OUseful.Info, the blog…

In earlier posts, I’ve pondered on the rise of “dual screen” activity (e.g. Dual View Media Channels), but what about when one screen provides the control surface for another?

Earlier this week, the new release of the Apple Mac iWork office productivity suite included an announcement about an iPhone remote control app for Keynote (Keynote is the Mac equivalent of Microsoft’s Powerpoint presentation software). Here’s a demo video showing how it works:

I’d been looking for something like this for some time (and have been tempted to try out the free Telekinesis universal remote, though I’ve not had chance to get round to installing it yet) so it was good to see what Apple’s “official solution” looks like.

Whilst taking the dog out for a walk, it occurred to me that using an iPhone/iPod touch like remote could be really handy for many other home entertainment appliances – like the telly, for example. Want to know what’s on the other side without changing channel (or using a picture-in-picture pop up? Why not preview it on your remote? Or how about checking out the programme guide? It’s a real pain having to steal the screen to view the guide, so why not check it out on your remote instead? Programming the DVD/HDD recorder is another activity that prompts the “can I just set the video” routine, as you change to the ever popular “schedule recording” channel. Duh – why not just do it on the remote…? And so on…

Of course, it seems that several “screen remote” clients are already out there… like the Apple official “Remote” app for iTunes/Apple TV (review here), or the rather more elaborate Remote Buddy, as shown in this video:

And if “Remote Buddy” isn’t to your taste, how about iSofa (video):

(For an up-to-the-minute review of iSofa, check out Get Yer Feet Off iSofa; as well as “remote-ing” your Mac, iSofa lets you open “not a web browser, but a file one. It allows you to navigate your user directory on the computer, and open files that can be opened in Safari on the iThing- images, Word files, PDFs, etc” – thanks for that, Alan:-)

As ever, it seems as if the future really is out there… So for example, take that “EPG remote on an iPhone” idea? MythTV viewers can already try it out with MyMote:

Do you ever get the feeling you’re living in a William Gibson novel?

PS thanks to Owen for the pointer to Air Mouse (use your iPodTouch as a mouse’n'keyboard combo for your Mac), and @oxfordben for a “fwiw” pointer to the MythWeb web interface to MythTV.

PPS See also Steps Towards Making Augmented Reality A Reality, which shows how to use an iPhone/iPodTouch as part of an augmented reality setup:-)

Okay – here’s a throwaway post for the weekend – a quick sketch of a thought experiment that I’m not going to follow through in this post, though I may do in a later one…

• The setting: “the box” that sits under the TV.
• The context: the box stores bits that encode video images that get played on the TV.
• The thought experiment: what’s the best way of getting the bits you want to watch into the box?

That is, if we were starting now, how would we architect a bit delivery network using any or all of the following:

1) “traditional” domestic copper last mile phone lines (e.g. ASDL/broadband);
2) fibre to the home;
3) digital terrestrial broadcast;
4) 3G mobile broadband;
4.5) femtocells, hyperlocal, domestic mobile phone base stations that provide mobile coverage within the home or office environment, and use the local broadband connection to actually get the bits into the network; femtocells might be thought of as a the bastard lovechild of mobile and fixed line telephony!
5) digital satellite broadcasts (sort of related: Please Wait… – why a “please wait” screen sometimes appear for BBC red button services on the Sky box…).

Bear in mind that “the box” is likely to have a reasonable sized hard drive that can be used to cache, say, 100 hrs of content alongside user defined recordings.

All sorts of scenarios are allowed – operators like BT or Sky “owning” a digital terrestrial channel; the BBC acting as a “public service ISP”, with a premium rate BBC license covering the cost of a broadband landline or 3G connection; Amazon having access to satellite bursts for a couple of hours a day; and so on…

Hybrid return paths are possible too – the broadband network, SMS text messages, a laptop on your knee or – more likely – an iPhone or web capable smartphone in your hand, and so on. Bear in mind that the box is likely to be registered with an online/web based profile, so you can change settings on the web that will be respected by the box.

