Absolute gold!

Yesterday evening m’colleague Bridget from GLEU and myself wandered down to the South Bank for the PureGold launch event. Thanks to some train shenanigins we arrived fashionably late but I managed to meet up with the people I’d invited along, hoping they’d like it.

Based in the Queen Elizabeth hall and spread over three spaces, it was an evening showcasing the music that is created and performed at Goldsmiths. I think it’s fair to say we liked it. We were all pretty much bowled over by the energy, talent and creativity. And the performers didn’t seem at all phased by playing in one of Europe’s top venues. They rose to the occasion.

There aren’t many events where you can listen to a madrigal, then pop next door for some experimental electronica. As someone commented, it was unusual to see me being so positive and smiling (no idea what they meant by that)  and they added they loved seeing such a diverse bunch of people doing such a diverse range of interesting stuff. Very Goldsmiths, I thought.

PureGold continues for some time – so catch an event – details here: http://www.gold.ac.uk/puregold/

Moodle: the joy of stats

We’re looking at moving learn.gold (our Moodle VLE) to a new server infrastructure over the summer, so I’ve been working with colleagues from IT Services to look at usage levels for capacity planning and load testing.

The first thing to do is find out how the service is used at present. There are broadly speaking three approaches.

• Google analytics
• Web server log analysis
• Moodle’s own built-in statistics

Google analytics

I know some people find this useful, but the downside is you have to modify your themes and remember to remove it from any test instances you have. It can only start analysing from the date you set it up and of course it depends how you feel about Google. We don’t currently use it.

Web server access logs

These are just a list of every request that has been made to the server, a typical day will have hundreds of thousands of lines of text. Depending how your server is set up, it will contain the IP address of the requester, date and time, item requested, referring page and possibly the type of browser and client operating system.

To make sense of them you need to put them through a web log analysis package. For example – web expert. This will create a multi-page report of charts and tables. It’s useful to get a broad brushstroke feel for overall levels and can also be handy for spotting suspicious activity, but it does get a bit flummoxed by Moodle, as we’ll see.

So – here are some of the things it can tell us about learn.gold.

Activity by hour of day

The chart above is the average activity by hour of day. It’s clear from this that it’s used 24 hours a day but peak times are early afternoon.

Weekly pattern of use

The chart above shows the most popular pages over the week. You can see the activity drops off at the weekend. You can also see the flaw with this approach – the most popular pages look a bit odd – they are actually theme and javascript files.

This is because a typical Moodle page also requests these other files too and they look like extra page views to the analyser. It therefore tends to inflate the overall figures and confuse matters. There are probably workarounds for this but I find the report is fine as it is, especially combined with Moodle’s own stats.

Operating Systems 2013

This I thought was useful. This gives an idea of how people are accessing learn.gold. The Mac is by far the largest with Windows 7 second. The iPhone is also quite a chunk. Interesting to compare this to the chart I produced a couple of years back (below).

Operating Systems 2011

Browsers

Web browsers 2013

This was a surprise to me – Google Chrome is the second biggest chunk of the graph. Compare it with two years ago (below).

Web browsers 2011

Finally – it seems people are still using IE!  What versions though?

Internet Explorer versions

Version 9 predominates. Alarming to see someone is still using IE6! Don’t!

So how is this useful? Well, it helps to know what the most used browsers are when testing new versions of Moodle or tweaking the theme – or indeed running sessions for staff. It’s also useful to know that increasingly people are accessing the VLE from their smartphones. When I did my PGCERT in ODE with the OU (lots of letters)!, I found their Moodle mobile offering really good for staying in touch via forums. On learn.gold we have the Mobile theme enabled, but as phones get bigger again and tablets smaller – it may be that the normal desktop theme works better.

I’ll take a look at the built in stats some other time. In the meantime, if you’ve any tricks you use to look at usage – add a comment!

 

From Television Centre to Generation C

Two different news stories set me thinking today about how fast things are changing.

Firstly, the BBC are moving from the iconic Television Centre and tonight there’s a live concert by Madness as part of a themed BBC4 evening. Perhaps they’ll get the Goodies in, who famously blew it up in one of their episodes. I’ve only been there once, for a job interview and I recall sitting in a waiting room when a giant cactus wheeled past, presumably on its way back to the props dept. I then followed my interviewer around a maze of corridors, up some steps, through a window, across the roof and in through the window at the other side. This, I was assured, was a commonly used short cut. I didn’t get the job. Broadcasting’s loss.

The other thing that caught my eye today was this piece in the Guardian – YouTube reaches a billion viewers – have a read. It was quite interesting but introduced yet another buzzword – Generation C – which was new to me (but I think I try and block these out these days). Gen C appears to include anyone with a mobile device capable of watching video on. That’ll be me then – apparently it’s not an age thing it’s my “connected behaviour” and I’m an expert curator, adept at finding and creating video, such as this one.

