Martin Hamilton's blog

Reflections on #IWMW10 and "amplification"

2010-08-29T12:10:00.009+01:00

Martin Hamilton at IWMW10 from UKOLN on Vimeo.

Here's a slightly cheesy video interview with me from the recent Institutional Web Managers Workshop at Sheffield, filmed by live blogger Kirsty Pitkin from TConsult. In it there is the implication that events like this are worth their weight in gold, and the statement that I have had the equivalent of tens of thousands of pounds of free consultancy from IWMW10 alone.

All fine talk, but let's spend a moment deconstructing this... The highlight of IWMW10 for me was that I became aware of an open source product that will save my institution around £50K over a three year timeframe. In my view this alone amply justifies the £350 conference registration fee. I also consider the event to be a masterclass in "event amplification", which I look at further below.

Events like IWMW provide great opportunities to get together with like minded people and share experiences. Just now we are gearing up to launch a student portal (though it will probably have a jazzier name), working out a tractable approach to the mobile web, reviewing and updating our web infrastructure, and assessing the impact of disruptive technology such as the iPad. And I didn't even mention the economy... The key thing is that we're not the only ones - these are topics of common interest.

But... you can't always attend an event that you would like to, and you can only be physically present at one parallel session (at a time!) Here's where amplified events come in. This is all about using the power of "Web 2.0" tools to engage with a wider audience, more deeply than through a simple video stream, and with a feedback loop. The latter ensures that remote participants can play a part in an event, and provides a handy backchannel that delegates can also use to share ideas and information. Brian Kelly's slides below take us through the origins of this approach, and provide feedback on some five years of practical experience:

What Can We Learn From Amplified Events?
View more presentations from Brian Kelly.

At IWMW10 Brian gave an impassioned plea for Web teams to use the tools of their trade to communicate, solicit feedback and generally stay relevant and involved. Thinking beyond the core Web team's activities, I thought it would be interesting to try this approach out with some of the projects that I'm involved with, hence this blog. The combination of blog postings and the amplification tools discussed above is particularly attractive to me because it means that I can relate the work I'm doing to an existing conversation (e.g. using the #iwmw10 hash tag in reference to this particular event), and also reach out to an audience beyond my immediate colleagues and team members.

Now for a note of caution... Non-Disclosure Agreements, tender confidentiality clauses and the like mean that there are certain areas that are off limits at any point in time. For instance, just now I am party to several discussions under NDA, involved in a couple of tenders and also conducting some quite sensitive initial conversations with potential partners. In many ways this mirrors the situation we see with e-Learning objects sequestered in the VLE (please note that I am not an e-Learning expert :-), and academic publications embargoed for months or years as part of journal publishing arrangements.

So, after having blogged for two months I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at how well this has worked. Is there anyone there? Have I managed to reach a wider audience? Has there been a dialogue? And what about my chosen techniques for "amplifying" my blog postings? Let's have a look at some statistics for my blog, courtesy of Google Analytics and Google AdSense. These may also be interesting as a convenient illustration of the sort of data that service providers like Google are collecting about your browsing habits.

First off, my blog pages have now been viewed over a thousand times. This is no great shakes in advertising terms, and according to AdSense I shouldn't give up the day job just yet...

Google Analytics shows the expected peaks in page views as a new posting is promoted, and also provides some interesting insights into the behaviour of my readers... For example, 77% of them read only the posting itself, 70% have never been to the site before (or cleared their cookies, changed browser etc), and on average people spend just over a minute reading my posts...

What's that, just over a minute? Averages can be misleading, so let's drill down to that one:

Aha! So when there is a new blog posting people are spending some three to five minutes reading it - that's perfect. The average is probably a bad metric for low volume sites, as it's skewed by all of the people dropping by to see if there is a new posting, or finding the site by mistake.

But who are my readers? They're from the green countries on the map below...

Bit disappointing that there haven't been any visitors from Greenland yet :-( One to watch for the future!

Let's look at the top countries and the proportion of page views they account for...

Will the knowledge that there is interest in my blog from outside the UK change my approach? It may be interesting to look back in a few months time to see if the US and Canadian readers in particular have exerted a discernable influence, or whether there's a noticeably international feel to the postings. But what about the UK readers - is there a pattern here?

It probably won't come as a surprise that one of the two big red circles is Loughborough, where my home institution is based. There are quite a few Loughborough folk in my LinkedIn and Facebook networks, and in my Twitter followers. Interesting that the other big one is London though...

Now let's pause for a moment to consider the ramifications of this - a reasonable assumption would be that the work that I am blogging about is principally intended for a local audience, and that this would form the lion's share of my readers. In fact only 182 out of 858 site visits (21%) could be directly identified as coming from Loughborough. I think this nicely validates Brian's point about the potential of wider engagement through modern Web tools, and the principles of "amplification". The other 79% of my readers can't all be Loughborough folk coming in from home or their travels.

But are these just casual passers-by, or am I building a community of interest here? It's interesting to see that around a third of my visitors are returning to the site...

But where are my visitors coming from... ?

I have tended to promote my blog postings by sending the URL to Twitter, and posting to LinkedIn and Facebook. My understanding is that anyone following these links will show up in the "Referring Sites" section (Twitter itself presently accounts for 8% of referrals), whereas the "Direct Traffic" refers to URLs entered directly into the browser. Perhaps my 858 visits aren't all they appear to be, if 45% of them are actually indexing robots, spam merchants, security scanners and the like!

Finally, let's have a look at the platform breakdown for readers of the blog. At Loughborough our standard corporate desktop uses IE running on Windows XP. Is that typical of my readers?

As far as visitors to my blog are concerned, IE in all its flavours accounts for a mere 17% of visits. Of course IE is effectively Windows only nowadays, so it's interesting to see the combined stats for Firefox (29%) and Chrome (28%) here.