If you want to play the game properly, you might want to read the Caio Review of Barriers to investment in Next Generation Broadband first.

PS If this thought experiment provokes any thoughts in you, please share them as a comment to this post:-)

One of the nice things about blogging within the WordPress ecosystem is the way that trackbacks/pingbacks capture information about posts that link back to your posts, in much the same way that using the link: search limit on a web or blog search engine allows you to see what other webpages are linking back to a particular web page.

In the latter case, for example, searching for link:http://hedebate.jiscinvolve.org/on-line-higher-education-learning/ on Google blogsearch will turn up blog posts that link back to the original HE Debate blog post on On-Line Higher Education Learning.

(Actually, that’s not quite true. In an apparent tweak of the Google blogsearch algorithm last year, the Google blogsearch engine now seems to be indexing and returning results from complete web pages rather than indexing the content of RSS feeds i.e. blog posts – which means that as well as the useful links referred to in the body of a post, links are also indexed from blogrolls, twitter feeds and bookmark lists displayed in blog sidebars, blog comments etc etc. Which in turn is to say that Google blogsearch qua a web search of blog web pages is not much use as a blog search engine at all…)

By judicious linking back to your own blog posts, it’s possible to build up quite complex pathways between related posts that are navigable in two directions: from one post that links to another, previously published post, via an inline link; and “forwards” in time to a later post that has itself linked back to a post of interest and been picked up via a trackback/pingback.

(For examples of these emergent link structures, see Emergent Structure in the Digital Worlds Uncourse Blog Experiment, Uncovering a Little More Digital Worlds Structure and Trackback Graphs and Blog Categories.)

So the question arises – if I write a blog post that several other people link back to, and several further posts in turn link back to those posts that referred back to my post, but not my original post, how do I keep track of the conversation?

Keeping track of posts that cite my post is easy enough – if I have an effective pingback set-up, that will tell me who’s linking back to my posts; or I can simply run link: searches against the URLs of my posts every so often to see who the search engines think are linking back to me.

The answer lies in a recursive algorithm of the form:

function showInLinks($url){
  $links=getLinksto($url);
  foreach ($link in $links){
    print $link;
    showInLinks($link)
  }
}

This will then display URLs for the pages that link to an originally specified URL, the URLs of pages that link to those URLs, and so on…

So here for example is a quick test:

The items numbered “1.” are links that Google blogsearch thinks link back to the original URL. The items numbered “2.” are links that link to the links that link back to the original URL.

Here’s some minimal PHP code if you want to try it out:

<?php
$urlstub = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/blogs?scoring=d&v=1.0&rsz=large&q=link%3A";
$url="http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-online-learning-ten-years-on_16.html";
if ($_GET['url']) $url=$_GET['url'];
$testurl=$urlstub.$url;
echo "Starting with: ".$url."<br/>";
echo "via: ".$testurl."<br/><br/>";
$depth=0;

function handlelinks($url, $depth){
	$urlstub = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/blogs?v=1.0&rsz=large&q=link%3A";
	//echo "testing".$url."  ";
	$depth++;
	$testurl=$urlstub.$url;
	//echo "testing ".$testurl."  ";
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $testurl);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$body = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	// now, process the JSON string
	$json = json_decode($body);
	//var_dump($json); echo "<br/&gt";
	if ($depth<3)
	  foreach (responseData->results as $result) {
		for ($i=0;$i<$depth;$i++) echo "  ";
		echo $depth.".$result->title;
		echo "<a href='".$result->postUrl."'>".$result->postUrl."</a><br/>";
		handlelinks($result->postUrl, $depth);
	 }
}
handlelinks($url, $depth);
?>

By using this sort of algorithm to generate an RSS feed of links, it becomes possible to subscribe to a feed that will keep you updated of all the downstream posts (“blogversation” posts) that are contributing to a discussion that at some point referred to a URL you are interested in.

One of the sessions I attended at last year’s CETIS get together was the UKOLN organised Technological Innovation in a World of Web APIs session (see also My CETIS 2008 Presentations and What Makes A Good API? Doing The Research Using Twitter).

