You are among geeks when…

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One of our developers is going to be a dad real soon. His waiting stirred the creative juices among the other developers. Brett came up with the following “from conception to birth” scenario à la version control system (used with permission):

mkdir baby
cd baby
git init .
awk 'BEGIN { s="ACGT"; genes=""; srand(); for (i=1;i<=1024;i++) {genes
= genes""substr(s,int(rand()*4)+1,1)} print genes}' > seed
git add seed
git commit -m 'conception'
git remote add mother mother
git push -u mother baby
sleep 23667694.5
git pull mother baby

git is a very popular open source version control system that we use for I guess all our proejcts. I also started using it for reviewing Mahara code and for writing the Mahara user manual.

A weekend amongst hackers

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Blackhat, whitehat, rootkit, cyber security, and bugs are just some of the terms that flew around my head the past weekend because I went to Kiwicon V. Having gone already last year, I kind of knew what to expect and was very much looking forward to 2 days of technical bombardment interspersed with demos of how the talented hack into the system of their choice.

Mind you: hacking is not just the bad, bad guys. There is also a lot of good coming out of hacking: software / web site producers are made aware of security holes in their systems that could be exploited by not so kind people.

It was amazing that some companies don’t care at all: vt for example took down 5 software packages frequently used in Hollywood and only 1 company really talked to him. Others were not as willing and still haven’t fixed their bugs.

I learned:

  • how insecure the iPhone is and how easily you could read the RFID information stored on an EFPOS card by using a mobile device.
  • that poop has an ASCII sign UTF8 character Unicode code point but in contrast to the snowman sign, it cannot be used in a URL. Go figure.
Poop can't be used as URL

Poop can't be used as URL

  • not to say CyberWar if I didn’t want to start on a drinking binge.
  • that I didn’t understand Erlang and couldn’t defile MacOSX on my own.
  • how to go rogue.
  • how to hide images in images.
  • about the National Cyber Security Center.
  • how not to go about your first hacking job and that if you do you better know some people in high hacker circles.
  • and was reminded of the security fails of the last year.
  • and much more

This year’s Kiwicon was the largest so far. There were over 600 participants, and we were in Wellington’s Opera House as the previous venue would not hold as many people. Just imagine 600 people mostly clad in black in the middle of Wellington on a sunny weekend.

Kiwicon is not just a conference, but it is an experience. The pre-conference emails are the funniest ever, the registration process produced random quotes as comments that made you laugh, name tags were not your typical plastic around paper, but laser engraved leather and VIP had hand-made ones. Participants can also learn how to pick locks and handcuffs, and how to work in a team to hack a big organization who does evil.

I am already looking forward to Kiwicon VI to learn even more and be awed by the things that some people find when they look more closely.

While listening to talks on exploiting RFID technology and hiding information in pictures via steganography, I was wondering how secure EyeFi cards were. Could somebody put malicious code on them which would alter images put on the card so that when they are transferred they would not just include the image taken by the photographer but also some hidden information, possibly code that could endanger the computer / server where these images can be uploaded immediately wirelessly?

Boarding NZ and U.S. style

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Waiting is an annoying activity that travellers have to deal with. It seems that especially air travel is plaqued by long unwelcome waits. Some people have the necessary money or status miles to travel in style and avoid queues. Mere mortals, however, can conduct a study on how boarding for example is being conducted in different countries.

Here I only focus on my observations from New Zealand and the U.S.A. I have the impression that boarding an airplane takes longer in the U.S.A. than it does in New Zealand. Are the NZ travellers just faster or more disciplined? Seeing that there are many international travellers in both countries, I doubt that there is a special national traveller mentality.

I think the main reason is the way boarding takes place. In the U.S.A. passengers are boarded according to priority groups. First class and priority access can always board and then there are groups 1 to 4 with 4 being the lowest priority.

Coming from New Zealand, you would think that the groups were formed according to where people sit. But far from it. It is strictly according to priority and that means that you can sit anywhere in the airplane. It can easily be that group 1 are passengers primarily in the first rows and a few in the back rows. Having to wait until the ones at the front are seated before the ones in the back can proceed does take time. On one flight I was in group 4 but sat in a third row window seat behind the business class. As my fellow row neighbors had a higher priority they were already seated and had to let me in which held up everybody else.

In New Zealand the general system is the following: Passengers in business class (on international flights) and with priority access as well as those that need assistance board first. They are followed by the travellers in a window seat. That’s very smart because then 2 others don’t have to get up later. On bigger flights, the rest of the passengers are asked to board according to their row number starting with the higher numbers thus filling the plane from the rear to the front.

This system seems to work well and the boarding of planes takes place swiftly and is faster than in L.A. and San Francisco in my opinion where I observed the U.S. style of boarding. Though that is just a very unscientific observation from observing a few flights.

Notes and observations from the PESC Data Summit

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The PESC Data Summit Fall 2011 took place in San Francisco from October 12-14, 2011. It is a regular meeting of organizations that come together to discuss and further interoperability between educational systems. PESC, the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council, “enables cost-effective connectivity between data systems to accelerate performance and service, to simplify data access and research, and to improve data quality along the higher education lifecycle” (PESC info sheet).

In order to achieve that PESC develops XML standards that are community driven and open for anyone to use. Because of the involvement of institutions of higher education as well as vendors / producers of software for that sector, it is hoped that the standards that are being developed have high relevance and are a result of actual demand and thus are more likely to be implemented by vendors in their products.

