I’ve been told by several people now that it was one of the best presentations of the whole conference (which I find more than a little hard to believe). The audience did seem to perk up to the concepts we were demonstrating, and I think the whole RSS-syndication-of-learning-objects meme is getting some decent traction now.
original problem: hard to find/evaluate learning materials
emergent problem: number of collections/repositories/communities
various ways of addressing the emergent problem - they chose federated search over harvesting
2 issues with harvesting
lots of authors - how to get info together?
if lots of collections, we could create one “union catalog” with all collections harvested in it, BUT that removes the value added by the individual collections
Harvesting would “take away the life” of the communities and collections that are harvested
2 parts
services
expose partner resources
clients
connect to partner resources
Federated search = cross collection client
Simultaneous search of all partners, collecting results into integrated hitlist
Limit number of results, to prevent harvesting (can’t get more than 25 results at a time)
use Long Response Page to show progress bar during search (like WOLongResponse)
Built in JSP
Ranking weighs title over description, etc…
How are controlled vocabularies managed?
not at all. vocabulary agnostic
Demo
Merlot
EdNA
SMETE
Relevancy ranking applied at the fed. search client level (not in sources)
Can you run a federated search against Merlot? What API?
based on Google WebService API
A tweaked version used by Merlot and its partners (DN: CAREO should probably support this)
search is open to partners only (both ways) - not open to the The World
No RSS feed or bookmarkable URL for searches
Federated Search Collections
Current partners: MERLOT, EdNA, SMETE
additional partners needed
general collections
discipline-specific collections
Fed. Search Architecture
proxies
service dispatch mechanism
result handlers
user interface customization
future requirements
Discussing putting their implementation into Open Source, or Shared Source with their partners
Federated search community
can’t solve these problems individually:
search syntax - what is the query?
results requirements - what info is returned?
sharing knowledge and solutions
Community charter: develop simple standards for searching multiple collections and a federated search framework as an implementation of those standards
RE-USE EXISTING SIMPLE STANDARDS
eg. used Google as model, not Lucene.
What about network latencies?
different services respond at different speeds
use timeout - if no result after so long, disregard source.
use intermediary page before results to show status of search (progress bar)
EdNA is in australia, and are one of the faster responses - latency not really an issue.
Cacheing?
How to handle scalability?
searches run simultaneously (in parallel) so they all happen at the same time
no real cost for increased sources - the entire search is only as slow as the single slowest source
have a resultlistener that gets callbacks from each source query, aggregates and ranks all results together.
assume that the individual sources are giving their results with the “best” first, since we use only the first X records…
Aggregated results from all sources are then sorted together for overall relevancy at the fed. search client level
If there are missing fields, they just aren’t displayed (if there is no author returned, it’s not put as part of the result display item)
Built it to grow easily
just add 2 classes to the server to manage fed. queries on new source
Brian mentioned something over lunch, and I think it’s a great idea. It seems like there is a Metric Busload of EduTech bloggers here at Merlot. Why not have some kind of get-together?
Thursday at lunch? After sessions? Any better time? Any takers?
build on strengths of each partner (individuals and institutions)
used online collaboration to make f2f more effective (get memorization of names out of the way… ;-)
Mike
Presentation is important
has a personal hate for current state of LMS - presentation isn’t flexible, not rich.
interface innovation not as common now as in the “early days of multimedia”
we’re stuck with “weapons of mass instruction” now
must be a better way
Pachyderm, tied in with standard tools (like EduSource is building) may be a solution
Larry
Partners, roles, etc… Big project. Big. BIG.
15 people on steering team
several hundred participants in total
Open to Q & A, Discussion
authoring tool info available at http://www.nmc.org –> search “Pachyderm” –> first link on top of page
How to modify software and templates?
Pachyderm 1.0 –> can’t do this. 2.0 will have this as a goal
Lou: an API or plugin system to allow addition of templates
probably not a built-in template building interface
Is there a way/templates for learning activities (as opposed to just media presentation?)
pedagogical templates, stuff for activities (how to engage students in an activity WITH the content - quiz templates, matching items templates…)
Target client? technology…
is it flash, or thin client
answer: flash, because of a few reasons
works on several platforms (web, kiosk, desktop)
high quality display
some rudimentary copy protection
rich environment
Timeline for people to start having access to Pachyderm 2.0?
problem is the project is rather open-ended, but we’re going as fast as we can.
End users?
Aimed at instructors AND students
way for everyone to create/aggregate sets of learning objects - VERY IMPORTANT to be able to push resources back into the system, not just a top-down dump of resources onto learners
analysis of search patterns used by students against their collection (google referrals)
Majority of searches are curriculum- or professional-development-related
Top search BY FAR was on “Classroom Management”
“Lesson Plans” also places high in search queries
Many queries were for items that were presented in the interface, but users habitually search for keywords (even when handy nav links are presented on the “main page”)
Science related topics are BY FAR the most popular curriculum-based searches
Mike and I just had a quick conversation with Dawn Mercer, and she was telling us of some of her needs for entering metadata for learning objects in CAREO.
They have a bunch of flash movies, and need to have several versions available online. A “Presentation” version, with a URL pointing to an .html file, a “download” version, with a URL pointing to a .swf file, and a “source” version, with a URL pointing to a .fla file.
It’s a little freaky. Everyone (and I mean everyone) is talking about RSS here. Merlot apparently even demoed RSS feeds from it’s collection (I guess that makes our presentation on Friday rather moot. oh, well…)
Garry flew in from Oz, and is going to be showing some cool stuff they’re doing with RSS to syndicate stuff all over the place. He’s going to be in Calgary on Monday, after the conference, and we’ll be talking more then.
I’m heading to UBC today (along with Alan) to get Brian and his folks up and running with their own copy of CAREO. Should be fun! They’ve got a spanky new XServe just waiting. Chomping at the bit, as it were. Judging from Brian’s recent post, we may need to stage an intervention for him. Sad, really.
We’ll be spending the day on campus, then heading back to the Hyatt for the Big Fancy Reception for the Merlot folks. Curious to see how many people are here.