This session formed part of a project being co-ordinated by UKOLN’s homeworking Marieke Guy – JISC “Good APIs” project (project blog) – which is well worth getting involved with because it might just help shape the future of JISC’s requirements when they go about funding projects…

(So if you like SOAP and think REST is for wimps, keep quiet and let projects that do go for APIs continue to get away with proposing overblown, unfriendly, overengineered ones…;-)

So how can you get involved? By taking this survey, for one thing:

The ‘Good APIs’ project aims to provide JISC and the sector with information and advice on best practice which should be adopted when developing and consuming APIs.

In order to collate information the project team have written a very brief research survey asking you about your use of APIs (both providing and consuming).

TAKE THE What makes a good API? SURVEY.

I don’t know if the project will have a presence at the JISC “Developer Happiness” Days (the schedule is still being put together) but it’d be good if Marieke or Brian were there on one of the days (at least) to pitch in some of the requirements of a good API that they’ve identified to date;-)

PS here’s another fun looking event – Newcastle Maker Faire.

A few days ago, I posted a few observations about internet appliances, leaving the post dangling with a comment about how nice it would be to have an internet TV applicance that was as easy to use as the Pure Evoke Flow wifi radio.

Well, it seems that CES will flush a few first generation candidates out of the woodwork – like the LG/Netflix streaming broadband TV, for example.

Sony also do wifi TVs, such as the Bravia ZX1 for example, but I’m not sure if this can stream video content from the web directly? Using the BRAVIA Internet Video Link Module, however, it is possible to stream content from the web to Bravia TVs, as this landing page for the Amazon Video On Demand on BRAVIA Beta suggests.

(Apple also do an internet TV box, of course – the Apple TV. And in the UK, services like BT Vision and Fetch TV offer hybrid set-top PVR boxes that blend Freeview terrestrial digital broadcast reception with video-on-demand services via a broadband connection (see also IP Vision delivers over the top set-top box to Fetch TV).)

Netflix already have a streaming delivery deal with Microsoft’s XBox 360, too – though rights issues being as they are, neither the 360 play, nor presumably the LG TVs, are available outside the US. (C’mon, BBC, c’mon…;-)

In fact, although not appreciated by many people, all the latest generation consoles – Wii, XBox 360 and PS3 – come with support for internet connectivity; and many of the latest release games include options for network play. (The BBC iPlayer also works on at least PS3 and the Wii too – but you knew that already, right?)

So here’s where my one “prediction” for the year ahead comes in to play: we’ll start seeing adverts for broadband connections that both raise and play upon people’s awareness that broadband is not just for computers (because not everyone feels the need to have a networked computer), but it’s also a desirable for an increasing range of home/consumer electronics appliances.

Like these ads, for example:

Hmm – does that mean my prediction has already come true? Or does it mean that the rest of the world (but not me) knows this is how the world already works just anyway?

PS if I was writing this post as a “serious” piece, I’d probably include some commentary about broadband and wifi router penetration in the UK, numbers of online gamers in the UK, the Ofcom communications Report 2008, the Caio Review of Barriers to investment in Next Generation Broadband etc etc. I’d also idly wonder what on earth our esteemed Prime Minister thinks he means about using a programme of public works to roll out ubiquitous high speed broadband access in the UK? But I’m not going to, ‘cos I’m a blogger not a journo;-)

Regular readers will know that I’ve been posting about daily – or serialised – RSS feeds for several years now, so here’s a quick recap of what serialised feeds actually are, and then a bit of news about my latest attempt at OpenLearn Daily feeds.

If you’re reading this via an RSS feed, then I’m assuming you’re familiar with the idea of RSS (if not, check out the Common Craft video: RSS in Plain English). The important thing to take away from this understanding is that separate RSS feed items contain separate chunks of content.

Typically, RSS is used to syndicate content as it is published from a regularly updated source, such as a blog, news service, or saved search. In these cases, each feed item might correspond to a separate news item, blog post, or search result.

In contrast to syndication feeds from continually or regularly updated sources, a serialised feed is an RSS feed derived from an unchanging (or “static”) body of content, such as a book, or OpenLearn course unit, for example.

The original work is partitioned (serialised) into a set of separate component parts or chunks – in the case of a book, this might correspond to separate chapters, for example. Each chunk is then published as a separate RSS item. By scheduling the release of each feed item, a book or course can be released as a part-work over a period of time, with each part delivered as a separate feed item.

“Serialisation” should thus be understood in the sense of “serialised” books, such as might appear over several issues of a newspaper, or several episodes of a radio programme in the case of a book serialised for radio.

Daily feeds are a special case of serialised feed in which items are released according to a daily schedule.

Serialised feeds may be published according to a “global” schedule – starting on a particular day, and running for a fixed period of time – or a local “personal” schedule, in which case the serialisation starts at the time an individual subscribes to a personalised, serialised feed. That is, the serialisation is published according to when an individual subscribes to the feed. So if I subscribe to a daily, personalised feed today, I get the first item today, the second item tomorrow, and so on; whereas if you subscribe next Wednesday, you get the first item next Wednesday, the second item next Thursday, etc.

Two good examples of services that publish serialised feeds are DailyLit and Podiobooks. DailyLit produces books (some free, some for a fee) as serialised feeds (or via email installments) and Podiobooks serialises books as audio podcasts. Another example is RSS Response, an RSS “auto-responder” service in which a series of staged marketing or product support releases can be delivered to a potential customer over an open-ended period of time, but starting when they subscribe to the feed.

There are two main ways of handling personalised feeds at a server level: datestamping, and unique feed subscription identifiers.

The first, and simplest, way is simply to add a datestamp to a feed subscription URL whenever a page that contains a link to the feed is published. When a blog reader polls the feed server, the current time is sampled, compared to the timestamp in the subscription URL, and the appropriate number of items published to the feed. This approach is demonstrated on Openlearnigg, where a Yahoo pipe is used to provide daily serialised feeds for OpenLearn units (see Static RSS Feed Content, Delivered Daily for more on this); the “clockRSS” icon links to the daily feed:

[Note: the openlearnigg daily feeds appear to be broken at the moment:-(]

The second way is to add a unique subscription identifier (or set of identifiers, such as a user ID and a separate feed identifier) to the feed URL each time it is linked to. User settings can then be associated with each identifier in a small database, containing details such as the start date of the subscription, information relating to the schedule (such as how frequently items should be added to the feed), the provision of offsets and accelerators (for example, an offset might say that the user wants the first three items on the first day, item four on the next day, and so on; an accelerator might allow a subscriber to grab an additional item before the next scheduled release is due, accelerating the rate at which the serialisation is published to the subscriber). DailyLit uses unique subscription IDs to allow personalised scheduling:

In a commentary on Misconceptions about reuse of open educational resources, Juliette Culver rightly identifies “Misconception 1: The only type of reuse is wholesale reuse” (see also some of my own thoughts on this: So What Exactly Is An OpenLearn Content Remix?). However, that is not to say that wholesale reuse of opencourseware is not possible. For example, whilst I have not been engaged in remixing OpenLearn content, per se, I have dabbled in various ways of re-publishing course units in different formats (ebooks, for example, or via embeddable Grazr widgets on Openlearnigg, as shown in the screenshot below).

(For more examples, see Feeding from openencourseware.)

Republication is also possible in different contexts (such as an environment that provides alternative community, commenting or discussion tools).

Serialised feeds offer another possible context for re-publication, particularly for opencourseware, in which pacing is returned to mix, at least insofar as the subscriber to a serialised course is concerned. (There are loads of issues here with respect to serialisation discussion around serialised course content, but that is for another day and another post ;-) That is, by subscribing to a serialised version of a course, a learner can benefit from the paced delivery of the course materials, akin to the paced delivery that is achieved by attending a series of timetabled lectures over a term in a traditional institution.

For a long time, I’ve felt that serialised content on demand is an attractive offering, and I’ll be looking to explore this area far more aggressively than I have in the past over the next year or so…

As Stephen Downes noted in his essay “The Future of Online Learning 2008” whilst discussing Time Independence:

Being able to time the distribution of resources is a significant advantage. It allows for presentations, interactions and other activities to be encountered dynamically during the course of days or weeks. This space can be used to pedagogical advantage in addition to meeting the student’s scheduling needs, facilitating ongoing practice and recall. Dynamic scheduling does not guarantee success – students may simply delete the material as it arrives. But having this level of control makes it more likely students will be able to attend to the material when it arrives.

Self-pacing in online learning, therefore, isn’t simply the learner picking up the work from time to time whenever he or she feels like it. It is rather the employment of various mechanisms that will enable work to be scheduled. Pacing continues to be important, even in instances of self-pacing. Being free to set one’s own schedule does not mean setting no schedule at all. Nor does it mean that the release of learning activities and content is not scheduled at all. It is, rather, a meshing of schedules.

So to start the year, I’ve spent a little bit of time putting together a WordPress MU site that republishes OpenLearn content in a blog format, and additionally provides a daily feed for the republished courses: http://learningfeed.org.

The installation makes use of two WordPress plugins that were developed under the auspices of the OpenLearn project mid-way through last year: OpenLearn WordPress Plugins. The first plugin makes it easy to create WPMU blogs based on separate OpenLearn course units; the second provides the daily feed service.

The WordPress serialised feed plugin uses a timestamped subscription URL, and a relatively simple approach to scheduling (though I intend to develop this further).

You can find links to several examples of a republished courses – and their corresponding serialised RSS feeds – here: LearningFeeds Miscellany.

It is my intention for the first iteration of LearningFeeds to see just what sorts of thing “come to mind” when playing around with the syndication (republishing) of opencourseware in a WordPress environment, as well as the “issues” that will no doubt arise from using the first versions of the OpenLearn WordPress plugins in anger (I will document my exploration s in the LearningFeeds blog, and cross-link to them from OUseful.info).

In the meantime, please feel free to comment back here with any thoughts you might have with respect to the use of serialised RSS feeds in online education and training:-)

One of the reasons I don’t tend to use many diagrams in the OUseful.info blog is that I’ve always been mindful that the diagrams I do draw rarely turn out how I wanted them to (the process of converting a mind’s eye vision to a well executed drawing always fails somewhere along the line, I imagine in part because I’ve never really put the time into practising drawing, even with image editors and drawing packages etc etc.)

Which is one reason why I’m always on the lookout for tools that let me write the diagram (e.g. Scripting Diagrams).

So for example, I’m very fond of Graphviz, which I can use to create network diagrams/graphs from a simple textual description of the graph (or a description of the graph that has been generated algorithmically…).

Out of preference, I tend to use Mac version of Graphviz, although the appearance of a canvas/browser version of graphviz is really appealing… (I did put in a soft request for a Drupal module that would generate a Graphviz plot from a URL that pointed to a dot file, but I’m not sure it went anywhere, and the canvas version looks far more interesting anyway…)

Hmmm – it seems there’s an iPhone/iPod touch Graphviz app too – Instaviz:

Another handy text2image service is the rather wonderful Web sequence diagrams, a service that lets you write out a UML sequence diagram:

There’s an API, too, that lets you write a sequence diagram within a <pre> tag in an HTML page, and a javascript routine will then progressively enhance it and provide you with the diagrammatic version, a bit like MathTran, or the Google Chart API etc etc (RESTful Image Generation – When Text Just Won’t Do).

If graphs or sequence diagrams aren’t your thing, here’s a handy hierarchical mindmap generator: Text2Mindmap:

And finally, if you do have to resort to actually drawing diagrams yourself, there are a few tools out there that look promising: for example, the LucidChart flow chart tool crossed my feedreader the other day. More personally, since Gliffy tried to start charging me at some point during last year, I’ve been using the Project Draw Autodesk online editor on quite a regular basis.

