This week has been exciting in regard to Android apps coming out of Catalyst IT. At KohaCon10 next week we are going to use Reed Wade‘s WebScan (more during / after KohaCon10), and Alan McNatty released MaharaDroid on Thursday, October 21, 2010. Both are – of course – open source.

MaharaDroid is a simple app which allows Android users to upload files from their phone to any Mahara installation. At the moment it only works with the developer version of Mahara 1.4. Anybody who wants to trial the integration, can do so at master.dev.mahara.org (testing and not live environment!). I also use that installation for this brief guide.

Feedback, issue reporting, and feature suggestions are greatly appreciated. We already have a few ideas for future releases and would like to hear about others. Visit the project’s homepage to get the ball rolling.

Alan told me that MaharaDroid is heavily based on Flickr Free by Russell Stuart. Russell’s app is also open source and he was happy to give Alan the code. Don’t you just love open source?

1. Install and launch

Install the app from the Android Marketplace or AppBrain and then launch it via the MaharaDroid icon.

MaharaDroid app icon

2. Set MaharaDroid preferences

When you open the app, you can make certain settings.

MaharaDroid preferences overview

3. Enter upload URI

Use the pre-entered URI if you want to upload to master.dev.mahara.org or change it to your server’s address. You must have the developer version of Mahara 1.4 installed to connect MaharaDroid to Mahara.

Upload URI

4. Enter Mahara username

To connect MaharaDroid to the Mahara installation you want to use for uploading your files, enter your Mahara username for authentication.

Your Mahara username is one part for the authentication

5. Enter token

The authentication to your Mahara account requires a token instead of a password. This can be a simple word. Once you have uploaded your first file, the token changes to one that is difficult to guess.

After you click OK, the app closes. That’s something that I would like to see changed because I always think that the app crashed.

You also need to enter the same token on your Mahara “Settings” page.

A future release of the app could see a different kind of authentication, e.g. with OAuth.

The token is the 2nd part of the authentication with Mahara

6. Choose upload folder

You can choose an upload folder. If it doesn’t already exist, it will be created.

Choose where MaharaDroid shall put your files on Mahara

7. Take a photo

Take a photo and click on the “share” icon (to the left of the trash bin). True, I could have been a bit more creative with my photo. There’s a better one in the screencast.

Take a photo or find a file to share from your phone

8. Share your file

After clicking on the “share” icon, choose with which app you want to share it. In this case, of course, we choose MaharaDroid.

Sharing a file is easy with MaharaDroid

9. Give your file a name

Before you can upload the file to Mahara, you must accept the copyright notice. That is the same as if you uploaded a file to Mahara via your computer.

You can also choose the file name. Click on “Upload” and your file gets transferred if you are online.

For a future release, I would like to see two additional fields: description and also tags. It would be awesome if I could also choose from my existing Mahara tags.

Almost done with the upload via MaharaDroid

10. Check out your uploaded file on Mahara

Once the upload is finished, you can log on to your Mahara account and check out your uploaded files in “My Files”. There you can add a description and tags.

The uploaded files can now be used in Mahara views

Do you want a short video demonstration instead? You can watch the MaharaDroid demo.

Emily Cotlier, the still coordinator of the Wellington branch and Vice President of TCANZ (Technical Communicators Association of New Zealand, Inc.), whom I had met on the first Sunday after arriving in Wellington, asked me to give a short introduction to WordPress and be available for Q&A during one TCANZ event that she was organizing. This event happened today.

I was very happy to have been asked because I like using WordPress and introducing people to new tools that might be useful to them. The knowledge about blogging and WordPress in the small group that had gathered for this 1-hour session had ranged from very little to rather experienced. Judging from the nods and looks from the participants, I did not bore them, and the information that I gave them was helpful.

As this is a longish comment on “The ePortfolio Debate” by Mike Bogle, I post it on my own blog.

