Tim Bullough, Andrew Green and Adam Mannis will be presenting Kritikos to the 5th International Materials Education Symposium to be held in Cambridge, UK April 4-5, 2013.
Talks, workshops, and poster sessions will focus on four key themes:
The abstract for the presentation is here.
We had a first team meeting today to discuss how we go about creating our evaluation video and to draft a storyboard for it. Luckily we have expretise within the team in getting good pictures and sound; and the draft script was created today.
We will draw on the technical guidance provided by JISC Digital Media (JDM), and use a 10-point list provided by them to ensure a level of consistency between all project videos from the JISC Content Programme.
Some quick jottings from today’s road-test for the next things we need to be doing on the technical front:
This is primary engine of the ENGrich site, using Google Custom Search and overlaying data from LR
This provides metadata and paradata on an individual resource. Also allows verified users to submit paradata in the form of comments, module alignment and recommendations, likes/dislikes, etc.
This is the page where you can browse resources already in the Learning Registry by module or by user (i.e. the person who submitted data). Other browse categories might be added in future.
Thanks to all the students who came along to road-test the first alpha test version of the ENGrich visual media search engine. We’ve got lots of notes and video to go through and analyse, but we were pleased to see how well it appeared to go down.
Prototype iLIKE widget in Student Portal
ENGrich search results
ENGrich resource details page
Thanks also to Simon Hatton and Paul Hagan in Computing Services for the work they’ve put in this week and to Phil Barker from CETIS for coming down from Edinburgh.
We took part last week in “The Sustainability Workshop” held in Bristol, on Friday 9 November, which was a joint event for Content Programme 2011-13 and Digging into Data programme.
The workshop was led by Rebecca Griffiths and Nancy Maron from Ithaka S+R, tuckling together the questions of defining sustainability and impact, typical funding models, knowing your audience and prioritising your choices in sustaining products and services.
The exercises icluded Framework for Post-Grant Sustainability Planning for Digital Resources and Audience Segmentation Tool from Ithaka S+R Sustainability Toolkit.
Most relevant for our project ways to financially sustain out project into post-grant period are:
We are well past the mid-point of our project – and are now in a good position to estimate the “value” and “impact” of the project. The project is not finished yet, although a prototype iLIKE ‘widget’ (a portable version of ENGrich visual search) is published – to be incorporated into the student portal at the University of Liverpool (UoL) for access by all engineering students at the university.
The ENGrich project is developing a customised search engine for visual media relevant to engineering education. It is unique in its usage of the Learning Registry (LR) as a web-based storage and a resources retrieval service, and in the fact that it relies on engineering students’ experiences as learners. Both these aspects make the project a truly communal one: the LR is by design a public data store, where resource description and (contextualised) usage on various learning resources are stored in a way that can be flexibly distributed across an open data network and aggregated for re-use by others. Building a community of users and contributors – initially the engineering community at the University of Liverpool – was always one of the sustainable outcomes of the project.
Institutional “buy-in” was instrumental to the project success – we have had the University’s Computing Services Department and the Library on board from the outset. Together we have decided to set up an institutional LR node at the university, which has the potential of significantly changing the way the institution goes about digital resources discovery and sharing practices. With the development of the project, stakeholders at the University of Liverpool (including departments other than Engineering) became interested in expanding the ENGrich service from its initial Engineering focus to include other disciplines. Scaling and cascading the service from its test base at Liverpool to other institutions within the UK and beyond will be possible.
Some examples of how the project affected the institution and student community so far you can read in our case study prepared within the framework of the JLeRN experiment at Mimas.
We took part in the Mimas JLeRN Final Workshop in Manchester yesterday, which was a stimulating and thought-provoking meeting.
Just a couple of highlights relevant to the ENGrich project:
slice API.The slides used by Andy Green for the ENGrich presentation can be found here.
We have taken part in the Content programme Evaluation and Impact workshop in London earlier this week. The key aims were to provide projects with a shared understanding of approaches to evaluation and impact and
with an opportunity for reflection, sharing of ideas and collaborative working in order to refine their evaluation and impact plans.
The morning seeesion started with an introduction from the managers of JISC Content Programme 2011-2013, Paola Marchionni and Peter Findlay. The participants were then asked to get into six clusters and discuss/compare their evaluation plans and methods and approaches they employ to capture baseline data. ENGrich was in a cluster 5 together with three other projects: ArchitectUS, Stepping into Time and New Connections: BT Archive.
The afternoon session consisted of three presenattions, as follows:
Interesting issues were discussed in the presentation of Sarah Whatley from D-TRACES project, including ways to increase students engagement with resources released and to increase the students’ digital literacy. She also talked about supporting the students’ development as professionals and enhancing their employability. All these approaches seem very applicable to the ENGrich project.
On Friday last week, there was a final meeting with representatives from all of the organisations who have been involved in projects with the now former UKCME. We attended the afternoon session and gained an insight into the wide scope of potential applications of both current and recently completed projects. It was also useful for us to see which kinds of companies had been funding these projects and how they intended to contribute to or benefit from certain aspects of them.
We have taken part in the JISC Content and Discovery Programme Meeting in Birmingham earlier this week. This event brought together projects from different JISC programmes, in particular the JISC Discovery programme and the Content programme. The key aims were for projects to get to know about each other’s work, share experiences and key issues around best practice in producing resources that can be easily discoverable and usable and re-usable by others (e.g. open data, etc). This too was less about formal presentations and more about informal group work.
The participants were asked to get into groups and share their thoughts on the following topics:
The afternoon Technology session, which was lead by Owen Stephens from The Open University, and the discussions were focused around three major issues: Linked Data, data interfaces and data aggregation.
In the session we talked of crowdsourcing approach to metadata; creating own APIs as a mechanism of increased web exposure and sustainability; how to deal with big size data; what to use as identifier for Linked Data; how to deal with migrating of data; how do you deliver your data – human-readable format, machine-readable or mixed; approaches, tools, licensing for data aggregation; anti-duplication semantic algorithms and semantic inconsistency.
Interesting discussion sparked about using SILK for calculation of semantic similarity for aggregation and anti-duplication purposes when pulling together resources from a number of repositories. Google Refine was mentioned being used for dealing with duplicate content shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs.