Archive for the ‘OBU’ Category
Recent Robotics Reviews on OpenLearn…
A few years ago I worked on an OU robotics course ambitiously titled “Robotics and the Meaning of Life” (the working title had been “Joy, Fun, Robotics”), elements of which have been woven into a new OU course Technologies in practice (hmm, thinks – would folk be interested in a course on data in practice?)
As well as providing a general introduction to robotics technology, the course reviewed a range of social, political and ethical issues that might impact on a society in which mobile, intelligent, autonomous machines were part of our everyday experience. As part of our current co-pro series of the BBC World Service Click radio programme, we’ve been exploring some of the issues associated with recent developments in robotic vehicles. This has also provided an opportunity for me to start scouting around some of the emerging laws that are being considered with a view to regulating the operation -and behaviour – of autonomous intelligent robots. So here’s a quick round up of some of the related articles that I’ve recently posted to OpenLearn…
- A dark future for warehousing? – robots are playing an increasingly important role in the logistics industry, with robot workers increasingly finding a role in warehouses. This post reviews several different ways in which robots can work with – and instead of – human workers in today’s modern warehouses.
- Robot cars, part 1: Parking the future for now – the DARPA robot vehicle challenges demonstrated how autonomous robot vehicles could cope with off-road and urban driving conditions, leading in part to the development of things like the Google autonomous car that is currently being tested on public roads in several US states. Whilst the mass availability of such vehicles is still only a remote possibility for a variety of reasons (from cost and safety issues, to legal and ethical considerations), autonomous driving in certain limited situations is now possible.In this post, we look at one such situation, disliked by many a driver – parking – and see how our cars may soon be managing that aspect of driving on our behalf in the near future.
- Robot cars, part 2: Convoys of the near future – along with the fiddliness of parking, the monotony of stop-start traffic jams and convoy style motorway driving provide another environment in which autopilot systems may be able to improve not only the driving experience, but also road safety. In this post, I review some recent demonstrations in autonomous driver support systems suited to these particular road conditions.
- Naughty robot: Where’s your human operator? – a wealth of regulations at international, national and even regional (state) level cover the operation of our public highways and public airspace. But when the robots start taking control of their own actions and decision-making in these spaces, do we need further regulation to limit the behaviour of robots as distinct from humans? And when it comes to allowing autonomous robots to bear arms, is that a situation we are comfortable with? In this post, I review some of the emerging laws that are developing around not only the testing and use of autonomous robot cars on our public highways, but also in consideration of autonomous flying vehicles – drones – in both domestic and military settings. in part, this sets up the question – will there be one law for humans and other for robots?
Hear the latest episode of Click radio here: #BBCClickRadio, or keep track of the OU supported special editions via OpenLearn: OU on the BBC: Click – A Route 66 of the future
Twitter Audience Profiling – OU/BBC Feynman Challenger Co-Pro
Another strong piece of TV commissioning via the Open University Open Media Unit (OMU) aired this week in the guide of The Challenger, a drama documentary telling the tale of Richard Feynman’s role in the accident enquiry around the space shuttle Challenger disaster. (OMU also produced an ethical game if you want to try you own hand out at leading an ethics investigation.)
Running a quick search for tweets containing the terms feynman challenger to generate a list of names of Twitter users commenting around the programme, I grabbed a sample of their friends (max 197 per person) and then plotted the commonly followed accounts within that sample.
If you treat this image as a map, you can see regions where the accounts are (broadly) related by topic or interest category. What regions can you see?! (For more on this technique, see Communities and Connections: Social Interest Mapping.)
I also ran a search for tweets containing bbc2 challenger:
Let’s peek in to some of the regions…”Space” related twitter accounts for example:
Or news media:
(from which we might conclude that the audience was also a Radio 4 audience?!;-)
How about a search on bbc2 feynman?
Again, we see distinct regions. As with the other maps, the programme audience also seems to have an interest in following popular science writers:
Interesting? Possibly – the maps provide a quick profile of the audience, and maybe confirm its the sort of audience we might have expected. Notable perhaps are the prominence of Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain, who’ve also featured heavily in BBC science programming. Around the edges, we also see what sorts of comedy or entertainment talent appear to the audience – no surprises to see David Mitchell, Charlton Brooker and Aianucci in there, though I wouldn’t necessarily have factored in Eddie Izzard (though we’d need to look at “proper” baseline interest levels of general audiences to see whether any of these comedians are over-represented in these samples compared to commonly followed folk in a “random” sample of UK TV watchers on Twitter. The patterns of following may be “generally true” rather than highlighting folk atypically followed by this audience.)