Hello Mike,

Thank you for bringing the Twitter conversation onto your blog. That’s how I realized that there was more going on than just the 2 tweets I had seen earlier.

You are correct when you say that e-portfolio solutions (no matter what they may look like) be available beyond educational institutions to ensure that (former) students continue to use them. In contrast to LMSs, e-portfolios center around the student.

I have not yet met anybody from the efolio provider in Minnesota, but from what I can gather from the web site, Minnesota provides space for all its residents to create an e-portfolio at eFolio Minnesota for free (to a certain data allowance).

For Mahara, there are services around that offer free hosting (again, up to a certain data allowance). I do not know how many there are, as there is not yet a list of them, but I have seen FolioSpaces (hosted in Australia primarily). Ian writes a bit about FolioSpaces outside of their web site here. If anybody knows of others, I’d like to hear from them.

In New Zealand, the MyPortfolio services for schools and tertiary education are hosted Mahara solutions that do not sit on an institution server. Thus it is easy for students to take along their portfolio when they switch schools. On myportfolio.school.nz they only have to be put into a different institution. There is not even the need to export and import a portfolio. If they go on to study at university, they export their Mahara portfolio and have it imported into myportfolio.ac.nz. Later on they can export it again and use on another hosted solution or even a different portfolio system (that follows the LEAP2A portfolio standard).

It will be interesting to see how far we can take “lifelong” in the electronic world. Will it actually be feasible to work with one (dedicated) portfolio software for more than 5 or 10 years or will we have to find other solutions and try to archive a certain phase instead of having to upgrade everything to the current software?

Kristina

Some weeks ago I decided to purchase Aperture 3 after a long time of non-decision due to bad reviews of Aperture crashing, eating photos and databases etc. Lucky for me, I had no problems importing my Aperture 2 database and photos and everything went smoothly.

I updated to Aperture 3 not necessarily to be up-to-date with the latest software, but to take advantage of some of its features. The ones very high on my list were:

• geotagging
• face recognition
• Flickr uploader

Geotagging

Up until this update, I have hardly ever geotagged my photos as the process was a bit cumbersome with an external software. It did work well, but was just not easy for the workflow. Now with “Places”, a browser view in Aperture that shows where your photos are on a map, geotagging became easy as pie. Of course, having the GPS coordinates committed to the metadata immediately upon taking the photograph would be even better, but I do not have that luxury. Thus, I go for the second best option: tagging manually.

Places works very well and you can easily see which photos you have already geotagged as they have a little red pin in the Places view.

Aperture 3: Places mode

Face recognition

At first I thought I would be finished with tagging the faces in my pictures very quickly as I hardly ever take photos with people in them (how wrong could I be?). Once I fired up the Faces browser mode, Aperture told me that it found over 10,000 (!) faces in my photos. First, I thought: Yeah, right. But then, when I saw some of the faces, it dawned on me that I indeed had a lot of photos with people in them. I just did not upload them onto Flickr. As I tend to document events like special seminars or conferences that we had organized, by default, these pictures featured mostly people.

So it took me a long while to sift through all my faces and label those that I wanted to have in my Faces browser and reject all others. As I rejected the majority of faces, Aperture was not so good in “learning faces”, but that was fine by me.

Faces is actually nothing more than a special tag for a photo with the name of the person’s face. I could have achieved something similar by tagging the photo with the name in the keyword field. However, then the name would show up as regular tag everywhere. In photos with a number of people in them, I would still not know who was who. The Faces tagging resolves that problem. In addition, I can quickly see how many photos I have of a certain person, and I only see their face in a close-up and not the entire photo. This is especially great for photos of small children. You can see their development in seconds by flipping through these close-ups.

