Ensemble survey response:
Cliff Shaffer
Gail Chapman
Email:
Skype: None
Office phone: 212-626-0507
Cell phone: 619-319-0629
Affiliation: CSTA
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it accomplish? Nothing yet
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch? Nothing yet.
What else would you like to share with the Ensemble team? CSTA is in the initial planning stages for a workshop designned to provide guidance for a group of CSTA volunteers in review and classification of materials submitted to the CSTA Source web repositiory. We are currently working on the materials to be used at the workshop and a possible agenda. We have requested meeting space for the Wednesday before SIGCSE, but will not be able to confirm that until late September. The intention is for the first workshop to include approximately 20 participants.
Patrick Fan
Tom McMail
Original Microsoft Contact. Removed from list.
Alex Wade
New Microsoft contact. May come to October meeting. Other Microsoft contact, Lee Dirks, will come.
Patrick Fan
Email:
Skype: weiguofan1973
Office phone: 540-231-6588
Cell phone: 540-313-2868
Affiliation: Virginia Tech
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it accomplish?
Ed Fox will be able to answer this. I am in charge of research update. Nothing received so far.
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
Research updates from all team members.
What else would you like to share with the Ensemble team?
We need all ensemble team to be more proactive and share what they are doing in terms of development and research.
Carol Weiss
Email:
Skype:
Office phone: 610 519-5627
Cell phone:
Affiliation: Villanova Institute for Teaching and Learning
For all of the questions below: Nothing to report
Steve Carpenter
Email:
Skype: bscarpenterii
Office phone: 979.458.3339
Cell phone: 979.739.3821
Affiliation: Texas A&M University
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it
accomplish?
ENSEMBLE Pavilion in Second Life
This site will serve as the virtual presence for the ENSEMBLE Computing Portal in the three-dimensional online virtual world of Second Life (SL) As a form of social networking the ENSEMBLE Pavilion offers currently (1) a virtual meeting space for ENSEMBLE members in SL; (2) a means for other users to become members of the ENSEMBLE Computing Group in SL; (3) a common location to collect and share related SL sites on computing, social networking, computing education, and education through computing, and; (4) an RSS hub for blogs related to computing, digital technology, and education in the virtual world.
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
1. Continued development of the ENSEMBLE Pavilion: archiving and cataloging computing and education collections, groups, and sites within SL
2. Sample curriculum development content using computing applications (VKB, Walden's Paths, Storyspace, Tinderbox, Voicethread)
What else would you like to share with the Ensemble team?
Nothing at this point.
Greg Hislop
Email:
Skype: gwhislop
Office phone: 215-895-2179
Cell phone: 610-804-8998
Affiliation: Drexel University
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it accomplish?
Nothing?
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
Upgrading SWENET to provide OAI data for harvest.
What else would you like to share with the Ensemble team?
a) Content: Those working on the ComputingPortal.org have done a great job in getting facilities up and running. I think that success brings us to the point where we need to put more emphasis on content needed to draw visitors and, especially, repeat visits. Put another way, I think the success of building infrastructure now makes us look content poor. For example, we added Twitter, but we’re not getting Tweets, even from ourselves.
Some questions: a) Who is focused on content creation? Do we have any student resources focused there? b) Who is organizing / controlling content for the site overall? To what extent are we adopting a completely open model? (anyone can contribute anything) How do we organize materials into various channels? (resources vs. blogs vs. tweets vs. whatever) To what extent do we check and edit materials, and who does that?
b) Change requests: How do we improve computingportal? We need a bug report, but even more, a change request and suggestion vehicle. And we need a change review group so suggeations get attention. General comment: should we learn from the open source world here and adopt some of the approaches used there?
c) Project management / communication: At the start of the project we discussed a variety of ways to communicate and some were set up (Scholar; citeulike, etc.). They haven’t been used much. Should we pull the plug on those? Is computingportal the vehicle for all project activities at this point? (internal project documents and communication as well as being the external face) And if computingportal is for project management too, how do we separate that content since casual visitors probably won’t care (e.g., at present the recent blog posts includes one about candidate Ensemble logos).
d) I think the skype scheduled for this Thursday is a good idea. While having the core group meet regularly is good, some more regular communication with a larger group might also be useful.