PS Online scripting tool for UML diagrams: YUML

Given that OUseful.Info is a personal – rather than a corporate – blog, you may be forgiven for wondering why I post round-ups of OU job ads every so often. The answer is simple – I look at the OU jobs listings (via a public RSS feed) to find out about what projects are actually going on around the OU, and get some idea about where the institution’s current priorities lay, at least in terms of staffing needs. And then I post on details about some of the jobs that I think may be interesting in a OUseful.info context, both as a personal reminder to find out who’s been appointed to the posts but also because there’s an outside chance that a small percentage of the OUseful.info readership might actually be interested in applying…

So without further ado, here’s a quick round-up of posts that are currently being advertised. (Note that the deadline on some of them is – err – today…)

• Enterprise Content Management Programme Manager: ECM will touch all aspects of our business; from committee minutes, to product catalogue workflows, to learning materials production. This is just not about technology; it is about changing our culture, understanding business processes, and building intelligent workflows.
  You will work with many other parts of the University including Computing Services (who manage the technical developments of ECM), and Learning and Teaching Solutions (LTS), who manage the production of our learning materials.
  Our core tool for ECM is EMC Documentum; released to a number of early adopters we have just upgraded to version 6.5.
• JISC TELSTAR Project Manager : This is a superb opportunity to join a proactive world class Library service and provide leadership and excellent project management skills for The JISC (Joint Information Services Committee) funded TELSTAR (Technology Enhanced Learning supporting students to achieve Academic Rigour) project. TELSTAR is a collaborative project between the Library, Learning and Teaching Solutions and Proquest and is based at The Open University headquarters in Milton Keynes.
  The project aims to deliver; more integrated systems solutions for managing course and programme related references within web based courseware; an improved personalised student experience for the management of bibliographic references for learning, teaching and research purposes.
• Research Associate/Assistant: Semantic Web: The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute has an opening for a Research Associate to participate to the research activities realized within the NeOn EU-funded integrated project on knowledge sharing and ontology publication. This work is part of our ongoing research program on enabling the development of the Semantic Web, and in particular, of the next generation of Semantic Web applications, by providing the necessary foundation for the realization of such applications. More precisely, this work is at the forefront of emerging semantic technologies, combining infrastructure components for Semantic Web search (i.e., the Watson Semantic Web gateway) and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing with principles of social networks for collaborative evaluation and trust management in ontologies. Core to the work is the development of a new ontology sharing and publication system (Cupboard), which addresses the need for an open, distributed ontology repository system for the Semantic Web.
• Senior Lecturer in Education (‘Educational ICT’ and Professional development): You will lead the development of courses to extend practitioners’ ability to support the effective use of new technologies in both formal and informal educational contexts (e.g. playgroup, school, home, youth club). This will require understanding how ICT can be used as a tool to enhance subject learning and its assessment across the curriculum as well as in informal settings and workplaces. In addition you will provide academic leadership in the use of ICT to enhance course design within the Department. In this respect you will support course teams in using ICT as pedagogic tools in a way that models the practices that students are expected to develop as an outcome of their study. You will be contributing to the development and transaction of a range of courses as well as playing a key role in extending research in the area of ‘educational ICT’ and the future of education.
• Senior Learning Developer: Are you interested in on-line learning development? Can you help meet the growing demand for professional learning and development? The Centre for Professional Learning and Development (CPLD) is looking for a Senior Learning Developer to join the team. This appointment offers the opportunity to help shape the OU’s Professional Learning and Development provision that is key to diversifying the learning opportunities we provide to current and potential students and alumni and to our commitment to engage with employers’ skill development needs.
• Producer Sound & Vision: Learning and Teaching Solutions (LTS) is The Open University’s media production centre. We take academic ideas and turn them into multimedia products for the OU’s distance learning courses.
  We are looking for an imaginative producer to work with academics and within media teams to create innovative ways to deliver educational ideas and content.
  What are you like? You are most likely to have started out in television, video, or radio, and will have taken those narrative and storytelling skills into the world of interactive media. You understand the value and uses of video and audio in education and in multimedia products. You will have had experience of overseeing production teams to ensure high quality and on budget deliveries.
• Internal Communications Manager: We are looking for a top-flight, Internal Communications Manager to help us align our internal communications with our external image. Working within Communications you will play a strong part in developing effective communications systems, including our intranet, with professionals from within the unit and with colleagues throughout the University. You will be a skilled communicator with a strategic approach.
• Media Relations Officer, Communications: We’re looking for a creative media professional to help us tell the world. The university needs an experienced media officer to join a small team working in a busy and dynamic environment. We are looking for a media professional with proven experience in a press office or journalism. Experience in the corporate sector, TV publicity and social media would be an advantage. You will need to have strong communication, interpersonal and organisational skills to service the needs of internal and external clients, and the drive and enthusiasm to take advantage of an almost inexhaustible source of PR opportunities.
• Publications Co-ordinator, Marketing and Sales: You will be responsible for project managing the production and delivery of some of our University publications, aimed at both prospective and existing students. This will involve managing the output to print, digital and online formats of all the university prospectuses and subject-specific prospectuses. You will also be responsible for the production project management of the core publication which conveys the OU/BBC partnership and its activities.
• Information Literacy Specialist: We are looking for an enthusiastic and creative information professional to help us to develop and embed information literacy skills through all areas of the curriculum.
  You will be a superb communicator with experience of developing effective and engaging learning materials and an up to date knowledge of both information and digital literacies.
• Business Performance and Planning Manager, The Library and Learning Resource Centre: We are seeking an enthusiastic, highly motivated individual with sound experience of managing budgets and working with complex financial information.
  Providing direct support to the Associate Director (Business Performance and Management) you will be ensuring delivery of the business performance and management agenda.