PESC has a number of workgroups and taskforces. I participated in the ePortfolio workgroup and learned a great deal about how PESC views ePortfolios and what academic institutions in the U.S.A. and Canada expect of an ePortfolio. PESC looks at an academic ePortfolio for which tracking of competencies and assessments are important components. Furthermore, the academic ePortfolio will be used in academic advising, e.g. for future career paths or further studies. Therefore, it must be machine- and human-readable. Transcripts that are moved from one institution to another and can be stored (or a link to them) in the ePortfolio are a necessity. Thus, the ePortfolio is not entirely learner-driven, but it has a number of prescribed content that it must contain in order for an in-taking institution to get a more complete picture of a student.

Besides discussing the ownership of the portfolio, we particularly looked at standards for portfolio data exchange. PESC does not have to come up with its own standard if there is already one that is in use and that is usable for PESC purposes.

There are not too many ePortfolio schema around. Leap2A and Desire2Learn’s XML export structure were put forward. The IMS ePortfolio standard was put aside as not being suitable because PESC does not only require the moving of content artifacts but also of assessment information.

As PESC tries to implement XML standards, Leap2A would not work exactly because it is based on ATOM feeds. However, it was discovered that CETIS is working on a Leap2R standard that converts Leap2A into an XML structure.

There is more analysis needed to look into how Leap2A/R could be implemented and what kind of data can be pulled from other systems. Even though it would be quite handy to get everything automatically in an easy-to-read and easy-to-process format, I think that not everything can and should be done (in the beginning). Implementing web services that assist in the transfer of information is not to be taken lightly. If every software involved in the process is expected to support these web services, uptake may be slow as high costs may be involved in developing the necessary interfaces.

I think it is important to define a priority list for connectivity, exchange of data, and export of ePortfolios. Being able to pull in transcript information into a university’s portfolio for advising purposes is all well and good. However, if the purpose of the advising is to find a graduate school for the student that will take him away from his current institution, then being able to export his portfolio and import it into the other institution may be more important to the student and he’d be happy to include his transcripts as secure PDF documents only instead of having them transferred automatically.

A pragmatic approach may be useful in order to get an initiative started and to see how it is being received instead of trying to accomplish everything.

In New Zealand, the Ministry of Education is funding the LMS-MyPortfolio Interoperability Project which aims to connect the major LMSs used in NZ schools to MyPortfolio, which is a Mahara installation. The main areas of work are:

  1. account provisioning
  2. notifications
  3. moving content

In order to achieve this, a web services stack has been implemented in Mahara which allows other LMSs (and also Student Management / Information Systems) to consume these web services and thus connect to Mahara.

The account provisioning project part is the most advanced. Sometime during the discussion of what to enable besides account provisioning, group creation came up. However, the actual implementation of total group management via the LMS was not activated for MyPortfolio because group admins should still have the possibility to add users from outside of their institution who have accounts on MyPortfolio to their group or remove users without having to check back with the LMS. The attempt to manage everything via the LMS would have been far too complicated and would have had to take a number of exception as well as special rules into account. The “low-hanging fruit” was the implementation of account and group creation via the LMS as well as initial group membership provisioning. However, the updating and deleting of groups was abandonded for MyPortfolio because it is a Mahara instance that is used by many schools (over 810 at the beginning of October). Had it been a Mahara with just one institution, the group management via the LMS would have worked better.

Besides the administrative concerns, other thoughts need to be heard. MyPortfolio (and Mahara) is a learner-centered portfolio application and thus the users should have as much freedom as possible. Therefore, governing all groups via LMSs would be in direct conflict with this ideal. Of course, the students who use MyPortfolio are connected to a school and thus have to follow certain rules, but MyPortfolio should still be different from a LMS.

That does not mean that no formal assessment documents can and should be included. However, the amount of information or group membership making it into a learner’s account is the question.

Coming back to PESC: Being aware of the work that is going on in the U.S.A. and Canada as well as thinking about possible connecting points for future development work in Mahara is beneficial in order to advance possible integration work with other systems.

MyPortfolio: New features take 2

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At the end of July I gave a presentation at MoodleMoot NZ about the new features for MyPortfolio. As there were so many we knew that we could not finish them all for the August 1, 2011, release. On Wednesday, we released the last lot of them along with a number of bug fixes. A few highlights of the new features (taken from my release notes):

  • group types: They are now more flexible and you can have more settings when you create a group. If you have the staff role, you will see more options than a user with the default rights.
  • text box: Now mainly called “Notes”. They are re-usable across pages and can have comments like other artefacts. Your existing text boxes have been converted into notes and reside under Content -> Notes. You can create new notes from a page and they get added to the re-usable ones. You can edit your notes from the Notes page as well and every instance of the note will be changed (similar to how journal posts work). You can also include notes created in groups to which you have access and make a copy of them.
  • changes to the profile and how it is handled: You can share your profile now only with your institution. Basic information like display name, institution membership, send a message is still visible to everybody. But you can keep the rest to your institution and other people only. Your profile page now shows up as page under the Share Tab (due to a bug that couldn’t yet be fixed it is called “Profile view”). “Logged-in users” still appear in the access list, but you can take them off. You can now also share other pages with your entire institution.
  • multiple file upload: When you click on the “Browse” button for uploading files, you can now select more than one file to upload at once.

A new member of the Mahara community had tested the fullscreen mode in the current TinyMCE and found that it works. Thus, a long open bug could be closed and users on MyPortfolio can now also increase the editor window easily.

If you are a Mahara user, you can test these features yourself. They are all part of the future Mahara 1.5 release. The wiki tells you how to set up your developer environment and get the code for your experiments.

These features have all been made possible thanks to funding from the NZ Ministry of Education and in there the Managed Learning Environment Project Group (now part of the Sector Access and Interoperability team) around Paul Seiler.

Let’s see how the close to 40,000 users from over 810 schools in NZ like these new features. Yes, that’s over 110 new schools since the end of July. :-)