Looking at visitors to the site by operating system, I was struck that iPad, iPhone and Android together enjoy a 14% share of site visits - clearly it's worthwhile spending a little time to ensure that the blog is usable for these folk.

I'll come back to the blog stats from time to time to see if there are any trends (or surprises!) emerging, but I hope that the info I've presented here will help to get across Brian's message that there is value to taking a little time out to try get your message across to a wider audience. If you've not looked at Google Analytics before, then I hope the small sample of the available stats that I have presented here has whetted your appetite. You can apply Google Analytics to any web site, not just a blog, and your site doesn't have to be hosted by Google.

I've not written here about the comments I've received on my blog postings, but they are much appreciated, and I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you, my small (but select :-) readership for your readiness to engage and your helpful contributions.

Google Apps in UK HE survey results

2010-08-21T00:25:00.004+01:00

I recently carried out a survey of IT directors to gauge the level of interest in the sector in a "user group" to discuss Google Apps for Education or perhaps cloud computing more generally. There were 28 responses, which is quite a good sample size for something like this. As this seems to be something that people are generally keen on, I will aim to organize an initial meeting for Autumn 2010.

Check back for further updates as this work progresses, but first a quick precis of the survey results...

Substantial interest in such a group from HE institutions
Overwhelming preference for a face-to-face meeting
Key topics:

Roadmap updates and engagement with Google over issues and enhancements
Integration with identity management / AD sync etc
APIs and systems integration
Institutional case studies / show and tell

Half of respondents had a production Google Apps service or were developing a service
1/3 of respondents were looking at their options and investigating suppliers
HR, VLE and Library systems were the other common SaaS services (>10% of respondents)
Google App Engine was the only PaaS in common use (1/4 of respondents)
Amazon EC2 was the only IaaS in common use (>10% of respondents)

Some of the statistics from the survey are likely to be of general interest, and these are reproduced below along with my commentary. I should mention that the tables and charts below were produced automatically by a Google Docs spreadsheet which the survey form acts as a front end to. I think this is one of the most useful features of Google Docs, as it takes nearly all of the pain out of conducting a survey and collating the responses. Here's a quick video from Google that shows how it works:

Now on with the survey questions...

Which of the following best describes Google Apps at your institution?

Production service	10	36%
Project to implement under way	4	14%
Business case being developed	1	4%
Considering options - not selected a supplier	8	29%
Not actively considering outsourcing	2	7%
Outsourced with another provider	1	4%
Other	2	7%

So, half of the respondents either had a production service in place already, or were in the process of pulling one together. Incidentally, I'll blog separately about the work involved in getting our own Google Apps service up and running, and our students' data migrated. It's interesting to see that a third of respondents were considering their options or developing a business case at the time of the survey.

What topics would be of particular interest to you?

Google Apps for Education product roadmap	23	82%
APIs and systems integration	21	75%
Engagement with Google over issues and enhancements	20	71%
Institutions' case studies / show and tell	20	71%
Google Apps Marketplace applications	10	36%
Google Message Security (Postini)	7	25%
Google Message Discovery (Postini)	6	21%
Google Search Appliance	10	36%
Chrome OS	6	21%
Android	8	29%
Single Sign On (SAML, Shibboleth etc)	0	0%
Identity Management (Active Directory sync etc)	23	82%
Developing with App Engine	7	25%

I had hoped that the responses to this question would help to shape the agenda for the user group meeting, and I wasn't disappointed. It was also good to hear from several institutions keen to share their Google Apps story with the community. I was hoping for more interest in Android and ChromeOS, for the reasons discussed in my blog post on chromoting - but this stuff may be best covered in an exhibition area with hands on demos. It was illuminating to see the level of interest in the Postini products - I had been wondering how visible these were to folk working in Education. Our own initial investigations suggested that Google may need to rethink their pricing model to develop an EDU market for these products.

Institutions were also asked about their use of "Software as a Service", "Platform as a Service" and "Infrastructure as a Service". The results are summarised below...

There are so many cloud hosted Software as a Service offerings that I decided to use the UCISA CIS survey system categories rather than attempt to list individual services.

It was interesting to see that some HE institutions were actively pursuing SaaS solutions in areas that might be considered quite sensitive - such as HR and Payroll.

From the long tail of "other" responses I picked up email and collaboration as the key additional areas. It may be interesting to consider whether the UCISA survey could usefully be extended to cover these and other infrastructure areas - e.g. preferred server, storage and networking vendors.

My feeling on drawing up the survey was that the only Platform as a Service providers in widespread use would turn out to be Google's own App Engine and Amazon Web Services. Hence I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was some interest in Heroku and Microsoft Windows Azure too. What the chart doesn't capture is that several of the institutions were looking into more than one PaaS provider.

Institutions were also asked about their use of Infrastructure as a Service providers such as Amazon with their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. This is an area that has seen a great deal of activity in the last couple of years, with many of the traditional players banking on a move away from on-premise IT.

Both Amazon (with VPC) and BT (with their Virtual Data Centre) are looking at a "hybrid cloud" approach that can use a VPN tunnel to provide Layer 2 adjacency between the customer premises and the IaaS provider's data centre.This makes it much less painful to move applications such as DNS and Active Directory into the cloud, and also potentially provides a route for live workload migration e.g. via VMware's Long Distance VMotion. I'll blog about the potential of the hybrid cloud separately...

It was interesting to see Eduserv's cloud hosting make an appearance. In this vein, Matt Johnson's blog posting on Eduserv's work on OpenStack and the "G-Cloud" is worth a look.

Looking at the responses to these more generic cloud computing questions it seems to me that this is still an area where people are still feeling their way. This is in contrast to services like Google Apps and Microsoft Live@edu, which have already gained significant traction. A cynic might say that these two are special cases, because they are being made available at no cost to institutions for a variety of reasons. Indeed it is instructive to look at the potential costs of an EC2 hosted site as I have blogged about recently.

So, all in all a very useful exercise - many thanks to all who responded, and in particular to those who volunteered to talk about their own experiences (I'll be in touch!)