Please note, that (as ever) I have nothing to do with any of the posts mentioned above – though if you do apply for one, and get called to interview or even take up a post, feel free to ping me for a coffee sometime ;-)

A few weeks ago now, I was looking for a context within which I could have a play with the deprecated BBC Web API. Now this isn’t the most useful of APIs, as far as I’m concerned, because rather than speaking in the language of iPLayer programme identifiers it users a different set of programme IDs (and I haven’t yet found a way of mapping the one onto the other). But as I’d found the API, I wanted to try to do something with it, and this is what I came up with: a service you can tweet to that will tell you what’s on a specified BBC TV or radio channel now (or sometime in the recent past).

Now I didn’t actually get round to building the tweetbot, and the time handling is a little ropey, but if I write it up it make spark some more ideas. So here goes…

The first part of the pipe parses a message of the form “#remindme BBCChannel time statement”. The BBCChannel needs to be in the correct format (e.g. BBCOne, BBCRFour) and only certain time constructs work (now, two hours ago, 3 hours later all seem to work).

The natural language-ish time expression time gets converted to an actual time by the Date Builder block, and is then written into a string format that the BBC Web API requires:

Then we construct the URI that references the BBC Web API, grab the data back from that URI and do a tiny bit of tidying up:

If you run the pipe, you get something like this:

Time expressions such as “last Friday” seem to calculate the correct date and use the current time of day. So you could use this service to remind yourself what was on at the current time last week, for example.

A second pipe grabs the programme data from the programme ID, by constructing the web service call:

then grabbing the programme data and constructing a description based on it:

It’s then easy enough to call this description getting pipe at the end of the original pipe, remembering to call the pipe with the appropriate programme ID:

So now we get the description too:

To see what’s on (or what was on) between two times, we need to to construct a URI to call the BBC Web API with the appropriate time arguments, suitably encoded:

and then call the web service with that URI.