Well I don’t know about that, but it’s interesting to reflect how the technology has changed and what it has enabled. When TV Centre was built, the idea of the public making their own programmes would have been the stuff of science fiction. In the 1980s I used to make things for Nexus Television, the student TV service at UEA, but that required some effort lugging heavy cameras around and editing involved manually controlling two massive tape machines. Cameras started getting smaller and incorporated into ever more powerful phones. And now, anyone can knock together a HD video on an iPhone or similar and upload it to Vimeo or YouTube. And of course, the learning angle here is pretty obvious – videos are a great way to help learning.

Apparently Generation C watch less television, but is this because they’re busy curating online video – or is it because there seems to be nothing worth watching on television nowadays? Or has television lost some of the magic because it seems less of a wonder now?

And now I must go and video the cat.

learn.gold users: Turnitin grades disappearing

There is currently a problem with Turnitin assignments – it seems the grades disappear when the post date is reached on anonymous assignments.

For now – it’s a matter of waiting for Turnitin to find a fix for this. Please keep an eye on the learn.gold home page and we’ll keep you informed.

Change of venue – PGCERT day at Goldsmiths is now in Education 226

We’ve had to move the venue for today’s PG CERT study day at Goldsmiths. It’s now in the Education building – room 226. (March 6th).

Use Evernote? Change your password

If you use Evernote, you are advised to log in to reset your password as soon as possible.

Evernote is a popular cloud-based notebook – you can store text, images, web pages and so on and your content is available across all your devices. I use it for my own studies and interests. When I received this email from them this morning, I almost dismissed it as spam:

Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on  the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.

As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset.

However – it’s not spam – it’s genuine – someone has gained access to user information including usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords – which is particularly worrying. It’s good practice to store passwords in an encrypted form, but it is possible to decrypt them if you have the time and the processing power. It makes sense for Evernote to get users to change them, although getting all your users to change their passwords isn’t something you’d do lightly. If nothing else it’s not exactly good for business.

Details on the issue are here: http://evernote.com/corp/news/password_reset.php 

As they helpfully say -

There are also several important steps that you can take to ensure that your data on any site, including Evernote, is secure:

• Avoid using simple passwords based on dictionary words

• Never use the same password on multiple sites or services

• Never click on ‘reset password’ requests in emails — instead go directly to the service

It also illustrates one of the risks associated with cloud-based services. Be careful what information you store in them!

Turnitin not responding (Friday 1 March 4pm)

Turnitin tell us: Turnitin is experiencing a global intermittent service disruption. We are working to resolve this and will provide an update.

It looks like this has been going on for half an hour or so. As a result, you may find your Turnitin assigments in learn.gold are either slow or not accessible. Keep an eye on learn.gold’s SITE HOME page and we’ll update that if we get news.

UPDATE 4.50pm – seems to be working again now. It is described as ‘intermittent’ so if you have problems, leave it a few minutes and try again.

Peake awards 2013 launched by GLEU

Goldsmiths students can nominate a staff member for a 2013 Peake award.

The objects of the award scheme are

• to celebrate excellence in learning and teaching
• to publicise it within Goldsmiths and beyond
• to identify good and/or innovative practice
• disseminate it within the institution and to the wider HE sector.

More about the award is here on the GLEU web site. Students can nominate via learn.gold (login required).

Curing cancer more speedily with a game

Nice to hear something good on the news once in a while.

The idea of engaging the public in research projects isn’t that new, but I was intrigued by the item today about turning such endeavours into a game people can play on their phones. Some of the big internet names are teaming up with Cancer Research to try and make this idea a reality – or at least into a prototype of an app. The human eye is still better at spotting subtle anomalies than software, so the plan is to engage hundreds of thousands of volunteers (and disguise it as fun).

There are many existing examples of perhaps more straightforward ‘citizen science’ at work, such as Galaxy Zoo or for that matter – ‘citizen history’ with the old weather project.

What’s a good eReader?

I’m on the lookout for something to read ebooks on. Why, you may ask?

Some background – a couple of years ago I bought a Kindle for my dad and he just took to it, it meant basically he could read books again as it was lightweight, had a bigger (variable) font and a light built into the cover. A couple of days ago I was given a Kindle that someone had received as a gift and had experienced the opposite – it became an unwanted gift. So I had a mess about with it and within ten minutes had downloaded several free books, a few free samples and bought a book – How music works by John Powell – which was quite an entertaining take on music theory.

I’d not experienced an e-ink display properly before and now I’m completely sold on them. In fact suddenly I seem to be reading books again.

Here’s what I like:

• really gorgeous display -  easy to read and clear (not backlit)
• you can change the font size
• battery life of four weeks
• easy to turn ‘pages’
• no distractions (ok it has a web browser but it’s a faff to use)

What’s not to like? Well my main problem is that the Kindle is tied to Amazon, so I’m having a look around to see what else is out there. Ideally it would be something just as good technically and more open – I’d like to put my own files on there to read – lots of them potentially.

Anyone any suggestions?