Monika Akbar
Email:
Skype: amonika8
Office phone:
Cell phone:540-553-5878
Affiliation: Virginia Tech
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it accomplish?
I will provide the metadata of Algoviz following the Open Archive Initiative protocol.
This will connect Algoviz with Ensemble the data will be used as a resource for Ensemble.
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
I will work on connecting other communities with Ensemble. I will also work on building taxonomy for the site.
What else would you like to share with the Ensemble team?
n/a
Manuel A. Perez-Quinones
Email:
Skype: maperezquinones
Office phone: 540-231-2646 (out often)
Cell phone: 540-572-0723 (new number, but keep private, old one still works)
Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, VT
Not working on anything, will try to give data to Dr. Fox for moving the syllabus collection under his control.
David Maier
Email:
Skype: david.maier.pdx
Office phone: (503) 725 2405
Cell phone: (503) 679 7916 (there is only a 4% chance it is turned on at any given time)
Affiliation: Portland State University
I will let Lois respond to the following questions on behalf of the PSU group.
We are scheduled to meet Wednesday morning to make the final call on what
we will try to get out for the October meeting & November launch
Haowei Hsieh
Email:
Skype:
haowei-hsieh
Office phone:
319-335-5713
Cell phone:
979-739-0659
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, School of Library and Information Science
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it accomplish?
I'm working with Rick and Frank on modifying the the hypermedia tool "Visual Knowledge Builder" (VKB) for the Web user. It will allows VKB users to share their VKB documents via dedicated Web hosts. VKB documents hosted on these servers will provide data harvesting capability for better use of VKB document authors' effort.
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
Depending on the progress, some of the improvement may be included in the launch or the future, including
- Improvement on the OAI-PMH service with more metadata in the repository.
- Provide better installer for the Mac OS platform.
- Options for using OpenID to login to VKB document servers.
Lois Delcambre
Email:
Skype:
loisdelcambre
Office phone:
503 725 2405
Cell phone:
503 799 3853
Affiliation:
Portland State University
We are working on three different projects for Ensemble. I'll answer your next set of questions, 3 times.
project 1 at Portland State University: support for subdocuments in Ensemble
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it accomplish?
We expect to demonstrate the following (fully implemented - but definitely a prototype):
1. The ability to "mark" a fine-grained selection in MS Office and in OpenOffice Writer.
2. The ability to paste these marks into a simple tool that allows you to create folders and place marks into various folders. The UI for this tool is very much like the Windows Explorer (or Finder) UI.
3. The ability to select marks for ingest into Fedora. They will have multiple streams, e.g., the mark information, the plain text version of the excerpt, a subdocument (i.e., a bona fide MS Word or OpenOffice Writer document) consisting only of the excerpt - with formatting preserved, and possibly a "screenshot" of the highlighted text in the context of the original page(s) in jpeg or pdf.
4. The ability to browse to subdocuments (from their documents) or vice versa in Fedora.
5. The ability to use an advanced search to find subdocuments in Fedora.
Items 1-3 are currently implemented. We believe that this will allow the team and the board to brainstorm the possibilities.
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
We envision including mark/subdocument-capable annotation in Fedora; perhaps also in Drupal. We envision the Ensemble team at large providing input regarding whether marks/subdocuments are created in Fedora? Drupal? both?; whether marks/subdocuments are stored in their own (global collection) or in the appropriate ancillary collection (e.g., one per Ensemble source collection) and other issues regarding the use of marks/subdocuments. We envision incorporating a full-featured browse and search capability for marks in Fedora and/or Drupal.
What else would you like to share with the Ensemble team?
nothing else to report
project 2 at Portland State University: Drupal structure plus sample content for CS1
> What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it
> accomplish?