Intrinsic motivation - from Magic Trackpad to @psychemedia

2010-08-14T01:06:00.004+01:00

In a recent talk at TEDGlobal 2010 in Oxford, Clay Shirky (above) discusses a very interesting topic - intrinsic motivation. The critical section starts at around 6 minutes into the video, so watch this if you don't have time for the whole thing. The talk is about the larger (and also quite fascinating) concept of "cognitive surplus", which Shirky illustrates with some examples of the power of Internet mediated grassroots activism in a post-TV era. And yes, he does have a book out :-)

So, what's this all about? Let me frame it like this... Why is it that companies like Apple and Google consistently produce exceptional ideas, products and services? How can other organizations best learn from these firms?

Intrinsic motivation is all about doing things because they interest and stimulate you. This is in direct contrast to extrinsic motivation, which is principally about doing things because you have been instructed or coerced to - often with some implied threat of punishment for failure.

Probably the key text in this area is "Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation" by Edward Deci, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1971. You might struggle to find this online, though. Deci also co-wrote a widely cited book Intrinsic motivation and self-motivation in human behavior, which you can peek at via Google Books. In a recent paper looking back at 30 years of research into this area, Deci and Richard Ryan observe that:

The most basic distinction is between intrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, and extrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it leads to a separable outcome. Over three decades of research has shown that the quality of experience and performance can be very different when one is behaving for intrinsic versus extrinsic reasons.

This theory helps to explain why activities that used to be fun and rewarding in themselves (such as programming computers) can turn almost overnight into chores - e.g. "you have two weeks to recode the user interface before the pitch to the angel investors". In a situation where extrinsic motivation is the norm, tasks and goals are typically imposed externally by management and there is little opportunity for self-direction. Let's picture that the latter approach is taken to extremes, leading to demoralization and poor productivity. In an extrinsic culture this would likely lead to rounds of performance reviews, layoffs if targets are not met, and so on.

I think the continuing success of companies like Apple and Google (and there aren't many companies like them!) is due in a large part to tapping into intrinsic motivation in their staff, with new hires and acquisitions only made if they fit into this mindset. Much has been made of Google's famous "20% time" for personal projects, which gave rise to the likes of Gmail, Google News and Adsense. I'd contend that the culture of intrinsic motivation actually runs much broader and deeper. In my experience working with Google over the last few months this happens in a number of ways, e.g. by letting staff choose projects to work on, encouraging people to take personal responsibility for the results, and working in small project oriented groups rather than a top down hierarchical structure.

We've been doing some work with Apple recently too. I don't have similar visibility of their inner workings yet, but my feeling is that for all the public perception of control freakery, something similar is at work. For example I don't envisage a top down directive that "we must make the conventional mouse obsolete by Christmas 2010 in order to maintain our 'thought leadership' image". Instead picture a talented engineer producing a prototype of the Magic Trackpad from some parts that happened to be lying around and saying "hey guys, I took the trackpad out of the Macbook and made it standalone - do you think there's some mileage in this?"

Incidentally, if you've not seen the Magic Trackpad already, here's a video from Apple (from the OS X System Preferences control panel) that works through the built-in gestures... This in itself is pretty neat, but it gets even better if you use something like Andreas Hegenberg's BetterTouchTool freeware to add your own custom gestures and actions. After a stint on the Magic Trackpad, an old style mouse will probably seem rather quaint, but also somewhat limited and constraining. Of course I'd have to note here that free and open source software like BetterTouchTool (BTT is free but not open source) is another good example of people acting on their intrinsic motivations, in some cases profitably. Eric Raymond has some interesting thoughts on the role of patronage, which are quite relevant here.

Of course we can't talk about Apple without keeping in mind that they have a charismatic leader par excellence in the form of Steve Jobs. Is it possible to have one of these new-style organizations without an exceptional leader? There may be a clue here in that Google has three... :-) To get an idea about what drives Steve Jobs, his strength of character and his personal presence, watch the commencement (graduation) address he gave at Stanford in 2005:

Now let's move on to look at what happens when developments that are happening at Internet speed collide with the more sedate world of academia.

One of the most interesting developments over the last couple of years has been the explosion of interest in Linked Data, which is all about opening up data sets (such as MP's expenses) and figuring out how to create mashups by combining data from different sources. The information in question can range from common office document formats such as Excel spreadsheets through to SPARQL targets and the Semantic Web.

Open University lecturer Tony Hirst, aka @psychemedia is a leading figure in this movement, frequently invited to conferences and workshops to speak about (and demonstrate) its potential. Tony's work is widely cited, notably by the curators of data.gov.uk and The Guardian's Open Platform. Returning to our theme of intrinsic motivation, Tony's day job is as a robotics lecturer - his mashup activities could easily be thought of as moonlighting. Tony has no formal peer reviewed academic publications relating to his work on Internet technologies, in spite of being an internationally recognised authority in his field. His work is highly interactive and difficult to appreciate offline. This video will give you a flavour of it:

For me this raises some interesting questions around how to measure concepts like "impact" and "significance" in the new world that we find ourselves in. It is clear that Tony has made a huge contribution to the area by pushing the technologies to their very limits, illustrating how data from disparate sources can be brought together to create a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, and exposing the cracks wherever they show.

So how would your organization recognize and reward (or even attempt to "manage"!) someone like Tony? Of course we can't all be Google, but a useful first step is undoubtedly some level of self-awareness of the power of intrinsic motivation and the results that it can deliver.

And what are the implications for the academic community when the old mechanisms of peer reviewed research publications, citations etc start to break down? How do we figure out someone's impact and significance?

Perhaps this is the future... :-)

Baked beans or dogfood? Find out, with talking barcodes

2010-08-17T00:47:00.004+01:00

Let's imagine that you can't see to find out what's in that tin you just took out of the cupboard. This isn't a hypothetical scenario if you're visually impaired. Rice pudding, baked beans, or dog food? Doesn't bear thinking about, does it? Later on in this post I'll offer a simple solution for Android devices, but first here's a bit of background...

