claret

• Julie and I have been working on matching concepts to the LOs and assets to examine how they are distributed across the domain.
• CLARe is currently undergoing testing in house across different operating systems before we start to link concepts to LOs and assets in the repository itself. We expect to start work on this in the next week or so.
• The autumn workshop planning is still going ahead as planned.

At Reading University we worked once again with the large scale paper concept maps. However, for this event we refined both the profiles that we were using to gather requirements both in terms of their content and their presentation. The inclusion of hand-picked images to represent each person, and the new presentation style of the profiles and tasks proved to be highly effective. The workshop feedback went on to form the final set of external changes to the concept map.

We would like to extend our thanks to Joan McCormack for hosting this event. As with Portsmouth, the day was both enjoyable and very productive.

The concept map has reached its final stage of development and is now being integrated fully into the ePrints3 version of CLARe for the project. Once the CLAReT interface has been updated, we will be starting work linking our 100+ Learning Objects and Assets to CLAReT.

Plans are underway for the CLAReT workshop that will test the working repository tool in the autumn.

In April we took part in a day workshop at the University of Portsmouth in conjunction with our sister eLanguages project L20. Both L20 and CLAReT share a community, and this community has seen the initial L20 project outcomes go on to underpin CLAReT.

Unlike the London event, the CLAReT concepts were explored through the medium of the concept map tool. This was undertaken through the use of profiles, with a series of related tasks, to test how effective a search using the concept map. It also provided invaluable feedback on the concept tool interface itself, as we had the opportunity to observe interaction with the tool, and to discuss with participants their experiences.

As the event was centred around the use of individual computers, there was a different dynamic from the London workshop, which gave us insight into arranging effective ways of encourage discussion for future events. We gained some excellent feedback, and this subsequently went on to inform the next generation of the map, the map tool and the workshop at the University of Reading.

The day was hosted by Miguel Arrebola-Sanchez at Portsmouth and we would like to extend our thanks for such a productive and enjoyable day.

We held a workshop in March at the University of London Union, with an interesting and vibrant mixture of teaching practitioners, learning technologists and information professionals from both the UK and Mexico. Our attendees were both domain experts in the area of language teaching and learning and speakers of a range of languages from French, German, Russian, Spanish and Swedish amongst others.

After some introductory talks by Dave Millard and Yvonne Howard, we explored the CLAReT concept map in detail in conjunction with some activities. There were 2 groups lead by Ann Jeffery and Kate Borthwick. Each group worked with a very large print version of the map on which they were free to comment and and draw.

Discussions around the concept map were certainly lively and informative, particularly areas concerning grammar, themes, learning strategies and cultural awareness. Issues relating to repository interfaces were also discussed during the day, as a natural extension of the conversation.

Kate Dickens gave a talk on the research work of eLanguages, and Dave Milllard gave feedback on the workshop activities and new web 2.0 websites such as Flickr and Del.icio.us.

Our concept map is now undergoing further revisions to reflect the input give during the workshop. We would just like to extend our thanks to all of those that gave their time and invaluable expertise.

Yesterday we held the first CLARET workshop in the LUSU. The objective was to go over the prototype concept maps with a number of language experts and to reflect on the shape of the blog and the way in which we intend to use it. The feedback has been fantastically useful, not only comments about the shape and terminology, but ideas about different viewpoints on the space and how that may change the concept maps.

I also presented an overview of Web 2.0 and examined a number of sites to extract a set of features that are very common. We then discussed how these might be applied to repositories - the general feeling was that comments and ratings would be most useful (to act as a form of provenance).

We’re going to need a couple of weeks to fully digest the feedback and comments, we’ll make the slides availble on the site in the next few days.

The Claret project has been going for a few months now, and in that time we’ve made some excellent progress. The project has been progressing along three lines:

• Concept Maps - one of our major deliverables is to add a concept mapping tool to CLARE. We have a rather nice flash tool developed by the FREMA project, but of course it needs to be based on real maps, constructed and validated by experts in the field. Over the last few months we have had a chance to build up a draft concept map on teaching languages based on our own research and workshops with a number of domain experts. We are now planning to validate the map with a wider group of experts at a workshop in London later this month - the objective is to confirm that the maps we now have are sensible and comprehensive, but also to explore how people might use the maps to try and locate Learning Objects in Clare.
• Another thread of work has been looking at how we can migrate Clare to ePrints 3, which looks like a massive improvement on the previous version with much better usability. Although there is a migration tool we will have to make a lot of small adjustments to make sure that the Clare look and feel is restored, and that the complexity of a full eprints installation is filtered into something more appropriate for a Learning Object repository.
• Lastly we have been planning for the Web 2.0 tools that we hope to deliver towards the end of the project. We are inspired by Web 2.0 sites such as Digg, Flickr and YouTube, and would love to be able to offer that sort of added functionality to Clare. One important question is whether or not we implement features such as Tagging and Ratings locally, restricted (across all repositories), or globally (in the same pool as any other bookmark on the Web). There are pros and cons to each approach. If we restrict the community to users of one repository (locally) then we can ensure the quality of tags and feedback, however the network effects may be much less. If we use global tools (such as delicious or digg) then we can save ourselves a lot of implementation effort and can join in with a much wider community, but the value of the tags will be less (since they will link to anything, not just resources in repositories). The middle option is to provide tools that work across all repositories, which maximises both the network effects and the quality - the problem is that this would involve eprints.org providing a live service. We have been discussing this with Les Carr and the ePrints team, and I think that the debate will go on a while!

Hopefully in the next few weeks we will begin to see the concept map tool come toegther. We’ll post more details when they become available.