to the point where it is today. Was that secondary uptick curve not looking good enough to Google? Was there no secondary uptick curve at all, with me only seeing slow returning enthusiasm among my peers in the ed tech community? We may never know. As I said, it’s a business decision. In a tough economy especially, it’s probably necessary to let go of our sunk costs in projects that we may be altruistically attached to, but where returns don’t justify continued investment. (It was definitely a rather sudden announcement though, even the Google Wave Blog makes no mention of it as of the time of this posting.)
I still think there’s hope. Wave is mostly open-source, and someone else might pick it up, perhaps even turning out an enterprise version. A company with good business sense would learn the lessons from Google’s mistakes and improve the user experience, attempt to understand real world use cases, write better documentation, market it well, etc. All in all, I still strongly feel that a focused, multimodal, real-time communication platform like this has vast potential in terms of keeping people and projects on track. As I said back in November, I find e-mail to be cognitively distracting and a terrible way for collaboration to happen. I can say the same thing about Twitter (sorry Twitter fanboys and fangirls). It’s all just too much noise.
I’m very interested to hear your thoughts in comments.

Mobile phone development

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At the end of October last year, I attended a day-long workshop on Quickbase. The sessions at this “Tech Fest” were led by real world developers who had come up with unique solutions in their own deployments of the Quickbase product. Now, I have blogged previously about the intricacies of the productivity problems we’re trying to solve with our own Quickbase solution, and I believe we’re getting closer to implementing some real solutions that will make everyone’s job in the office easier (thanks in NO SMALL PART to the efforts of our database guru Jeanette Condo). The Tech Fest really got me thinking on a grander scale about what possibilities there are not only with Quickbase but with other ed-tech related projects as well. Two sessions in particular that really inspired me to run with it were a session on jQuery and one on using jQtouch for iPhone development.

I’ve recently upgraded to a paid personal account on Safari since Penn State’s access only includes a subset of the full Safari library, and not a lot of recent works. I’m learning jQuery fast and finding that I really love it. Just like css, jQuery allows you to keep your HTML pages clean and uncluttered. Unlike css, which controls the styles on and appearance of your pages, jQuery adds dynamic and interactive effects. It’s pretty slick and easy to learn. It helps to know some javaScript, but luckily I’m not too rusty from my days coding javaScript in the 90’s. Back then, a lot of javascript actions were inserted directly into the HTML, as was any element styling or document layout coding (read: HTML tables for layout). I’m most familiar and comfortable with client-side scripting, which is how jQuery primarily works, so this is all a piece of cake!
Here are the books I have on my Safari shelf for learning jQuery (with links to their Amazon pages):
Now to return to the title and the original purpose of this post. Knowing jQuery is a good foundation for becoming familiar with jQTouch, which is the library of javascript methods used by the iPhone and other mobile devices (so I’m told, but only real-world testing will tell). Supposedly too there are utilities for turning your jQTouch-based mobile apps into native iPhone apps (negating the need to learn much Objective C). Mobile apps for productivity purposes in the workplace sound intriguing to me. Time tracking or project management while on the go? Would potentially eliminate some of the inevitable “catching up” time on these necessary evils when returning from a conference or offsite meeting. Maybe I am just dreaming, but I think it would be fun to try. Besides, in a more mission-focused sense, if we are to pay attention to the needs of our learners, mobile learning is really looking like the next big thing. Perhaps it is better to rephrase “mobile learning” as “reaching our learners where they are” because I think that is really what we are looking at enabling with mobile phone development. The 2010 Horizon Report lists mobile computing (their term) as a technology for educators to adopt in one year or less. We are here now, folks!
In that vein, I plan to read about mobile phone development from a strategic and planning standpoint by reading this:
This book seems to touch on the actual details of mobile app development but does not delve much into it. For the real nitty-gritty, I plan to read this:
One more thing on the jQuery front. I have some ideas, based on the exercises I’ve done, for ways to improve the usability and interactivity of our course content pages that I plan to share with the Evolution programming team.
That’s all. If you have any thoughts on any of this, please leave a comment. In particular, if you know of any good resources or books on jQuery, jQTouch, or mobile development that I haven’t listed, please let me know.