I have an interest in assistive technology, and for the last few years have been attending Sight Village to geek out on the latest gadgets for blind and partially sighted people. Historically there has been a running theme of hugely expensive software and/or hardware packages to do things like screen magnification and screen reading. This year I felt that things were substantially different - the buzz was about apps for iPhone and Android, and it was telling that there were lots of iPads in evidence. I think Apple have a particular mindshare here because of their Voiceover extensions to iOS:

My experience of screen readers and magnifiers under older Symbian and Windows Mobile devices has been pretty dire - memory and CPU hogging, and prone to crashing the device due to being only tangentially integrated with the operating system. To add insult to injury these packages have tended to be extremely expensive due to the limited size of their market. The move with Android and iOS to support accessibility from the ground up is very encouraging. Let's see what sorts of apps it makes possible...

Here's a very powerful example. SayText is free OCR and text-to-speech software for the iPhone:

But let's head back towards baked beans and dog food... At Sight Village this year there were several systems for labelling things and then using a reader to identify them. The RNIB's PenFriend is probably the most impressive of these. You might expect that this uses RFID tags, but it's actually based on optical recognition. This makes the labels effectively disposable as the unit cost is very low. Here's John Godber from the RNIB explaining how this system works:

The PenFriend was pretty impressive to play with in real life, but I found myself thinking that many of the items you would be interested in (e.g. CDs/DVDs and food packaging) already have an optical tag on them - the humble barcode (UPC). This took me back to my first adventures with barcode scanning on mobile phones. Google Googles for Android is probably the most impressive app in this category, as it will scan bar codes, carry out on-the-fly OCR of text, translate text into other languages, and carry out a Google search. Here's a video of Hartmut Neven from Google demoing recent enhancements:

I found myself thinking that a paired down version of this could be very handy for a visually impaired Android user. Enter the Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A), which exposes the underlying Android APIs to a range of scripting languages. This makes the barrier of entry very low indeed for doing interesting things with your device. Now you can write trivial Python, Perl or Ruby scripts that use geo-location, accelerometer, compass, speech synthesis, speech recognition, scan barcodes with the camera, and interact with the Internet. Here's a video demoing some simple Python scripting on the phone itself:

The SL4A community has helpfully put together a large number of tutorials, including this nice example of barcode scanning for books from Google's Matt Cutts:

import android
droid = android.Android()
code = droid.scanBarcode()
isbn = int(code['result']['SCAN_RESULT'])
url = “http://books.google.com?q=%d” % isbn
droid.startActivity(‘android.intent.action.VIEW’, url)

This six line script is all it takes to start up the Android barcode scanner, look up the UPC code and then carry out a Google Books search in the Android web browser. Unfortunately if you turn on the Android TalkBack screen reader, it insists on reading out everything it comes across, including the URL of the Google site being visited.

So, here goes with talking barcodes!

This script is a quick and dirty hack to scan a barcode, search the Google Products database for the barcode, pull out some interesting attributes (title, price, description etc) and speak them.

import android
import urllib2
import re

from htmlentitydefs import name2codepoint
name2codepoint['#39'] = 39

def unescape(s):
  return re.sub('&(%s);' % '|'.join(name2codepoint),
    lambda m: unichr(name2codepoint[m.group(1)]), s)

droid = android.Android()
droid.ttsSpeak("Ready to scan bar code")

code = droid.scanBarcode()
barcode = int(code.result['extras']['SCAN_RESULT'])
print "Barcode: ", barcode

url = "http://www.google.com/products?q=%d" % barcode
handler = urllib2.urlopen(url)
response = handler.read()
handler.close()

# clunky code to pull out the interesting bits - was hoping to use xml.dom.minidom instead
rtitle = re.compile(r'<h3 class="result-title">.*</h3>', re.M|re.S).search(response)
rattrs = re.compile(r'<p class="result-attributes">([^<]+)</p>', re.M|re.S).search(response)
rdescr = re.compile(r'<p class="result-desc">([^<]+)</p>', re.M|re.S).search(response)
rprice = re.compile(r'<span class="main-price">([^<]+)</span>', re.M|re.S).search(response)

output = ""
if rtitle is not None:
  output = re.sub(r'.* >(.*)</a></h3>', r'\1', rtitle.group(0))
if rattrs is not None:
  output += re.compile(r'<p class="result-attributes">(.*)</p>', re.M|re.S).sub(r'\1', rattrs.group(0))
if rdescr is not None:
  output += re.compile(r'<p class="result-desc">(.*)</p>', re.M|re.S).sub(r'\1', rdescr.group(0))
if rprice is not None:
  output += re.compile(r'<span class="main-price">(.*)</span>', re.M|re.S).sub(r'\1', rprice.group(0))

print unescape(output)
droid.ttsSpeak(unescape(output))

With a little more finessing I think it should be possible to replace the crufty regular expressions with callouts to the Python DOM library. I should mention that the HTML entity decoding above is courtesy of dluce's posting to Stack Overflow. A Python guru could probably replace most of this with a couple of well chosen one liners.

Ironically, whilst the Google Products database search did just fine with a bunch of books and CDs, it didn't match my test case tin of baked beans. I think a useful next step would be to link the script up with the barcode database provided by upcdata.info, as a database of last resort. This loses the immediate potential for comparison shopping that we get through the Google database, though. I like to picture a blind person at the supermarket being asked if they need any help - "Thanks but I'm OK. Think I'll get this from the local shop down the road, my phone says it's cheaper there" :-)

Now it's over to you to think of some other applications for SL4A, like this nice example of onboard rocket telemetry gathering...

Google Apps for Alumni - 1,000 users in our first week!

2010-08-08T09:48:00.006+01:00

I recently blogged about Loughborough's Google Apps for Alumni service, which has just gone live for this summer's leavers after an initial pilot with alumni from previous years.

