We are working Computing with CSD to develop an integrated sign-in for Kritikos. At present, it is necessary to redirect users to the University Student Portal in order for them to sign in and perform an initial search from there. In future they will be able to sign in directly from the Kritikos site. We’re sure this will improve the overall experience for Kritikos users.
During the next couple of weeks, we’re demonstrating Kritikos to the Engineering students here in Liverpool.
Students are invited to drop by and have a play with the search engine; we can try looking for concepts and terminology encountered in the most recent lectures, etc.
If you’re a student and have feedback or comments, please leave a reply in this blog.
Thank you to students Zofia and Lucas for coming in this afternoon to help us finalise some of the site design and functionality.
Both students reacted positively to the proposed re-branding to Kritikos. There was plenty of discussion about the name, the logo design and colours, but quite a strong consent to retain what has currently been produced.
We need to make a final decision as to how individual students will be uniquely identifiable in our Learning Registry node. At present (01 Jan 2013), we record:
In the short term, this is likely to provide ‘unique’ enough, but since we are now able to retrieve the students’ (or staff’s) University ID, we propose saving this in an encrypted form.
Having a unique identifier will make it easier to develop the code to prevent (i) users from voting for their own interactions (recommendations, comments, etc.) and (ii) users from sending duplicate paradata.
We’ve been looking at the best way to implement upvote/downvote functionality in our website. The purpose of this is to enable users to endorse or disagree with other users’ activities, thereby introducing a level of self-regulation or democratisation. It also allows users to earn credibility or trustworthiness, which can then be used in the algorithm used to rank search results, and also incentivise students to interact positively with the ENGrich service.
Although some social media sites such as Facebook only support the positive like, our initial position is that we should allow (identifiable) users to give negative votes for activities they do not agree with. We shall review this position with our student group once we have gathered and analysed sufficient activity data.
The paradata statement we propose publishing into Learning Registry will take the following form. Note that the object of the paradata statement is the URL of a page describing the first user’s activity (e.g. comment, recommendation), not the URL of the actual resource itself.
{
"doc_type": "resource_data",
"doc_version": "0.50.0",
"resource_data_type": "paradata",
"active": true,
"identity": {
"owner": "AN Other",
"curator": "",
"submitter_type": "agent",
"submitter": "ENGrich",
"signer": ""
},
"digital_signature": "",
"resource_locator": "http://engrich.liv.ac.uk/rd3/?doc_id=78396f82b6984512ab5c3d5dab8e0b17",
"payload_placement": "inline",
"payload_schema": "LR Paradata 1.0",
"resource_data": {
"activity": {
"actor": {
"objectType": "student",
"displayName": " Student Name",
"description": [
"University",
"Engineering",
"University of Liverpool",
"3rd year",
"Aerospace Engineering with Pilot Studies",
"MEng(Hons)"
]
},
"verb": {
"action": "upvote",
"context": "ENGrich website",
"date": "2012-06-28"
},
"object": {
"id": "http://engrich.liv.ac.uk/rd3/?doc_id=78396f82b6984512ab5c3d5dab8e0b17"
},
"content": "This resource was upvoted on the ENGrich website by a 3rd year student reading Aerospace Engineering with Pilot Studies MEng (Hons) at the University of Liverpool on June28, 2012."
}
}
}
Today we have published two large batches of data into the JLeRN Learning Registry node:
We have also started work on the user interface to display these new paradata ‘types’.
We have spent much of today working on the ranking algorithm to use for search results.
Each time a student interacts with a resource, the event will be captured and published into Learning Registry. Examples of such events include:
We are calling these primary interactions, each of which can carry different ‘points’ for weighting subsequent searches.
In addition to these events, we will provide a mechanism for users to like/dislike (or agree/disagree with) other students’ primary interactions, thereby introducing a system of self-moderation or ‘democratisation’. Each user will therefore build up a trustworthiness index, based on how helpful or otherwise their peers judge them to be.
The ranking of the resource will therefore depend on the number of interactions found in LR, the relative importance of these interactions and the trustworthiness of the contributors.
This post presents the results from the online survey that the students completed after road-testing the initial iLIKE and ENGrich user interfaces last week. Some feedback from the ENGrich team is included too.
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.
Following on from earlier work on the iLIKE widget that allows students to view relevant resources by module, we have met again with Simon from Computing Services to outline the functionality of a general search box. We hope to have this ready to try out by the end of this week.