Useful? Who knows…?!
(I have PDF versions of the full plots if anyone wants copies…)
Local News Templates – A Business Opportunity for Data Journalists?
As well as serendipity, I believe in confluence…
A headline in the Press Gazette declares that Trinity Mirror will be roll[ing] out five templates across 130-plus regional newspapers as emphasis moves to digital. Apparently, this follows a similar initiative by Johnston Press midway through last year: Johnston to roll out five templates for network of titles.
It seems that “key” to the Trinity Mirror initiative is the creation of a new “Shared Content Unit” based in Liverpool that will provide features content to Trinity’s papers across the UK [which] will produce material across the regional portfolio in print and online including travel, fashion, food, films, books and “other content areas that do not require a wholly local flavour”.
[Update - 25/3/13: Trinity Mirror to create digital data journalism unit to produce content for online and printed titles]
In my local rag last week, (the Isle of Wight County Press), a front page story on the Island’s gambling habit localised a national report by the Campaign for Fairer Gambling on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals. The report included a dataset (“To find the stats for your area download the spreadsheet here and click on the arrow in column E to search for your MP”) that I’m guessing (I haven’t checked…) provided some of the numerical facts in the story. (The Guardian Datastore also republished the data (£5bn gambled on Britain’s poorest high streets: see the data) with an additional column relating to “claimant count”, presumably the number of unemployment benefit claimants in each area (again, I haven’t checked…)) Localisation appeared in several senses:
So for example, the number of local betting shops and Fixed Odds betting terminals was identified, the mooted spend across those and the spend per head of population. Sensemaking of the figures was also applied by relating the spend to an equivalent number of NHS procedures or police jobs. (Things like the BBC Dimensions How Big Really provide one way of coming up with equivalent or corresponding quantities, at least in geographical area terms. (There is also a “How Many Really” visualisation for comparing populations.) Any other services out there like this? Maybe it’s possible to craft Wolfram Alpha queries to do this?)
Something else I spotted, via RBloggers, a post by Alex Singleton of the University of Liverpool: an Open Atlas around the 2011 Census for England and Wales, who has “been busy writing (and then running – around 4 days!) a set of R code that would map every Key Statistics variable for all local authority districts”. The result is a set of PDF docs for each Local Authority district mapping out each indicator. As well as publishing the separate PDFs, Alex has made the code available.
So what’s confluential about those?
The IWCP article localises the Fairer Gambling data in several ways:
- the extent of the “problem” in the local area, in terms of numbers of betting shops and terminals;
- a consideration of what the spend equates to on a per capita basis (the report might also have used a population of over 18s to work out the average “per adult islander”); note that there are also at least a couple of significant problems with calculating per capita averages in this example: first, the Island is a holiday destination, and the population swings over the summer months; secondly, do holidaymakers spend differently to residents on this machines?
- a corresponding quantity explanation that recasts the numbers into an equivalent spend on matters with relevant local interest.
The Census Atlas takes one recipe and uses it to create localised reports for each LA district. (I’m guessing with a quick tweak,separate reports could be generated for the different areas within a single Local Authority).
Trinity Mirror’s “Shared Content Unit” will produce content “that do[es] not require a wholly local flavour”, presumably syndicating it to its relevant outlets. But it’s not hard to also imagine a “Localisable Content” unit that develops applications that can help produced localised variants of “templated” stories produced centrally. This needn’t be quite as automated as the line taken by computational story generation outfits such as Narrative Science (for example, Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers? or Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?) but instead could produce a story outline or shell that can be localised.
A shorter term approach might be to centrally produce data driven applications that can be used to generate charts, for example, relevant to a locale in an appropriate style. So for example, using my current tool of choice for generating charts, R, we could generate something and then allow local press to grab data relevant to them and generate a chart in an appropriate style (for example, Style your R charts like the Economist, Tableau … or XKCD). This approach saves duplication of effort in getting the data, cleaning it, building basic analysis and chart tools around it, and so on, whilst allowing for local customisation in the data views presented. With the increasing number of workflows available around R, (for example, RPubs, knitr, github, and a new phase for the lab notebook, Create elegant, interactive presentations from R with Slidify, [Wordpress] Bloggin’ from R).
Using R frameworks such as Shiny, we can quickly build applications such as my example NHS Winter Sitrep data viewer (about) that explores how users may be able to generate chart reports at Trust or Strategic Health Authority level, and (if required) download data sets related to those areas alone for further analysis. The data is scraped and cleaned once, “centrally”, and common analyses and charts coded once, “centrally”, and can then be used to generate items at a local level.
The next step would be to create scripted story templates that allow journalists to pull in charts and data as required, and then add local colour – quotes from local representatives, corresponding quantities that are somehow meaningful. (I should try to build an example app from the Fairer Gaming data, maybe, and pick up on the Guardian idea of also adding in additional columns…again, something where the work can be done centrally, looking for meaningful datasets and combining it with the original data set.)
Business opportunities also arise outside media groups. For example, a similar service idea could be used to provide story templates – and pull-down local data – to hyperlocal blogs. Or a ‘data journalism wire service’ could develop applications either to aid in the creation of data supported stories on a particular topic. PR companies could do a similar thing (for example, appifying the Fairer Gambling data as I “appified” the NHS Winter sitrep data, maybe adding in data such as the actual location of fixed odds betting terminals. (On my to do list is packaging up the recently announced UCAS 2013 entries data.)).
The insight here is not to produce interactive data apps (aka “news applications”) for “readers” who have no idea how to use them or what read from them whatever stories they might tell; rather, the production of interactive applications for generating charts and data views that can be used by a “data” journalist. Rather than having a local journalist working with a local team of developers and designers to get a data flavoured story out, a central team produces a single application that local journalists can use to create a localised version of a particular story that has local meaning but at national scale.
Note that by concentrating specialisms in a central team, there may also be the opportunity to then start exploring the algorithmic annotation of local data records. It is worth noting that Narrative Science are already engaged in this sort activity too, as for example described in this ProPublica article on How To Edit 52,000 Stories at Once, a news application that includes “short narrative descriptions of almost all of the more than 52,000 schools in our database, generated algorithmically by Narrative Science”.
PS Hmm… I wonder… is there time to get a proposal together on this sort of idea for the Carnegie Trust Neighbourhood News Competition? Get in touch if you’re interested…
University Apps, iBooks and Stores
I don’t quite remember how I came across this now, but it seems the OU has an appstore, of a sort – appstore.open.ac.uk – that provides a one stop place on the web for downloading a range of OU produced iOS and Android apps:
These range from the sorts of app you might expect – the StudyAtOU app, for example, which gives a rather more browser-centric way of browsing the OU’s course offerings compared to the PDF re-presenting OU Prospectus app, or the OU News app – as well as a range of “feature” apps: PhotoFit Me, a photofit testing game, or Devolve Me, another photo based app that takes you back through your evolutionary history. In a family learning context, the Our Story app “enables young children to take part in fun games which can help develop interests and skills that will be relevant to them when they start to read” (or so the blurb says…), and the Chinese Characters First Steps app draws on the OU’s Beginner’s Chinese module to provide a simple trainer around common Chinese characters.
I haven’t tried looking at that URL on a mobile device (Android or iOS), so I’m not sure how responsive the design might be…? (I’d guess there isn’t a tablet look’n'feel design that is passed through…?)
Out of interest – do any other UK HEIs host their own “appstore”? (Links in the comments please…:-)
In other news, the OU has finally publicly launched the “collaborative online learning space” that is SocialLearn. You can try it out here… SocialLearn
Also last week, an Open University press release announced “Another innovation milestone: The Open University launches iBooks textbooks for iPad”. I thought this had happened some time ago, with the Moon Rocks iBook (First Open University iBook now in Store, 27th March 2012), but I guess this relates the first offering of a new collection?!
(Ooh.. that’s interesting: there’s a £4.99 price tag on those iBooks (I wonder if OU staff get a discount? Or whether there are discount codes available that can be used for promotional purposes?))
The titles so far appear to concentrate on science topics. The OU has a long history in producing high quality interactives/educational software (and what used to be called “computer based learning” applications) across a wide range of subject areas using licensed, as well as in-house created, content, so it’ll be interesting to see if any iBooks appear in the art history or classics area, for example.
(By the by, interactive textbooks/new pedagogy for e-books was one of the things highlighted in the Innovating Pedagogy report, although not in the context of the OU as a “commercial” educational publisher.)
In much the same way that BBC commercialised many of its offerings through BBC Worldwide, the OU also has a commercial arm – Open University Worldwide, a site that looks as if it is now hosted as an Amazon webstore:
This sells OU/BBC co-pro DVDs (at a higher price than on the main Amazon website, I notice?) as well as a range of other products, including software, print materials/study guides and home experiment kits (including the Arduino like Senseboard, due out early next year). I’m not sure if the way Apple locks down iContent means that the iBooks won’t be available on the Amazon powered OUW webstore?
The store seems to be missing a couple of tricks on the OU marketing front, though, such as areas featuring books by OU academics and books by OU alumni which I think the OU’s “physical” library folk track (i.e I think there are shelves for books by OU academics and OU students/alumni), even if they don’t post related lists of titles online anywhere? (I’m guessing the affiliate fees from any sales would be negligible…the point more is one of showcasing the range of OU family commercial cultural/content outputs.)
I suspect that the sale of books required for OU courses is not an option (because of other bookseller agreements, it wasn’t when I asked years ago when I was tinkering with the now completely broken course booksearch (the backend server has been taken down)…which in passing reminds me of what I think was the only entry to the JISC MOSAIC competition that didn’t receive a prize/honourable mention: books around courses.) As far as second-hand books go, there’s always the “unofficial” OU second-hand bookstore University Book Search.
Again, are there any other UK HEIs running Amazon webstores? I see from the Amazon “seller showcase” that the Ashmolean shop is at least one?
The mainstay of OUW operations is (I think) licensing of OU warez, course materials and courses to local partners. A recent job ad for a Business Development Manager (International Education Agents) suggests that there may be an international push coming on this front?
Open University Worldwide Ltd, which is part of the OU’s Business Development Unit, is looking to recruit a Business Development Manager (International Educational Agents). This post will be involved in supporting the OU to expand its international business through relationships with local agents or partners delivering OU qualifications to individual students and corporates in strategic markets.
You will develop and implement The Open University’s new business development strategy for global partnerships, specifically focussing on the recruitment, management and growth of a network of agents to take OU products and services to B2C and B2B markets internationally.
You will be required to grow and maintain sustainable business relationships with key decision makers in potential agent/partner organisations in selected markets, in order to market the OU offer and secure business opportunities
You will also work with external stakeholders in key international markets to secure relevant, accurate and timely market information. To identify, develop and close business opportunities to meet agreed financial targets.
PS Just as an aside, I wish the template for the OU appstore made use of name anchors so that I could link directly to the appropriate section within the page – something like appstore.open.ac.uk/#studyatou, for example; here’s what the item template currently looks like:
PPS For what it’s worth, I also link to some of the iOS apps from my OU Programmes currently on iPlayer hack:
Maybe I should also add in a widget to OU/BBC DVDs available on Amazon…?!;-)
Feeding on OU/BBC Co-Produced Content (Upcoming and Currently Available on iPlayer)
What feeds are available listing upcoming broadcasts of OU/BBC co-produced material or programmes currently available on iPlayer?
One of the things I’ve been pondering with respect to my OU/BBC programmes currently on iPlayer demo and OU/BBC co-pros upcoming on iPlayer (code) is how to start linking effectively across from programmes to Open University educational resources.
Chatting with KMi’s Mathieu d’Aquin a few days ago, he mentioned KMi were looking at ways of automating the creation of relevant semantic linkage that could be used to provide linkage between BBC programmes and OU content and maybe feed into the the BBC’s dynamic semantic publishing workflow.
In the context of OU and BBC programmes, one high level hook is the course code. Although I don’t think these feeds are widely promoted as a live service yet, I did see a preview(?) of an OU/BBC co-pro series feed that includes linkage options such as related course code (one only? Or does the schema allow for more than one linked course?) and OU nominated academic (one only? Or does the schema allow for more than one linked academic? More than one), as well as some subject terms and the sponsoring Faculty:
<item>
<title><![CDATA[OU on the BBC: Symphony]]></title>
<link>http://www.open.edu/openlearn/whats-on/ou-on-the-bbc-history-the-symphony</link>
<description><![CDATA[Explore the secrets of the symphony, the highest form of expression of Western classical music]]></description>
<image title="The Berrill Building">http://www.open.edu/openlearn/files/ole/ole_images/general_images/ou_ats.jpg</image>
<bbc_programme_page_code>b016vgw7</bbc_programme_page_code>
<ou_faculty_reference>Music Department</ou_faculty_reference>
<ou_course_code>A179</ou_course_code>
<nominated_academic_oucu></nominated_academic_oucu>
<transmissions>
<transmission>
<showdate>21:00:00 24/11/2011</showdate>
<location><![CDATA[BBC Four]]></location>
<weblink></weblink>
</transmission>
<transmission>
<showdate>19:30:00 16/03/2012</showdate>
<location><![CDATA[BBC Four]]></location>
<weblink></weblink>
</transmission>
<transmission>
<showdate>03:00:00 17/03/2012</showdate>
<location><![CDATA[BBC Four]]></location>
<weblink></weblink>
</transmission>
<transmission>
<showdate>19:30:00 23/03/2012</showdate>
<location><![CDATA[BBC Four]]></location>
<weblink></weblink>
</transmission>
<transmission>
<showdate>03:00:00 24/03/2012</showdate>
<location><![CDATA[BBC Four]]></location>
<weblink></weblink>
</transmission>
</transmissions>
<comments>http://www.open.edu/openlearn/whats-on/ou-on-the-bbc-history-the-symphony#comments</comments>
<category domain="http://www.open.edu/openlearn/whats-on">What's On</category>
<category domain="http://www.open.edu/openlearn/tags/bbc-four">BBC Four</category>
<category domain="http://www.open.edu/openlearn/tags/music">music</category>
<category domain="http://www.open.edu/openlearn/tags/symphony">symphony</category>
<pubDate>Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:38:03 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>mc23488</dc:creator>
<guid isPermaLink="false">147728 at http://www.open.edu/openlearn</guid>
</item>
I’m not sure what the guid is? Nor do there seem to be slots for links to related OpenLearn resources other than the top link element? However, the course code does provide a way into course related educational resources via data.open.ac.uk, the nominated academic link may provide a route to associated research interests (for example, via ORO, the OU open research repository), the BBC programme code provides a route in to the BBC programme metadata, and the category tags may provide other linkage somewhere depending on what vocabulary gets used for specifying categories!