I'm delighted to be able to report back that in the first week of full operation, over 1,000 people have used the alumni service!

This is great news, and I'd like to thank all those involved in the project for their hard work and perseverance - in particular Taz Siddeeque, Henry Chambers and Chris Peel from the Loughborough Students Union Executive and Richard Barber from our Development and Alumni Relations Office. From IT Services, Graeme Fowler, Nikki Doyle, Kathryn Latham, Chris Beggs and Lee Preston have provided invaluable assistance and support. Most of all, though, Tim and Dan from Google, for their work on the Google Apps multidomain support, and simpleSAMLphp developers Andreas Solberg and Olav Morken from UNINETT - we couldn't have done it without you!

Let's just recap on why this is a big deal - in previous years, leaving students would have had their University IT presence completely destroyed when their IT account lapsed. This is common practice in the education sector, and was a necessity due to the limited resources available to us. However, student feedback indicated that the IT deregistration came at perhaps the worst possible moment - and caused severe stress at a time when people were least prepared for it. From our own point of view in IT Services, summer and winter graduations would invariably be accompanied by a flood of requests for expired accounts' data to be restored and accounts reactivated for a period. By an unhappy coincidence these have also been our busiest times for development work. So, bad all round.

The situation has changed completely now, because we are in a position to convert an expired student Google Apps account into an alumni account without loss of data. It may sound like hard work, but the heavy lifting is done by Google. All we have to do is post an XML fragment like this via Google's Provisioning API:

This API call moves the user's Google Apps account from our student domain to our alumni domain, preserving the associated data - including email, calendar, contacts and documents.

The missing link in all of this is the simpleSAMLphp software developed under the auspices of the Feide federated identity management project in Norway and subsequently widely taken up as a lightweight implementation of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). Google Apps uses SAML 2.0 for single sign-on, which for our students translates behind the scenes to LDAP authentication against our Active Directory.

For alumni users we have hacked simpleSAMLphp to query the Google accounts database if the LDAP authentication fails. I had initially thought that we might achieve this through Shibboleth, but then I looked at the Shibboleth source code! I'd contend that simpleSAMLphp is much more tractable/hackable, and indeed the simpleSAMLphp experience has been so encouraging that we are currently looking at what we need to do to make it play nicely with the UK Access Management Federation.

The initial feedback that we have been receiving on the alumni service has been extremely positive, and I think it's particularly telling that people seem to be starting to take the new service for granted already :-) I saw something similar a few years ago when I led the project to implement the campus wide wireless network at Loughborough, but this took a little longer (two to three months) to reach the same stage of acceptance and expectancy. For me the message here is that this is how things should always have worked!

[To find out more about the Google Apps for Alumni service at Loughborough, please see our Alumni FAQ]

Chromoting and what it means for you

2010-07-29T00:32:00.005+01:00

My talk from JIF2010, in pictures

This is just to amplify a few of the points I made in my talk today in the "Thunderbolts and Lightning" session at the JISC Joint Innovation Forum conference at Royal Holloway. The graphic at the head of this posting was kindly produced by the good folk at Meeting Magic as a summary of the session.

The concept of the sessions was to look at the emerging threats and challenges facing institutions. I chose to think more in terms of new opportunities and how we might take advantage of them.

Let's begin by following on from my recent posting about the iPad. The conceit here is that the iPad has taken off because it meets most people's needs, most of the time. Whether or not you agree with this, it turned out that lots of people did want a big iPhone :-)

It may be worth reflecting on whether this owes more to an improved user experience through multitouch, or a reduction in the number of frustrating failure modes associated with a more complex device.

So, will Steve Jobs be on stage this time next year announcing a 27" iMac running iOS?

[Perhaps! However, the rumour mills are always cranking this kind of thing out...]

Of course Apple are by no means the only player in the newly rejuvenated information appliance space. Google's Android is probably the key competitor, and with devices from the likes of Dell and Toshiba it is now clearly viewed as a mainstream option.

If we peek into our crystal ball, what is the role of the IT department in a world where information appliances and software have usurped the traditional role of the "PC"? There may be a lesson here from Google's other operating system - ChromeOS. ChromeOS is an even more radical reconception of what people need from computing devices. Put simply, ChromeOS replaces the normal operating system desktop and applications with the Chrome web browser. Until recently this might have been of limited interest, but with the possibilities opened up by HTML5 (including offline storage), it's now looking much more interesting. As Mikel Manitius notes in a blog posting, ChromeOS is Google’s Secret Enterprise Thin Client:

So if an Enterprise can either move its most common applications into the cloud (or better yet, build it that way from scratch), the next logical step is to replace the old legacy desktop. Those applications that can’t be given a web-based interface for whatever reason, can just be encapsulated through browser-based terminal emulation or remote display.

The key word here is "chromoting". This is still a little sketchy at the time of writing, but it appears to be Google's solution to the problem of legacy apps that are not delivered as a web service. Chromoting provides access to apps running on another machine, in a similar fashion to a remote desktop session, but delivered through the Chrome browser.

Initial discussion of chromoting has revolved around the consumer scenario that a ChromeOS user will have a PC whirring away in a corner somewhere running legacy Windows apps that they occasionally need access to. I contend that a more likely scenario for enterprise and education users is that the apps will be hosted in the data centre or the cloud. This raises some interesting possibilities such as renting apps on a pay as you go basis - why buy AutoCAD if you only need it for a month? There may also be significant potential for efficiency gains and cost savings by sourcing apps from a mixture of internal builds (for specialist software) and external sources for off-the-shelf packages.

It's perhaps worth noting that there is very little new stuff involved here - application virtualization is already well established, with large scale use of systems such as Microsoft App-V, Citrix XenApp and VMware ThinApp. These packaging technologies form the back end to desktop virtualization systems like VMware View and are used to drive the bulk of today's conventional thin client deployments.

