I did a thing earlier this week to the internal OU CALRG conference about some of my thinking ongoing at the moment around new edtech toys for “the data course”, TM351. Annotated slides here: Imagining TM351: from virtual machines to notebooks. Having presented it, the slides need reordering, a bit more emphasis needs to be … Continue reading “New Ed Tech Toys for TM351…”
It’s getting to that time when we need to freeze the virtual machine build we’re going to use for the new (postponed) data course, which should hopefully go live to students in February, 2016, and I’ve been having a rethink about how to put it together. The story so far has been documented in several … Continue reading “Rethinking the TM351 Virtual Machine Again, Again…”
So this is how I currently think of the TM351 VM: What would be nice would be a drag’n’drop tool to let me draw pictures like that that would then generate the build scripts… (a docker compose script, or set of puppter scripts, for the architectural bits on the left, and a Vagrantfile to set … Continue reading “A Peek Inside the TM351 VM”
One of the things that’s been on my to do list for ages is trying to get a version of the TM351 virtual machine (VM) up and running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI). This would allow students who are having trouble running the VM on their own computer to … Continue reading “First Attempt at Running the TM351 VM as an AMI on Amazon Web Services”
When we put together the original TM351 VM, we wanted a single, self-contained installable environment capable of running all the services required to complete the practical activities defined for the course. We also had a vision that the services should be capable of being accessed remotely. With a bit of luck, we’ll have access to an OU OpenStack … Continue reading “Fragment – TM351 Services Architected for Online Access”
One of the original motivations for delivering the TM351 software and services via a virtual machine, with user interfaces provided via a browser, was that we should be able to use the same VM as a locally run machine on a student’s own computer, or as a hosted machine (accessible via the web) running on … Continue reading “Getting the TM351 VM Running on OU OpenStack”
One of the ways our Data management and analysis (TM351) course differs from the module it replaced, a traditional databases module, was the way in which we designed it to cover a full data pipeline, from data acquisition, through cleaning, management (including legal issues), analysis, visualisation and reporting. The database content takes up about a … Continue reading “Notebook Practice – Data Sci Ed, 101 With a Nod To TM351”
Another fragment because I keep trying to tidy the code so it’s ready to share and then keep getting distracted… Previously, I’ve already posted crude proof of concept demos transforming OU-XML to markdown and rendering it via Jupyter Book and wrapping a Jupyter Book in an electron app shell. I’ve managed to get a Jupyter … Continue reading “Fragment – TM351 Notebooks Jupyter Books In the VM and Via An Electron App”
Just before the Chirstmas break, I had a go recasting the TM351 VM as a Docker container built from a Github repository using MyBinder (which is to say: I had a go at binderising the VM…). Long time readers will know that this virtual machine has been used to deliver a computing environment to students … Continue reading “Dockerising / Binderising the TM351 Virtual Machine”
For 2020J, which is to say, the 2020 October presentation, of our TM351 Data Management and Analysis course, we’ve deprecated the original VirtualBox packaged virtual machine and moved to a monolithic Docker container that packages all the required software applications and services (a Jupyer notebook server, postgres and mongoDB database servers, and OpenRefine). As with … Continue reading “Deconstructing the TM351 Virtual Computing Environment via VS Code”
OUseful.Info, the blog... 