I guess I need to build myself a little demo to se what we can do with a fed of this sort..?!;-)
I’m not sure if plans are similarly afoot to publish BBC programme metadata actual the actual programme instance (“episode”) level? It’s good to see that the OpenLearn What’s On feed has been tidied up little to include title elements, although it’s still tricky to work out what the feed is actually of?
For example, here’s the feed I saw a few days ago:
<item>
<title><![CDATA[OU on the BBC: Divine Women - 9:00pm 25/04/2012 - BBC Two and BBC HD]]></title>
<link>http://www.open.edu/openlearn/whats-on/ou-on-the-bbc-divine-women</link>
<description><![CDATA[Historian Bettany Hughes reveals the hidden history of women in religion, from dominatrix goddesses to feisty political operators and warrior empresses ]]></description>
<location><![CDATA[BBC Two and BBC HD]]></location>
<image title="The Berrill Building">http://www.open.edu/openlearn/files/ole/ole_images/general_images/ou_ats.jpg</image>
<showdate>21:00:00 25/04/2012</showdate>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:19:10 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>sb26296</dc:creator>
<guid isPermaLink="false">151446 at http://www.open.edu/openlearn</guid>
</item>
It contains an upcoming show date for programmes that will be broadcast over the next week or so, and a link to a related page on OpenLearn for the episode, although no direct information about the BBC programme code for each item to be broadcast.
In the meantime, why not see what OU/BBC co-pros are currently available on iPlayer?
Or for a bitesize videos, how about this extensive range of clips from OU/BBC co-pros?
Enjoy! :-)
The Learning Journey Starts Here: Youtube.edu and OpenLearn Resource Linkage
Mulling over the OU’s OULearn pages on Youtube a week or two ago, colleague Bernie Clark pointed out to me how the links from the OU clip descriptions could be rather hit or miss:
Via @lauradee, I see that the OU has a new offering on YouTube.com/edu is far more supportive of links to related content, links that can represent the start of a learning journey through OU educational – and commentary – content on the OU website.
Here’s a way in to the first bit of OU content that seems to have appeared:
This links through to a playlist page with a couple of different sorts of opportunity for linking to resources collated at the “Course materials” or “Lecture materials” level:
(The language gives something away, I think, about the expectation of what sort of content is likely to be uploaded here…)
So here, for example, are links at the level of the course/playlist:
And here are links associated with each lecture, erm, clip:
In this first example, several types of content are being linked to, although from the link itself it’s not immediately obvious what sort of resource a link points to? For example, some of the links lead through to course units on OpenLearn/Learning Zone:
Others link through to “articles” posted on the OpenLearn “news” site (I’m not ever really sure how to refer to that site, or the content posts that appear on it?)
The placing of content links into the Assignments and Others tabs always seems a little arbitrary to me from this single example, but I suspect that when a few more lists have been posted some sort of feeling about what sorts of resources should go where (i.e. what folk might expect by “Assignment” or “Other” resource links). If there’s enough traffic generated through these links, a bit of A/B testing might even be in order relating to the positioning of links within tabs and the behaviour of students once they click through (assuming you can track which link they clicked through, of course…)?
The transcript link is unambiguous though! And, in this case at least), resolves to a PDF hosted somewhere on the OU podcasts/media filestore:
(I’m not sure if caption files are also available?)
