Research Log of Web Science Students

We won’t be submitting our paper to PCSC.

For one, Google App Engine failed us.

Second, the tests we conducted were inconclusive. I also had doubts over it. So what if our system/integration testing was successful? That only proves that we coded the system well. But that doesn’t prove anything about the effectiveness of our learning system, which tries to posit a better alternative to learning.

I guess somewhere along the way I lost track of the motivations for this project. Well today I am setting out with a renewed focus.

While I’ve been talking about all this time how our app will be an alternative/supplement to formal learning, now the project will assume a futuristic setting: Informal learning has now been accepted, and the debate now is whether using Hardwire is better than using a scattered set of online software to learn. This is where the Hardwire becomes a mashup. It brings together all your online learning tools under one hub.

All the efforts now of our testing will go to proving that learning using Hardwire’s features is more effective than say for example using Diigo, Google Docs separately as part of conceptual learning framework. The test we thought of this afternoon is simple: Simulate the learning process in Hardwire and see the results. Specifically, a teacher makes a course ( a set of modules with prerequisites among them) or a module. Student learns that module and uploads his/her work products. Student has/her projects assessed via Projectrix. Also happening in parallel is another student learning a topic via his preferred method using software on the web. After this the students will be gaged as to who learner more using what method.

To be able to measure this, Sir Rom said that a set of parameters or some metrics should be used to assess learning using online tools. My first reaction was, “Where would I get those metrics?” to which he replied that I had to look for a paper that actually does that.

That’s that for the testing and paper writing.

Another goal of mine is to have Hardwire somewhat ready for production. Here are some of the features/improvements I’d like to work on immediately:

1. Refactor code smells
2. Pulling resources from social bookmarking sites and via Drag and Drop functionality make a course/module.
3. New layout.

Everytime I try to run my project, I get the following error message:

Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/google/appengine/tools/util/Logging at com.google.appengine.tools.development.DevAppServerMain.main(DevAppServerMain.java:82)

What could be the problem? I’ve tried reinstalling Eclipse and reconfiguring the Build Path for a couple of times now, but no avail.

Thanks!

(This is actually a repost from my stackoverflow post, just in case this will get crawled on by people who also develop on GAE.)

I’ve been searching for existing implementations for this until I encountered David Burger’s post:

http://david-burger.blogspot.com/2009/03/display-google-docs-spreadsheet-data-on.html#comment-form

It made me hungry (okay, lame) but I’ll try it out in a bit. This might solve our problem of sending a request to Google Spreadsheets to return an ATOM feed. I also found another way, albeit more complex, using JSON (which I don’t yet have any idea about):

http://blog.uxebu.com/2009/04/30/jsonp-for-google-spreadsheets/

Another task pending is to try out the Jericho HTML parser (as suggested by Jeune).

Will update you if either works.

We almost gave up on using Google Spreadsheets for the rubric creation–until our last project planning. What we were planning to do is to create our own rubric creator using GWT–but I think there’s no way for us to implement the collaboration function (similar to that of Google Docs) given the timeframe.

So now, this is our current plan on how to implement the rubric:

(1) Make Projectrix create a new Spreadsheet — Done by Dan before.

(2) Insert rubric headers — The new rubric will include a scale for the top row (incrementing from left to right) and any additional row will be a new criterion.*

(3) Make Projectrix access the ATOM feed of the Spreadsheet (like in our sample rubric: http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/tigT9uc4x8-o7e4d7NrVd2w/od6/public/basic)

(4) Use open source ATOM parsers (here’s a running list: http://java-source.net/open-source/rss-rdf-tools) to parse the ATOM feed

(5) Insert the parsed text to the empty table** in Projectrix.

* Google Spreadsheets API provides steps on how one can update Spreadsheet rows (follow: http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#UpdatingListRows)

** The rubric table in Projectrix is entirely independent from the Spreadsheet–the only role of the Spreadsheet is to provide the rubric table with its contents. But without the text from the Spreadsheet, the rubric will actually work–albeit defeating the purpose.

Projectrix won’t save the contents of the Spreadsheet until it’s published. We’ll be doing the same action selections as iRubric (Create, Modify (for unpublished rubrics), and Duplicate).

My priority task is to find out solutions for points (3) and (4). Will update on which parser we’ll be using prolly later today or tomorrow.

Dan and I discussing Gadgets (by Pamela Fox)–a way to pull XML data from Google Spreadsheets.