* Title of Primary Project Output: JISCWILD: A tool to enable student wireless interaction with tutor delivered lecture slides.
* Screenshots or diagram of prototype:

Diagram of Overall concept

Screenshot of Tutor Interface

Screenshot of Client interface

Screenshot of Display

Plugin screen shots in practice (note both the above are PowerPoint slides with embedded web content)

* Description of Prototype: Death by PowerPoint, make PowerPoint come alive with the Wild Thing. The Wild Thing concentrates on allowing students in the lecture room to interact directly with slides delivered by a lecturer. Students use web or Wi-Fi enabled devices (including laptops and mobile phones) to send information through for display on presented slides. The Wild Thing is a web based system which enables lecturers to build interaction into standard presentational material. The interaction can be in the form of activities such as simple questions requiring textual or multiple choice response. However, the aim of the system is to enable these activities to scale up to much more sophisticated activity types such as ones enabling pictorial or audio responses. A plug-in exists for Microsoft PowerPoint to enable lecturers to do this quickly and efficiently. As a side benefit to the project work on the Wild Thing system has resulted in a tool which the majority of lecturers around the country will be interested in using. The tool enables directly embedded web content to be displayed within PowerPoint slides removing the requirement for lecturers to have to task switch between applications in the lecture room.
* Link to working prototype: The working prototype consists of multiple elements best described by our user documentation see link in section below, however, there is a tutor interface @ The Wild Web system (tutor interface) , a client interface (for mobile devices etc...) @The Wild Web system (client interface) , a display page for Presentational slides @ The Wild Web system (embedded content for slide display) FINAL NOTE: The display content would be embedded in the presentational slide with the use of a plug-in such as our PowerPoint add-in at sourceforge or on the project web page.
* Link to end user documentation: Sourceforge or on the project web page.
* Link to code repository or API: Sourceforge or on the project web page.
* Link to technical documentation: Sourceforge or on the project web page.
* Date prototype was launched: November 2009
* Project Team Names, Emails and Organisations: Darren P. Mundy, d.mundy@hull.ac.uk, University of Hull; Darren Stephens, d.stephens@hull.ac.uk, University of Hull; Keith Dykes, k.dykes@hull.ac.uk, Independent Developer
* Project Website: project web page.
* PIMS entry: https://pims.jisc.ac.uk/projects/view/1358
* Table of Content for Project Posts

Posts about Project Evaluation:Project Evaluation & First Few Weeks .
Posts about User participation:Demonstrations & User trials and forthcoming demonstrations .
Posts about Day-to-day work:Finishing Versions & Better late than never! & Interface Design & Diagrams and Tools & Design Documentation..
Posts about Technical standards:Jscrip, Jquery PHP and God damit! & Amusing Interface Quirks .
Posts about Value Add:Finalising the ValueAdd .
Posts about Small WIN(s):Teaching an "old" dog, new tricks & Creating Functions and Beating Web Servers.
Posts about FAIL(s):Mobiles for Project .

Demonstrations

Earlier this month we put on two demonstration sessions for staff members to come and have a play with Wild in practice. We talked through the project focus demonstrated the use of the add-in and demonstrated the composition of activities for PowerPoint integration. We had a range of staff come to the two sessions encompassing areas such as Study Advice, Primary Education, Coastal Sciences, Campus Management, Computer Science, Theatre and Performance, Creative Music Technology. We asked all of the staff who came to consider how the technology could be used in relation to their discipline and how we could push the technology on. Since the events we have had a range of different reponses which will lead to a number of different opportunities for Wild's integration into different disciplines over the next Semester and beyond. For example, we are going to demonstrate Wild and other Web 2 technologies to a large group of primary education students at the end of this semester with the intent of getting them to explore how new technologies may shape their educational environments of the future (ie. with young children and beyond) - this seems like a good value add to their education and an example of research embedded in techning practice. We also hope in the New Year to have the opportunity to use Wild in the context of substantial classes in the physical sciences to explore it's potential for use in very large groups.