Anyway – it’ll be interesting to hear back about whether this enriched linking experience drives more traffic to the OpenLearn resources, as well as whether the positioning of links in the different tab areas has any effect on engagement with materials following a click…
And as far as the linkage itself goes, I’m wondering: how are the links to OpenLearn course units and articles generated/identified, and are those links captured in one of the data.open.ac.uk stores? Or is the process that manages what resource links get associated with lists and list items on Youtube/edu one that doesn’t leave (or readily support the automated creation of) public data traces?
PS How much (if any( of the linked resource goodness is grabbable via the Youtube API, I wonder? If anyone finds out before me, please post details in the comments below:-)
Tinkering With Scraperwiki – The Bottom Line, OpenCorporates Reconciliation and the Google Viz API
Having got to grips with adding a basic sortable table view to a Scraperwiki view using the Google Chart Tools (Exporting and Displaying Scraperwiki Datasets Using the Google Visualisation API), I thought I’d have a look at wiring in an interactive dashboard control.
You can see the result at BBC Bottom Line programme explorer:
The page loads in the contents of a source Scraperwiki database (so only good for smallish datasets in this version) and pops them into a table. The searchbox is bound to the Synopsis column and and allows you to search for terms or phrases within the Synopsis cells, returning rows for which there is a hit.
Here’s the function that I used to set up the table and search control, bind them together and render them:
google.load('visualization', '1.1', {packages:['controls']});
google.setOnLoadCallback(drawTable);
function drawTable() {
var json_data = new google.visualization.DataTable(%(json)s, 0.6);
var json_table = new google.visualization.ChartWrapper({'chartType': 'Table','containerId':'table_div_json','options': {allowHtml: true}});
//i expected this limit on the view to work?
//json_table.setColumns([0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7])
var formatter = new google.visualization.PatternFormat('<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/{0}">{0}</a>');
formatter.format(json_data, [1]); // Apply formatter and set the formatted value of the first column.
formatter = new google.visualization.PatternFormat('<a href="{1}">{0}</a>');
formatter.format(json_data, [7,8]);
var stringFilter = new google.visualization.ControlWrapper({
'controlType': 'StringFilter',
'containerId': 'control1',
'options': {
'filterColumnLabel': 'Synopsis',
'matchType': 'any'
}
});
var dashboard = new google.visualization.Dashboard(document.getElementById('dashboard')).bind(stringFilter, json_table).draw(json_data);
}
The formatter is used to linkify the two URLs. However, I couldn’t get the table to hide the final column (the OpenCorporates URI) in the displayed table? (Doing something wrong, somewhere…) You can find the full code for the Scraperwiki view here.
Now you may (or may not) be wondering where the OpenCorporates ID came from. The data used to populate the table is scraped from the JSON version of the BBC programme pages for the OU co-produced business programme The Bottom Line (Bottom Line scraper). (I’ve been pondering for sometime whether there is enough content there to try to build something that might usefully support or help promote OUBS/OU business courses or link across to free OU business courses on OpenLearn…) Supplementary content items for each programme identify the name of each contributor and the company they represent in a conventional way. (Their role is also described in what looks to be a conventionally constructed text string, though I didn’t try to extract this explicitly – yet. (I’m guessing the Reuters OpenCalais API would also make light work of that?))
Having got access to the company name, I thought it might be interesting to try to get a corporate identifier back for each one using the OpenCorporates (Google Refine) Reconciliation API (Google Refine reconciliation service documentation).
Here’s a fragment from the scraper showing how to lookup a company name using the OpenCorporates reconciliation API and get the data back:
ocrecURL='http://opencorporates.com/reconcile?query='+urllib.quote_plus("".join(i for i in record['company'] if ord(i)<128))
try:
recData=simplejson.load(urllib.urlopen(ocrecURL))
except:
recData={'result':[]}
print ocrecURL,[recData]
if len(recData['result'])>0:
if recData['result'][0]['score']>=0.7:
record['ocData']=recData['result'][0]
record['ocID']=recData['result'][0]['uri']
record['ocName']=recData['result'][0]['name']
The ocrecURL is constructed from the company name, sanitised in a hack fashion. If we get any results back, we check the (relevance) score of the first one. (The results seem to be ordered in descending score order. I didn’t check to see whether this was defined or by convention.) If it seems relevant, we go with it. From a quick skim of company reconciliations, I noticed at least one false positive – Reed – but on the whole it seemed to work fairly well. (If we look up more details about the company from OpenCorporates, and get back the company URL, for example, we might be able to compare the domain with the domain given in the link on the Bottom Line page. A match would suggest quite strongly that we have got the right company…)
As @stuartbrown suggeted in a tweet, a possible next step is to link the name of each guest to a Linked Data identifier for them, for example, using DBPedia (although I wonder – is @opencorporates also minting IDs for company directors?). I also need to find some way of pulling out some proper, detailed subject tags for each episode that could be used to populate a drop down list filter control…
PS for more Google Dashboard controls, check out the Google interactive playground…
PPS see also: OpenLearn Glossary Search and OpenLearn LEarning Outcomes Search
OU Social Media Strategy is a Blast to the Past?!
