Impressions Scholarcast

All professions are undergoing massive change due to the disruptive digital revolution. The librarians are not only studying the revolution in detail they are doing something positive about it and are not afraid of pulling their punches in telling us so. See Kathryn Greenhill’s post about the National and State Libraries Australasia discussion paper with the not-so-timid title ‘The Big Bang … Creating the New Library Universe’.

Kathryn puts forward the key points:

• Access is our primary driver.
• Digital is mainstream.
• No job will be unchanged.
• New web technologies and community digital content are shaping user expectations and behaviour.
• Some things we have always done, we will no longer do.
• Experimentation and risk are necessary.
• People want services and spaces to be welcoming and easy

While librarians and libraries are targeted specifically, I suggest these comments apply to all professions and particularly my own of university teaching. Indeed these points will apply to life in general. All the above are pertinent and worth repeating but for me the standouts are ‘New web technologies and community digital content are shaping user expectations and behaviour’ and ‘Experimentation and risk are necessary’. As a web application researcher I like to think I contribute to the former and love to spend as much of my time as possible doing the latter.

I attended an expanded CodeCampOz at CSU Wagga Wagga campus during 25-27 April 2008. There were extra sessions on the Friday afternoon this year with plenty of new .NET technologies to catch up with. What is so valuable about CodeCampOz is that the speakers are practising software development professionals from around Australia. We had a couple of overseas speakers as well this year. The whole event is organised by this loosely coupled group of software developers themselves, although we do have some sponsorship from Microsoft, CSU and some of the leading .NET consulting companies like Readify, Solid Q, SSW and Avanade.

To the chagrin of several instant messaging diehards CodeCampOz 2008 was well covered on Twitter and with the hashtag #ccoz, becoming the most used hashtag during the weekend.  Social media was definitely at the forefront with a whole talk by Tom Gao from EuroRSCG (huge advertising company) on how to build Facebook applications with the .NET Facebook Developer Toolkit. He showed us the Sony Facebook app his company has just deployed.

Other impressive technologies covered in one or more talks were:

• SQL Server Compact Edition: originally designed for Windows Mobile devices SSCE is now the .NET managed code competition to SQLite (used in Google Gears) for lightweight desktop and mobile apps. A second talk showed how very easy it is to use SSCE for true disconnected apps because it has built-in synchronisation with SQL Server databases when the app becomes Internet connected again.
• Silverlight 2.0 and WPF: as expected several talks covered the benefits of Silverlight for rich Internet and browser-based apps in .NET. Silverlight now has the long-awaited ui controls that also bind to data sources. The toolset around WPF and XAML in the Expression suite are much improved, and our Norwegian speaker, Jonas Folleso, built a complex Silverlight app from scratch during his talk.
• LINQ to Entities: ORM was another technology on many lips; one talk attempted a very one-sided playoff of LINQ to Entities/ASP.NET Dynamic Data extensions versus the nHibernate ORM. Even though it is in beta still LINQ to Entities in Visual Studio 2008 really rocks
• BI extensions to SQL Server: not being a db person I was surprised how attractive from the ease of development perspective the data mining features of SQL Server seem to be.
• Team Foundation Server: the new version of TFS was demoed by CodeCampOz co-organiser Mitch Denny who always gives brilliant talks. He showed us every step of creating and auto deploying an ASP.NET web app. Every build is deployed to clients automatically for their immediate feedback – this is the way all apps should be developed.

The standout talk for me though was a totally innovative and hugely useful application of bindable and reactive .NET managed code given by Paul Stovell. Basically reactive code classes report automatically all changes to their data members and collections. This allows all UIs displaying the data for example  to be updated in real-time with virtually no extra code, just the hooking up of events. Paul has extended his ideas to changes in databases and many other data sources in a technique he calls SyncLINQ. Basically this is syndication (like RSS) brought to object oriented programming. Mind blowing!

There were other interesting talks tool. I now know much more about database performance from the presentation by Fernando Guerrero, founder of Solid Q. I should also mention the talk by Shane Morris, Microsoft UX Evangelist, who gave developers very useful and applicable advice on working with UI designers. I know Shane from HCI conferences in years past. I can’t wait for Shane’s slides to be available.

All in all the best CodeCampOz for me. Lots of inspiration and lots to follow up.

Wow, is Microsoft actually doing something cool? Is this another influence of Ray Ozzie? Mary Jo Foley tells us about the new Microsoft ExP system for conducting scientific online design experiments.

We have an unprecedented opportunity to run A/B tests with online
users and innovate more quickly based on actual user response. Microsoft
needs to shift the culture from planning the exact features to planning
a set of possible features, and letting customers guide us — Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect

Let’s hope we can get our hands on it soon for developing our own web apps.

InfoWOE Post Collection

After mapping the action items of InfoWOE the next step is to define tasks, the domain of project management applications. For the Eee PC-as-Internet-device these need to be online and as simple as possible.

I have been a fan of the Ruby on Rails guys at 37signals for a number of years. They produce minimal but effective web applications all of which have productive free versions. Their approach is:

Work well. Over 1 million people and businesses use our web-based applications to get things done the simple way. We aim for the software sweet spot: Elegant, thoughtful products that do just what you need and nothing you don’t.

These sentiments of 10 years standing mirror those of my own DotSoft tools :

Small, lightweight and really useful.

I signed up for their initial Basecamp project management product at least 18 months ago although I did little with it. Nevertheless it became an automatic choice for InfoWOE and I use it primarily as a sophisticated to-do list manager (also available as the separate Ta-da List product).