Sticking with Google as our example, it's not hard to picture a future where mainstream apps will be delivered via the web (perhaps increasingly through the Google Apps Marketplace), with legacy apps being chromoted. In this scenario the Google Docs general purpose storage could easily become the "home drive" for data from chromoted apps. There are multiple potential income streams here building on top of the Google Apps infrastructure that make this an attractive business model.

If the developments I've outlined in this blog come to pass, they would be hugely beneficial for the service user - rapid provisioning of new apps, availability of multiple versions of apps, automatic cloud based backup, no DLL/versioning/patchlevel conflicts, "disposable" hardware, and so on. However, the potential for disaster is also high unless sufficient care is taken to ensure that the approach taken is sustainable.

To get the mix right, I think a change of emphasis would be required from central IT services - this is probably best phrased as "adapt or die", melodrama notwithstanding. This change would see a reduction in effort devoted to areas such as servers, storage and corporate desktop support. In would come a new focus on the likes of APIs and systems integration and Linked Data - and providing technical assistance to the legal team during contract negotiations! My feeling is that this work would be significantly more rewarding (and challenging!) than that which it displaces.

This theme of "commodity" oriented work giving way to "complexity" oriented work in order to maximize added value is one that I will return to from time to time in my blog posts.

iPad naysayers have it wrong

2010-07-23T23:54:00.002+01:00

OK, so that's a provocative title for this post, and let's face it - much of the hyperbole surrounding the iPad is cringeworthy. But spend a bit of time looking at what people are doing with the technology, and an interesting picture emerges.

First off, here's Penguin Books CEO John Makinson demonstrating the work that his team has been doing to reimagine their back catalogue for the iPad, and create new "books" that fully exploit its capabilities: (note that these are Apps, not "conventional e-books" in EPUB format)

Next up, Flipboard, an App that creates an interactive newspaper for you based on public newsfeeds and a mash up of your friends' Facebook and Twitter posts: (no paywalls here ;-)

Now let's up the stakes... The popular contention is that the iPad is a device intended for passive media consumption. But wait, what's this?

In this video Franz.K demonstrates Aurora, an iPad app that effectively replaces an entire class of device, the Yamaha Tenori-On (MIDI controller capability notwithstanding). This ability of touch screen computers with fluid user interfaces to become "universal devices" has been much remarked upon, and other examples can be readily found - e.g. Korg's iElectribe.

Time to turn the volume up to 11 now, with a demo of RJ Voyager for the iPad. This is a wholly new way of making music that takes full advantage of the large multitouch screen as a control surface and Internet connectivity to download new "scenes":

But surely there's nothing new about touch interfaces? Products like the HP TouchSmart PC have achieved some market penetration, and the "tablet" form factor has been around for a long time. Clearly a very large part of the success of the iPad is down to Apple's canny approach to building upon the ecosystem of developers and apps that has coalesced around the iPhone and iPod Touch, and the evolution of touch technology from resistive screens that had to be used with stylii to the modern capacitive multitiouch paradigm. Perhaps more than anything, though, the iPad finally gives us Star Trek technology - the kind of computer we feel we deserve for the 21st century.

The Educational Bit

So what conclusions can we draw for educators? If the evidence of the iPhone is anything to go by, there is a distinct possibility that next academic year's intake of students may well forego laptops in favour of iPads - or tablets from other vendors.

It's already been widely noted that the absence of Flash support (Frash notwithstanding) for i* devices will cause problems with many learning objects created with a Mac/PC audience in mind. Joshua Kim notes that:

My first attempts to get all the content that can play through a browser and an LMS to play correctly on an iPad (curricular articles and videos) resulted mostly (and disturbingly) in failure.

This may actually be a blessing in disguise, by helping to steer people towards an open standard approach to learning objects based on HTML 5 and open video codecs such as WebM. However, widespread adoption of the iPad might well lead to the orphaning of large volumes of Open Educational Resources - produced in most cases at the taxpayer's expense.

It's interesting to consider different Higher Education institutions responses to the iPad - Jodi Harrison sums this up nicely in a blog posting:

The first camp, the early adopters, is rushing to adopt the device on a massive scale. Many are considering whether to provide an iPad to every student and faculty member. At least two institutions, Seton Hill University (not to be confused with Seton Hall) and George Fox University, plan to provide an iPad to every student later this year.

The second camp, the skeptics, wants nothing to do with the device. Some institutions, including Princeton University and George Washington University, are banning or limiting the use of the device on their campus networks until Apple provides fixes to possible connectivity and security bugs.

Ask yourself whether your institution is progressive or regressive? :-)

[Princeton have previous form here, having carried out a Kindle trial and concluded that the device wasn't ready for prime time for serious educational use]

Of course many institutions have scaled back PC provision for students on the assumption that they will mostly bring laptops. With that in mind, I'll leave the last word to John Naughton, describing the experience of editing a book using Pages on the iPad:

Later, I import a draft chapter from my current book project into Pages — and find that it’s stripped out all the footnotes, rendering the document entirely useless. I can’t work on it on the iPad in other words. Bah!

Magical!

Disaster Recovery on a Shoestring

2010-07-19T17:45:00.004+01:00

At Loughborough we're currently gearing up to roll out the Terminal Four Site Manager CMS. We're looking at quite a nice hosting environment, with multiple front end web server VMs at separate locations with Linux Virtual Server for load balancing and failover.

This setup is great for handling problems like localised hardware failures and operating system bugs, but what happens in the event of a catastrophic failure such as the fire that destroyed the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University? (Ballardian picture above from Dr John Bullas)

I'll blog about our wider institutional emergency planning separately. For this post let's consider what we could do to maintain a Web presence if circumstances conspire to cut off our Internet connection, or there's a major IT systems failure. We live in straitened times, so I'll frame this in monetary terms!