Readers over a certain age, ex-pats included, will probably remember (hopefully with fondness) a time when the only TV programmes on air in the early hours or on weekend mornings were OU broadcast items on the BBC:
From time to time, (eg OERs: Public Service Education and Open Production), I’ve thought that was the actual heyday of OU broadcasting in terms of get “authentic” Higher Education level teaching content to large audiences, nothwithstanding the popularity of some of the more recent flagship co-produced programming the OU has worked with the BBC on. (For a view of OU/BBC co-produced content currently on iPlayer, see OU/BBC co-pros currently on iPlayer; and for clips from co-pro programmes: clips from OU/BBC co-pros currently on iPlayer.)
As well as the BBC content, there’s also a wealth of OU video material on both YouTube and iTunesU. A great way into this content is through some of the OU’s YouTube playlists, such as 60 Second Adventures in Thought or Seven Wonders of the Microbe World. (See also this full list of OU Learn playlists on YouTube.)
ANyway, one thing that seems (to me at least) to be lacking is a social media strategy (on Twitter at least) relating to broadcast events – academic commentaries or OpenLearn links being tweeted alongside a live OU/BBC co-pro broadcast, for example – that could be used to help drive a second screen experience or community.
But then I realised I was looking in the wrong place – or at least, the wrong time… because it seems the lessons from the past are being heeded… and the @OUpahParr account is actually tweeting out links to OU content to a variety of hashtag streams throughout the early hours, picking up not only the global audience but the UK’s insomniacs and shift workers. It seems that as well as what are presumably scheduled tweets to content, there’s also someone from the comms team (^AF), staffing the account for anybody who wants to chat, or learn more…
Good stuff ;-)
OU/BBC Co-Pros Currently on iPlayer, via ScraperWiki
A quick update to yesterday’s post on OU/BBC Co-Pros Currently on iPlayer: I’ve popped the first draft of a daily scraper onto Scraperwiki that looks at my delicious bookmark list of OU/BBC series co-pros and tries to find corresponding programmes that are currently available on iPlayer: OU BBC Co-pros on iPlayer Scraperwiki
This is probably not the most efficient solution, but at least it provides some sort of API to at least some relevant iPlayer data.
I’ve also popped up a quick Scraperwiki view over the data OU BBC Co-pros on iPlayer (Scraperwiki HTML View); note that this data is unsorted (I need to think about how best to do that?)
[I've added a couple more columns since that screenshot was grabbed; please feel free to work on the scraper, or the view, to improve them further; if you grab a copy of the view to work on your own, please add a link back to it in the comments below, along with a brief description of what you're trying to achieve with your view...]
PS hmm, maybe I should pop the academics on In Our Time code onto Scraperwiki too?
PPS for a more recent view, see: OU/BBC co-pros – bootstrap experiment
OU/BBC Co-Pros Currently on iPlayer
Given the continued state of presentational disrepair of the OpenLearn What’s On feed, I assume I’m the only person who subscribes to it?
Despite its looks, though, I have to say I find it *really useful* for keeping up with OU/BBC co-pros.
The feed displays links to OpenLearn pages relating to programmes that are scheduled for broadcast in the next 24 hours or so (I think?). This includes programmes that are being repeated, as well as first broadcast. However, clicking through some of the links to the supporting programme pages on OpenLearn, I notice a couple of things:
Firstly, the post is timestamped around the time of the original broadcast. This approach is fine if you want to root a post in time, but it makes the page look out-of-date if I stumble onto either from a What’s On feed link or from a link on the supporting page on the corresponding BBC /programme page. I think canonical programme pages for individual programmes have listings of when the programme was broadcast, so it should also be possible to display this information?
Secondly, as a piece of static, “archived” content, there is not necessarily any way of knowing that the programme is currently available. I grabbed the above screenshot because it doesn’t even appear toprovide a link to the BBC programme page for the series, let alone actively promote the fact that the programme itself, or at least, other programmes from the same series, are currently: 1) upcoming for broadcast; 2) already, or about to be, available on iPlayer. Note that as well as full broadcasts, many programmes also have clips available on BBC iPlayer. Even if the full programmes aren’t embeddable within the OpenLearn programme pages (for rights reasons, presumably, rather than techincal reasons?), might we be able to get the clips locally viewable? Or do we need to distniguish between BBC “official” clips, and the extra clips the OU sometimes gets for local embedding as part of the co-pro package?