We expect to demonstrate an organic group in Drupal entitled CS1 - using the various structures that we are currently in the process of designing. Our current plan is to introduce a number of content types (such as "textbook post", "curriculum post", and others), define and use a set of categories/tags for "intended audience", "curricular approach" and "programming language").
We will populate our structure with content prepared by Scott Fetcher in early 2009 as an example of how this structure could be used.
We will present the alternative structures and rationale for our decisions about this structure to the board. We invite brainstorming about whether/how this might be used and whether/how this could be an appropriate structure for other ensemble groups. There could be such groups focused on other courses, for example.
> What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
We don't have specific plans here. One important task would be to reach out to other communities involved in CS1 to see if they have interest in what we're doing and whether they have content that we should put in Ensemble or link to or ...?
> What else would you like to share with the Ensemble team?
nothing else to report
project 3 at Portland State University: exercising the Computing Ontology (CO): working with the "first database course" Perhaps we should call it DB1
> What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it
> accomplish?
We will show the deliverables that we have so far:
6 database syllabi have been analyzed
Each syllabus is represented in XML, using an XML schema that we devised.
Each topic listed in the syllabus has been index using terms from the Computing Ontology.
This led to us identifying several dozen ambiguous terms - where one would have to choose which term(s) to apply to a topic. These ambiguous choices have been reviewed by three database faculty (perhaps more). We also identified some missing terms and have some suggestions for the Computing Ontology.
We also intend to show the preliminary results from an analysis of these syllabi. We'd like to see which topics are covered, at what depth, and in what order. (When we run an analysis on these 6 syllabi, the resulting reports will only be illustrative of the approach - rather than actual results - based on the small sample size.)
We'd like to brainstorm with the team and the board concerning the use/benefit of this kind of analysis.
> What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
We can imagine additional tools and associated instructions to guide Ensemble users to contribute syllabi. We plan to write a summary report, perhaps for ACM SIGMOD Record, describing our site and our analysis.
We have also marked up the associated class materials for a number of these 6 classes, at fine grain. This allows us to indicate which fine-grained pieces of lectures, assignments, and tests address which computing ontology topics. These marks have been created by hand, so far. But when project 1 listed above is more advanced, these marks could be represented in Ensemble. We would then enable search (for fine-grained pieces) based on the computing ontology, for example.
Heikki Topi
Email:
Skype: hetopi
Office phone: (781) 891-2799
Cell phone: (617) 230-3477
Affiliation: Bentley University
I have, unfortunately, nothing to report regarding the three other questions. I should, however, determine how we can link at least some of the AIS digital resources to the Ensemble context. This should probably be my primary task here.
Peter Brusilovsky
Email:
Skype: pbrusilovsky
Office phone: 412 624 9404
Cell phone: 412 908 1600
Affiliation: University of Pittsburgh
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it accomplish?
Program examples should be connected to the Portal. AUthoring system will be available.
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
Proper integration of interactive content, with logging functionality, simple social navigation.
Boots Cassel
Email:
Skype: bootscassel
Office phone: 610 519 7341
Cell phone: 610 608 4714
Affiliation: Villanova University
What will be ready for the October internal launch? What will it accomplish?
- Group support within the Ensemble site. Our focus this summer has been on implementing the Drupal organic groups and supporting the activities of the teams formed at the Future of Computing Education Summit held in June. That has been completed and announced to the teams. At least one team is currently using the Ensemble site.
- Federated search covering the SIGCSE list, the Syllabus collection, Google books, selected sites known to Ensemble.
- We hope to have a comment facility for resources in CITIDEL and CSTA in place by the October meeting.
What are you working on that will be ready for a future launch?
- Computing ontology development and integration into the DSpace installation of CITIDEL and CSTA for use as the classification scheme
- Collection development
- Work with publishers to allow appropriate search of their materials to be integrated with searches of other sources
What else would you like to share with the Ensemble team?