Flickr uploader

I had hoped that the Flickr uploader that was incorporated would be FlickrExport 3 for Aperture or something similar. However, I got disappointed. The Flickr uploader merely takes photos that you have selected and creates a new album on Flickr for them. That is nice for people who start out with Flickr after purchasing Aperture, but not for all others who already have Flickr albums. The Flickr option in Aperture does not allow you to view your already existing Flickr albums and add photos to them. I learned that the hard way as I tried to upload a photo to one of my albums and another one with the same name was created in Aperture AND Flickr. In the heat of the moment, I moved the image to the already existing album and deleted the newly created one on Flickr. But alas, the album still existed in Aperture. And I can’t delete the album there. That is the only time when Aperture actually freezes me out.

Aperture still needs to do quite a bit of work on this Flickr uploader. Meanwhile, I use FlickrExport which works like a charm and does not give me headaches.

Alec Couros had asked for mini lectures for his last EC&I 831 course in Winter 2009. I had almost forgotten to check out these micro lectures, but finally searched for them on the course site. There I came across Rodd Lucier‘s 8.5-minute video explaining how to use Compfight to search Flickr for Creative Commons licensed photos. This video is a great resource where you learn everything you need to know about the topic.

A couple of weeks ago I had introduced students of the first year in the BScE to Creative Commons photos and how they can find them on Flickr. Rodd’s video would have been a wonderful addition and also learning about Compfight. I posted them the video on our support web site.

On Wednesday and Thursday, March 10-11, 2010, I witnessed my first software launch. After 8 years of development and already substantial use, TAO, an open source computer-based assessment (CBA) platform was officially launched. The development of this online assessment tool started as a partnership of the Research Unit EMACS of the University of Luxembourg and the CITI department of the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor in Luxembourg in 2002.

The two days were filled with presentations about CBA in general, the partnership, the history of the development of TAO, and its use in international assessments such as PISA and PIAAC. Although TAO was not officially released as open source software until now, it has already been in use for some time now testing it thoroughly and improving it constantly.

Besides presentations, there were user and developer sessions dealing with all aspects of getting to know TAO. The workshops ranged from setting up TAO on a server to creating test items and running the tests. Thus, we could gain first-hand experience of the software.

TAO is being developed as a versatile and generic solution for CBA instead of being geared towards a very specific test. The aim was and is to create a system that can accommodate as many CBA tests as possible allowing also for the exchange of tests among the TAO users.

The launch did not only kick off version 1.0 of TAO, but also marked the beginning of the user and developer community for this open source system. The developers know that this official start is not the end of their work but the beginning of a more public development to improve the software.

In the user workshops which I attended we learned how to set up users, test takers, tests, test items, and the delivery of the test. I was very impressed by the possibilities of TAO, but also saw that there is a lot of work to be done in regard to usability. Being used to a great number of easy-to-use social media, some of the steps I had to take in the TAO system seemed not necessary and sometimes even annoying. However, I also learned that the usability guys and gals had not taken up their work until a few months ago and are working hard to make the software more user friendly.

During the final round of presentations, William Thorn, senior analyst with the OECD, brought the metaphor of haute couture vs. prêt-à-porter into the discussion. This metaphor was taken up by Marilyn Binkley and Romain Martin (both University of Luxembourg). Haute Couture was seen as where creativity goes on, where new developments are brought about to further CBA. At the same time it also signifies developments that have not yet been thoroughly tested and that cannot be applied everywhere, e.g. for technical reasons. On the other hand, prêt-à-porter assessment is well-tested, easier to administer, immediately usable. However, that does not necessarily mean paper-and-pencil tests, but can also be CBA. In contrast to haute couture CBA, it would only have little added value to paper-and-pencil tests. Just having multiple choice items on a computer screen instead of on paper is not very innovative. Like with elearning activities, the real added value must be something else, e.g. the use of multimedia, new forms of test items etc.

Altogether between 80 and 100 people attended this two-day event at the Abbaye de Neumünster in Luxembourg City. There were plenty of opportunities for discussions in the workshops and the breaks where developers, users and potential users mingled. The TAO Days were very well organized by the TAO team and also included a Walking Dinner for a selected number of guests (photos).