It’s easy enough to embed this pipe in a variant of the original pipe that generates the two appropriately encoded time strings from two natural language time strings:

If we add the programme details fetching pipe to the end of the pipe, we can grab the details for each programme and get this sort of output from the whole pipeline:

Towards the end of last year, my better half rediscovered the joys of radio… Around the same time, James Cridland wrote a post extolling the virtues of the Pure Evoke Flow wifi radio (Pure Evoke Flow – what it means for radio, or see this video walkthrough), so that was that Christmas present sorted…

As JC pointed out in his post, gadgets like the Evoke Flow could indeed be a game changer. On Christmas Day, we were wifi-less, which meant that the first experience of the radio was as a DAB radio. A quick self-tune on start-up, and a good selection of DAB channels were available. Getting back home meant we could get the wifi channels too – configuring the radio with a wifi key went smoothly enough, and getting an account with the online Lounge service provided a key to register the radio with lots of online goodness.

Wifi radio channels can be favourited online, along with podcast subscriptions, and stored in separate folders; the favourites are then also available on the radio itself. Radio stations can also be browsed and favourited on the radio itself – favouriting them also adds them to a particular folder in your online account.

So here are a few of my immediate impressions:

• being able to just switch the radio on and tune into a wifi radio or podcast station is really attractive; no need for the radio to receive content via an intermediary PC – it gets its network connection directly from your wifi router;
• within a few minutes of being connected for the first time, the appliance found a software update and offered to install it – a process which was achieved quickly and efficiently; in an age where automatic software updates are increasingly possible, what does this mean for built-in/planned obsolence?
• the integration between the appliance itself and the online account means that the radio has a full web browser interface and management tools, if required. (I’d quite like an iPhone interface too;-) I’ve written about “dual view” working before (Dual View Media Channels) – here’s an example of it in action with an interface for one device being provided through another.
• the appliance makes good use of soft/programmable buttons – a bit like a mobile phone, the functionality of the “buttons” is context dependent; the “undo” (or “go back” a step) button is incredibly useful, too.

I haven’t tried streaming music to the appliance from another computer, but that facility is also available.

From even just a couple of days playing with the Pure Evoke Flow, I’m sold on it – and the idea of streaming, dedicated internet appliances in general. So the idea of the BBC/ITV set-top box – Project Canvas – really appeals… (e.g. Canvas and the connected home and Partners to bring broadband to the TV; looking forward, this is also relevant: IMDA – Internet Media Device Alliance, a trade alliance for agreeing on protocols and formats for streaming digital media).

While on the topic of internet TV (sort of!), I noticed an advert last night on ITV for the ITV player… which is something I’d missed… Assuming that this revamp would be of yet another Windows only player, I was pleasantly surprised:

So if, as with me, the announcement passed you by, here’s a catch-up: in early December, 2008, ITV rebranded its online catchup TV service as ITV Player.

(Sky also launched a (subscription based) online TV play, called – can you guess? – Sky Player (e.g. as reported here: Sky and ITV launch new Silverlight online video players). Channel 4′s watch again service is still tethered to Windows, although some Channel 4 content – such as Shameless – is available via the Flash powered Joost.)

Unlike the Adobe Flash’n'Air approach taken for the BBC iPlayer, ITV and Sky have both opted for Microsoft’s Silverlight (as described in ITV’s case here: Silverlight on the ITV Player).

PS I’m not sure what this means, if anything, but both Apple and Intel have been buying into Imagination technologies, the parent company of Pure (Intel ups stake in Imagination following Apple’s buy-in). Imagination own the IP to the semiconductor cores used in a wide range of digital appliances, so tracking their news releases and OEM relationships over the next year or two could prove interesting…

PPS the consequences of this imagined phrase kept me awake a couple nights ago: “Pure Camvine Flow“. If Project Canvas resulted in an Imagination core capable of streaming BBC and ITV content, what would it mean if those cores were integrated within Camvine “digital signage” screens, so you could just plug your screen in, connect it to your home network, and start streaming watch again and catch-up content? (Ideally, of course, there’d be an iPlayer desktop like facility too…:-)

PPPS Here’s an interesting interview with Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix (via GigaOM: Here Come Broadband TVs). The topic of internet TVs is discussed from about 1m15s in…