Your project (only 1 in the free version) can be shared between co-workers and clients as needed. Milestones are self explanatory. The Messages features acts as an internal blog with commenting and maximum 2 free writeboards (a separate free 37Signals product) act like wiki pages. The Search feature is essential as always. Crucially Basecamp is Eee PC-friendly.

At the recent AusWeb 2008 conference a presenter, Andrew Sweany, used Basecamp as an example of a more productive tool compared with Microsoft Project at Monash.

I must put in word here for a potential Australian competitor for lightweight online project management, Remember The Milk. It started life as a simple to-do list task manager but has expanded its feature set considerably by adding simple CRM, sharing and notification schemes. The time investment in Basecamp has essentially made me lean that way for the present.

InfoWOE Post Collection

In common with many people I reach for a mind map to assemble concepts and components into a cohesive structure. For InfoWOE this must be online despite my being a keen MindManager user for several years, at significant personal expense. A quick web search for free online mindmappers yielded mind42.com where I commenced the mapping process for the InfoWOE project and adding notes on some of the map nodes. The mind42 mind map will change over time as will most links to mind maps in this post.

Mind42 is easy to use but I soon struck the need to insert new nodes and move them about in the map structure. The beta documentation did not help. I eventually emailed the dev team and received a quick reply explaining the undocumented move feature. By then I was looking for more features and had discovered an online mind mapping comparison post by Tiffany Brown. This revealed two more online mappers with free plans, MindMeister and Mindomo. As is typical the free plans mean one or more of the presence of advertising, fewer maps and fewer features.

This discovery led to further investigations into the export and import features of the online mappers. Still in beta mind42 exports in Freemind, MindManager, RTF and its own format. MindMeister and Mindomo can import in their free versions Freemind, MindManager and RTF formats; only the paid versions can export in Freemind and MindManager formats.

Transferring the InfoWOE map from mind42 to MindMeister and Mindomo in Freemind format proved problematical and the node notes are not transferred. Bearing in mind I wanted to stay with free versions I found that RTF was a good transfer format that retains the note content. I use Word to create a .doc or .docx version of the RTF map file, import it into MindManager. Once in MindManager format the map can be imported into the free versions of MindMeister and Mindomo.

Mindomo is Flash-based and has the most features and simulates the Microsoft ribbon interface. For use on the Eee PC the Google ads sidebar on the right takes up too much of the screen and the ribbon interface consumes over 25% of the remaining area. Mindomo is good for laptops with screen resolution of 1024×768 and above.

At this stage I have settled on the free version of MindMeister for the InfoWOE map:

In 2008 AusWeb reverted to a smaller, more intimate, conference at Ballina, the place where the original AusWeb 1995 was born. Around 80 delegates gathered to discuss the theme ‘Reflecting on the Past: Anticipating the Future’.

The keynotes were varied and interesting as usual. Shirley Alexander, who spoke about e-learning at AusWeb 1995, is now DVC at UTS for online learning. Her call reminded us that we overestimate the effect of work-changing technology in the short term and that it is the end users that determine how successful new technology will be. Using the analogy of the telephone she showed us how online learning technology has not lived up to its early promise in the first 10 years with several spectacular failures. However figures from the last couple of years shows online learning is gaining acceptance but only after the online learners needs have specifically been taken into account.

It was pleasing to see Bond IT and Business alumnus Geoffrey Kwitko give his keynote on creating online communities. His ShareScene site, mainly a forum, now has 16,000 members interested in swapping information about share investing in Australia. Geoffrey began this site just prior to coming to Bond and during his studies harnessed some of his fellow students (including my PhD student Matt Carter) to expand and develop ShareScene. He gave a competent talk and was very active in discussions throughout the conference.

The keynote from Graham Ingram from AusCERT certainly gained our attention in alerting us to the growing security threats on the web, and how the number of machines compromised by bots, phishing threats and ID theft is growing alarmingly. David Lowe, an AusWeb veteran, talked about the mismatch between software engineering using modelling techniques and web building and introduced us to the potential of sensor networks controlled via the web. Finally, Stephen Atherton from Apple Australia gave us a run through iTunesU which allows universities to easily distribute educational materials such as PDF, podcasts and video through iTunes. This service will be available in Australia during 2008.

With only one parallel paper track this time it was good to be able to hear 10 out of the 14 presentations from paper authors. I was one of the speakers and presented and discussed the joint paper from David Baker and me about the Web-Integrated Learning Environment. This was David’s MIT Honours project supervised by myself. He built the WILE prototype LMS as a mashup of publicly available web services, mainly from Google. The work generated a number of questions in the paper track session and the basic idea was well accepted. Our work also tied in well with the paper by Ian Reid from UniSA about Online Strategy Revisited.

Other papers/posters I found noteworthy:

• Virtual Worlds: Synopsis of User Interfaces and Accessibility Initiatives: Steve Hansen
• Web Briefs: Web ideas on one sheet of paper: Guy Sangwine
• Sign up: UoM blogs and wikis: Claire Spencer
• Web Application Development though Open Source Content Management Systems: Steve Hansen

Sally Burford won best paper for her IA work for the web.

Long time AusWeb conference chair Allan Ellis warned us that the numbers supporting the conference are too low for it to continue in its present form. Either attendance must be raised, a radical change in the conference undertaken or the conference will fold. A stark choice. We are given 3 months to come up with an effective solution to this problem.