Option 1 - Dedicated server with hosting company (~£6,000/year)

Let's take a look at some sample pricing from one of the market leaders, RackSpace, for a dedicated Linux server. This works out as around £500/month for a fairly basic server (Quad core 2.5GHz Opteron with 2GB RAM and 2 x 250GB mirrored SATA drives, with a monthly bandwidth allocation of 1TB). So, for some £6,000/year we could could have our own DR server in the clouds. However, our actual bandwidth use is of the order of 3.5TB/month peak outbound, so the bandwidth figure would likely be higher. I'll also note that those SATA drives might have trouble keeping up with our peak loads of some 2.5m URL requests/day.

That's if we tried to replicate full our web presence - probably a key question here.

An emergency website could consist of a small subset of the normal presence, and key information has already been identified as part of the University's emergency planning work. However, I contend that it would be difficult to predict exactly which additional information would be needed in an emergency, and that a minimal version of the institutional site would only be appropriate for a very short period. We also need to keep in mind that in a disaster scenario the demand for the website is likely to be significantly greater than on a typical day.

Option 2 - Community based hosting deal (£250/year to £6,500/year)

We'll look at JANET Web Hosting here although there are other community based options, notably Eduserv Hosting. For an annual fee of some £250 per virtual machine the JANET hosting contract with RM provides 5GB of storage on a virtualized RedHat Linux or Windows platform. There are no bandwidth charges for this service and there is no bandwidth quota at present.

However, each additional 5GB of storage is chargeable at a rate of £200/5GB. This is where the discussion about whether to replicate the full site or just specific content becomes more significant. It's interesting to note that Loughborough's 160GB of web content would take the bill up to around £6,500/year, comparable with a dedicated server.

Option 3 - Reciprocal arrangement with peer institution (~£3,500/year)

At the recent Institutional Web Managers' Workshop 2010, UCL's Jeremy Speller spoke about emergency communications. In addition to some trenchant observations about the potential of technology such as Twitter in an emergency, Jeremy noted that there would be some logic in institutions working together on a bilateral basis to host backup servers and services for each other. There is a degree to which this already happens with infrastructure services such as DNS secondaries and NTP peers for time synchronisation. Some organizations have already gone further. For example, we have a long standing agreement with several other institutions to come to each others' aid in a disaster situation. The expectation is that this would be likely to include everything from technical assistance to Internet connectivity and server hosting.

At first sight, this reciprocal option might seem like the most cost effective route to take - most of the infrastructure is already in place and paid for, after all. However, if we are talking about a physical server then this will need to be networked, powered and cooled. It's often observed that these ancilliary costs can exceed the price of the server hardware. For our purposes a suitably spec'd enterprise class server (e.g. HP DL380) could bought for around £8,000, with an expected five year lifespan. So, let's call the total cost £16,000 over five years, or some £3,500/year (£7,000 if you consider both institutions). In a bilateral agreement such as this both parties would ultimately be contributing a four figure sum, even if this was difficult to quantify due to the vagaries of utility charging, power metering etc.

Of course this figure could be reduced by re-using old hardware or using cheaper hardware, but there would be a concomitant increase in the costs to both institutions of dealing with with failures. Staffing costs associated with a flaky system could easily dwarf facilities costs for server hardware and hosting.

The above notwithstanding, momentum in the industry is very much towards server virtualization. This potentially offers much lower ongoing costs for hosting, and many institutions have already virtualized large proportions of their server estate. However, one would expect that dedicated cloud hosting providers would enjoy the best economies of scale and be able to pass these on to their customers. Let's see how this could work out in practice... [And don't forget that we are only expecting to run our DR website live for a few days while normal service is restored!]

Option 4 - "Best of breed" cloud hosting (£100 to £5,500)

Cloud hosting tends to come in one of three flavours:

Software as a Service, such as Google Apps, Microsoft Live@edu and Salesforce.com - typically a subscription service delivered via a website
Platform as a Service, such as Google App Engine or Microsoft Windows Azure - giving you an API to write against for hosting your application in the cloud
Infrastructure as a Service, such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Rackspace Cloud - giving you a virtual machine from a library of operating systems and preconfigured appliances. Typically you are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis for bandwidth and CPU capacity, though you often have the option of pre-paying for anticipated usage at lower rates

For this blog we'll assume that access to the underlying operating system is required in order to run scripts and manage the more complex aspects of the web server config. This leads us in turn to Infrastructure as a Service. We'll use Amazon EC2 as our example for this one.

A "small" EC2 Linux instance specification has enough storage (160GB) to be comparable with our main web server, although it may be resource constrained in other areas - 1.4GB RAM, CPU resource equivalent to a single core Xeon clocked at 1.2GHz. This costs $0.11/hour while it's active. It's presently free to upload material to EC2, but outgoing bandwidth at our typical usage rates would be charged for at $0.18/GB. So, if we had uploaded all 160GB of content to an EC2 instance, and had to run off this site for DR purposes for about a week, our bill would be some $18 for CPU usage and $160 for bandwidth (assuming around a quarter of our monthly 3.5TB data transferred) - or just over £100 at current exchange rates.

Now for comparative purposes let's imagine that we wanted to run our web server off EC2 full time, 24x7x365. It's possible to pay Amazon upfront for a "reserved instance", which dramatically reduces the cost per CPU hour. If our peak time bandwidth requirements were maintained, the total for this would be around £5,500/year, so comparable with (if not slightly cheaper than) a more traditional hosting approach. [All that's missing from the picture here is an academic discount rate ;-]

I'll note in passing that exchange rates could change dramatically, in our favour or against us, and that the true picture for Amazon is a little more complex - e.g. for persistence, storage would likely be done via Elastic Block Store. The Amazon offering is also particularly interesting given the recent availability of the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, which allows you to host institutional IP addresses in the cloud via an IPSEC tunnel between Amazon and your organization.

We'll be aiming to trial some of these options in the near future, so watch this space for further developments...