The coming months will show how quickly the word can spread about TAO and hopefully get the community to a good start.

It’s been some time since I wanted to write about my little computer helpers. Thus, without further ado I present (in alphabetical order):

Caffeine

During a seminar my colleague Bob Reuter and I gave, he switched on this little program to avoid having his Mac fall asleep. As I had 15 3-hour workshops during the past month, I came to value Caffeine. Previously, I had to make sure that my screensaver was disabled or the computer screen didn’t go into sleep mode (which I frequently forgot). Now I just activate Caffeine and the screen stays on and on and on, and the projector does not have to look for its input source or switches off entirely.

Evernote

Well, this is actually not just a little helper, but a big one. Many people have already written about Evernote lately, e.g. also Alan Levine in “More than notes in Evernote”. You can copy text from a website, use the browser plugin to convert it into a note for which the source URL is saved immediately, you can tag the note and put it into a folder in Evernote. The great thing is that you can sync your notes with the Evernote server and get all your stuff on the iPhone as well.

I usually use Evernote to take notes during an online event or while reading a text. Occasionally, I send a tweet to my Evernote account for save keeping or take a photo if I don’t want to copy the text.

Currently, a bit of a bummer are two things for me, but I guess, the Evernote team will get to them some time:

• You cannot edit a note on the iPhone when it includes rich text like bullet points, bold, italics etc.
• Shared notebooks don’t show up under “Notebooks”. You have to hunt for them.

Jumpcut

This little software is marvelous. As I do a lot of “copy & paste”, I depend on Jumpcut a lot. I can copy as much as I want (currently, I let the program remember 40 copied items), and then start pasting the text where I want to have it. Beware: as every text is copied, if you copy passwords, they also appear in the history. However, you can always clear the history.

Skitch

It is already easy to take screenshots on a Mac with the built-in snapshot functionality, but Skitch has some added value.

• You can decide where you want to have your screenshots saved -> no more moving of files to the final folder.
• The file format can be changed for each image.
• The files can get individual names after grabbing (a portion of) the screen.
• You can drag & drop your images wherever you need them.
• The images you saved on the computer are also placed in a history from where they can be recalled for further editing later on.
• You can add text, shapes, arrows etc. to your image before saving it.
• The image can be saved on your computer, the Skitch server, MobileMe, FTP, WebDAV or flickr account.
• You can take timed snapshots. They are particularly necessary when you want to show a dropdown menu.

Except for Evernote, my little helpers are exclusively for Mac.

I know that applications like TweetLater allow you to schedule tweets that will be delivered in the future. However, I did not know that TwitterFox, my Firefox plug-in for sending tweets, can also look into the future.

The TwitterFox update that I installed today now also shows when a tweet was sent. Sweet and necessary, especially after a good night of sleep. However, I just sent a regular tweet and TwitterFox told me that it was sent “1 minute from now”. Now that is strange. Is this a bug? Earlier I only saw something like “11 seconds ago” “less than 1 minute ago”.

Am I looking into the future with TwitterFox?

Now I know for sure that the apps that are suggested in the iTunes app store are country-specific or how else could I explain the #1 app being www.wort.lu? Too bad that I don’t see a general Top Ten list.

Country-specific recommendations for June 14, 2009

Alec Couros and Dean Shareski dueled today at #tatc09. Each of them presented their favorite web tools in the Cool Tools Duel which was broadcast live on Ustream. The audience – in the room as well as online could even vote for their favorite presenter. Both Alec and Dean presented great tools and the audience loved their duel.

Alec presented Ustream and thus he was streaming a stream and everybody could watch the stream in the stream streamed in the stream.

Streaming a Stream

It was tough to decide whom to give my vote. In the end, Alec got it,but the irony is that I used two tools that Dean talked about to take the above picture. I took the screenshot with Skitch, a tool that I truely love to have on my Mac, and added the frame and the text with Picnik.

Thanx for sharing this presentation.