If the OU is to make the most of repeat broadcasts of OU-BBC co-pro, then I think OpenLearn could do a couple of things in the short term, such as create a carousel of images on the homepage that link through to “timeless” series or episode supporting programmes. The programme support pages should also have a very clearly labelled, dynamically generated, “Now Available on iPlayer” link for programmes that are currently available, along with other available programmes from the same series. The next step would be to find some way of making more of persistent clips on iPlayer?
Anyway – enough of the griping. To provide some raw materials for anyone who would like to have a play around this idea, or maybe come up with a Twitter Bootstrap page that promotes OU/BBC co-pro programmes currently on iPlayer, here’s a (very) raw example: a simple HTML web page that grabs a list of OU/BBC co-pro series pages I’ve been on-and-off maintaining on delicious for some time now (if there are any omissions, please let me know;-), extracts the series IDs, pulls down the corresponding list of series episodes currently on iPlayer via a YQL JSON-P proxy, and then displays a simple list of currently available programmes:
Here’s the code:
<html><head>
<title></title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
//Routine to display programmes currently available on iPlayer given series ID
// The output is attached to a uniquely identified HTML item
var seriesID='b01dl8gl'
// The BBC programmes series ID
//The id of the HTML element you want to contain the displayed feed
var containerID="test";
//------------------------------------------------------
function cross_domain_JSON_call(seriesID){
// BBC json does not support callbacks, so use YQL as JSON-P proxy
var url = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20json%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fprogrammes%2F' + seriesID + '%2Fepisodes%2Fplayer.json%22%20and%20itemPath%20%3D%20%22json.episodes%22&format=json&callback=?'
//fetch the feed from the address specified in 'url'
// then call "myCallbackFunction" with the resulting feed items
$.getJSON(
url,
function(data) { myCallbackFunction(data.query.results); }
)
}
// A simple utility function to display the title of the feed items
function displayOutput(txt){
$('#'+containerID).append('<div>'+txt+'</div>');
}
function myCallbackFunction(items){
console.log(items.episodes)
items=items.episodes
// Run through each item in the feed and print out its title
for (prog in items){
displayOutput('<img src="http://static.bbc.co.uk/programmeimages/272x153/episode/' + items[prog].programme.pid+'.jpg"/>' + items[prog].programme.programme.title+': <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/' + items[prog].programme.pid+'">' + items[prog].programme.title+'</a> (' + items[prog].programme.short_synopsis + ', ' + items[prog].programme.media.availability + ')');
}
}
function parseSeriesFeed(items){
for (var i in items) {
seriesID=items[i].u.split('/')[4]
console.log(seriesID)
if (seriesID !='')
cross_domain_JSON_call(seriesID)
}
}
function getSeriesList(){
var seriesFeed = 'http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/psychemedia/oubbccopro?count=100&callback=?'
$.getJSON(
seriesFeed,
function(data) { parseSeriesFeed(data); }
)
}
// Tell JQuery to call the feed loader when the page is all loaded
//$(document).ready(cross_domain_JSON_call(seriesID));
$(document).ready(getSeriesList())
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="test"></div>
</body>
</html>
If you copy the (raw) code to a file and save it as an .html file, you should be able to preview it in your own browser.
I’ll try to make any updated versions of the code available on github: iplayerSeriesCurrProgTest.html
If you have a play with it, and maybe knock up a demo, please let me know via a comment;-)
PS seems I should have dug around the OpenLearn website a bit more – there is a What’s on this week page, linked to from the front page, that lists upcoming transmissions/broadcasts:
I’m guessing this is done as a Saturday-Friday weekly schedule, in line with TV listings magazines, but needless to say I have a few issues with this approach!;-)
For example, the focus is on linear schedules of upcoming broadcast content in the next 0-7 days, depending when the updated list is posted. But why not have a rolling “coming up over the next seven days” schedule, as well as a “catch-up” service linking to to content currently on iPlayer from programmes that were broadcast maybe last Thursday, or even longer ago?
The broadcast schedule is still a handy thing for viewers who don’t have access to digital on-demand services, but it also provides a focus for “event telly” for folk who do typically watch on-demand content. I’m not sure any OU-BBC co-pro programmes have made a point of running an online, realtime social media engagement exercise around a scheduled broadcast (and I think second screen experiments have only been run as pilots?), but again, it’s an opportunity that doesn’t seem to be being reflected anywhere?