Mobile University state of the art

2010-07-01T16:46:00.001+01:00

I was just discussing with colleagues the respective merits of mobile apps, mobile optimised websites (sometimes disguised as apps) and frameworks for building them. It's interesting to take a look around and see what people have done in this space.

A number of institutions have partnered with oMbiel to offer services based on their campusM product. Chris Sexton from Sheffield has a good description of what's offered by campusM. campusM runs as a dedicated iPhone app or a Java midlet for other devices. I expect an Android app to appear soon too.

In parallel, several institutions have developed their own open source mobile projects, notably Mobile Campus Assistant (from the ILRT at Bristol), Mobile Oxford (from the Erewhon project at OUCS), and MIT's Mobile Web. A sample screen from Mobile Campus Assistant is shown to the left.

These systems are much more than mobile optimised versions of the institution's website. They provide key information targeted at the needs of the peripatetic IT user - including staff, students and visitors. Examples of services offered include:

Interactive campus maps with points of interest / gazeteer (and "Friend Locator" in campusM's case)
Institutional news and events feeds
Institutional email and telephone directory search
Personal calendar preview
PC availability in open access labs
Emergency contact information
IT service stats
Bus timetables and running information
Quick links into the institutional VLE for course materials etc, and to download podcasts
Quick access to Library services, e.g. books on loan and renewals
Careers information, e.g. employer presentations
Online payments, e.g. for printer credits
Access to institutional webcams
Access to exam and coursework results

A recent Eduserv 2010 Symposium looked at the state of the art in the "Mobile University", handily summarised by Andy Powell. Mobile support will also be one of the key topics at this year's Institutional Web Manager's Workshop.

So where does this leave us at Loughborough? Much of the information that our peers are providing is readily available here, although it's not presently provided in a unified way via a portal. We are starting up a portal project, which I will be blogging about separately, and clearly there is potential to kill two birds with one stone by producing a site that degrades gracefully for mobile users via judicious use of CSS.

However, people feel a degree of ownership of their apps, and I suspect that we will offer a mobile view of our portal site packaged as an app simply because this is an expectation that our users will have. This is where a cross-platform framework like PhoneGap or Rhomobile may be helpful, by giving us a one size fits all method of developing a mobile optimised site that renders well on all the popular device types and can be delivered as an app. It's probably worth noting that there are other simpler (but not cross platform) ways of turning a website into an app.

This is a theme I'll be returning to as our portal work starts to gather momentum, so check back later for some practical examples of the software discussed in this post.

Taking a fresh look at portals

2010-07-01T23:02:00.002+01:00

One of my current projects is to pull together a student portal for Loughborough. For a variety of reasons we missed the boat and failed to develop such a system back in the Noughties, but I think this is something we can turn to our advantage by learning from other people's experiences.

My view is that our portal (see left for portal concept poster from Ben Spencer in our Web design team) will be mostly about giving people a handy preview of information that's relevant to them, and linking through to systems and services that we already run - rather than imposing a whole new IT system on everyone. One convenient side-effect of this not being a direct replacement for an existing system is that we will be able to introduce it as and when it's ready, thereby avoiding the traditional mad rush to get everything ready for the start of the academic year.

The initial system will be very tightly scoped, and is mostly about us identifying a sensible underlying architecture that we can continue to build on. On launch day we are aiming for something along like this:

Information providers able to update their content via our Terminal Four Site Manager CMS, with the portal pulling in material from specified CMS nodes as they are updated
Widget framework allowing for:

Admin defined default widgets (of which some may be "sticky" and cannot be moved or removed)
User selected widgets from a catalogue
Users able to move, remove and ideally resize widgets

Alerts and notifications framework:

Information providers and IT systems can send targeted alerts to specific users or groups of users, e.g library book is due back, careers fair for finalists
Alerts are aggregated and presented together in the manner of an RSS aggregator (this may well be the underlying technology)
Some alerts may be so important (e.g. emergency messages from the University) that they are displayed in a modal pop-up

Embedded email widget, linking to Google Mail
Embedded calendar widget, linking to Google Calendar
Enterprise search via our Google Search Appliance
News feed widgets with University and Students Union news and events
Modules widget showing active module selections and linking through to Learn, our Moodle based VLE
Library widget, current loans and reservations, making use of the X Server API from Ex Libris and linking through to our Aleph library catalogue
Student finances widget, including printer credits and account balance, and linking through to online payments service for (e.g.) topping up printer credits

Over time I expect that the portal will come to encompass widgets for many other areas particularly around student self service - at present we don't have a system to link people through to carry out many common tasks such as a change of address. This probably won't make it into the initial launch later this year, though.

There are a number of widely used pieces of software that could form the underpinnings of our portal, such as uPortal, Liferay and Sakai. However, I'm conscious that some in the developer community feel that the JSR-168 and JSR-286 "portlet" standards on which these packages are based are no longer the way to go. Consequently I'll be spending some time looking at alternatives.

At the recent TransferSummit conference I had some interesting discussions around this area with Sakai architect Charles Severance, the W3C working group chair Steven Pemberton, and Scott Wilson from JISC CETIS. The Apache Wookie project (instigated by Scott) is particularly interesting in this context. Wookie provides a mechanism for hosting W3C Widgets, with integration into existing platforms including Sakai, Moodle and Elgg. W3C Widgets are simply Zip files containing HTML, CSS, images etc, and driven by JavaScript. Wookie's integration with platforms like Sakai means that we could potentially hedge our bets and be in a position to take advantage of full-blown JSR-168 portlets where these are available, whilst taking a more pragmatic approach for our own development work.

However, it should be noted that there are caveats around authentication in particular with W3C Widgets - at present there is no general agreement as to how to pass on login credentials to widgets from the parent platform. There is some interest in OAuth or IMS Basic LTI (itself built on OAuth) as the solution to this problem. The W3C specification also has some serious competition from OpenSocial, which includes a "gadget" mechanism derived from Google Gadgets. More to come on this topic as we start to build our prototype portal...