Project Evaluation

Well we're very close to the end of the funded part of the project with the project now set to continue through postgraduate support over the next year. In terms of evalution of where we are at a SWOT follows this short piece.

Looking back over the project it's clear that there have been some key WINS and some key losses to learn from. In terms of the WINS, on submitting the proposal we weren't too sure how we were going to tackle the lecturer tool for composing slides having previously encountered problems with working with MS Powerpoint slides and other presentational tools for the first prototype. We knew that the way we were doing things needed to change (a clunky Java application is just not usable across the uninitiated) so the decisions made in creating a web solution and producing an add-in which has a really usable side effect of being able to embed any web content directly into Powerpoint was a real positive. Made even more positive when we sorted the add-in for a later version to enable multiple web pages to be displayed on the same slide.

In terms of the web system, we are in the position of having the basic functionality working and in addition having a lot of the other functionality ready to be integrated but we perhaps still need to continue to work on the interface to make things easier for users. That will happen though as the Wild system starts to be used in anger in a few modules in semester 2.

In terms of losses I think the main one has been the inability to get the desired technology through the University and corporate channels. However, the technology purchased through the project offers lots of different opportunities for future exploration linked to the Wild thing.

SWOT Analysis (at this point)

Strengths

The add-in (has the potential for widespread use given the propensity for the inclusion of web content in presentations)
The re-formulated architecture of Wild (offering clear opportunities for expansion)
Things work in the Wild, with tasks not too difficult to complete
Team (Clear ideas for how to continue to strangthen Wild)

Weaknesses

At present we still need to integrate some of the more advanced question types into the web tool.
The Wild system at the moment needs a clean up and will get one over the next couple of days.
The Wild web system is working but we need to re-factor the code to make it easier for other developers to add to the system.

Opportunities

Wild demonstrated at Making Web 2.0 Work For You and other external events coming up over the next six months
Wild demonstrated internally successfully, need to start to get more people using at the very least the web page insertion tool within their practice leading to transmitted word of mouth and tool usage in multiple circumstances.
Clear opportunity to experiment with embedding other forms of feedback mechanism directly into slide content e.g. twitter feeds and using other Web 2.0 technologies linked in with Wild within the lecture room environment.
Potential for commercial link up with a local company to move the system forward (still considering whether to actively pursue) - leading to a couple of versions of the software.

Threats

New versions of PowerPoint will possibly require a new image of the add-in tool. As things stand it seems to work retrospectively at the moment i.e. the version of the tool for PP95 works with PP97.
Loss of momentum, however, the PG focus should enable the system to move on substantially over the next year.

Finalising the ValueAdd

As you may have noticed tonight is blog catch-up amd as we move towards JISC funding ending its time to look at the value added and things that changed project direction.

The wild thing tool provides the following service for lecturers, 1 the integration of live web content directly into PP slides through a mechanism that is user friendly ,easy to understand and requires limited tutor intervention. This has been a significant side effect of the WILD tools production, 2: As things stand the wild tool provides a clear textual question and answer system for slide integration. Other question types are not far away but will be added as they are fully tested.

I think the clear turning point as regards this project was illustated in one of the earliest blog posts when we realised that a PP add-in could be constructed and linked directly to a web based system rather than the team focusing on creating a tool which would manipulate PP slide construction post creation through a different application.

Finishing Versions

When David Flanders visited he commented how it would be good to see something such as a twitter aggregator running in a web pane
on a slide containing other web content. At the time the plug-in was setup to only allow single web page integration into a slide. This week that changed now as many web pages as one may want can be integrated. In addition to this versions of the plug-in have been finished for PP2003 and PP2007. Took a bit of playing but the tool with these additions should be even more stable and user friendly. One of the annoyances with the plug-in was its insistance on a slide being selected in the left hand pane in PP before it allowed web content insertion, this has also now been solved.

Finally, a bit of time has been put into clearing up the WILD web interface with time to put in next week in addition.

A pretty happy successful implementation week.

User trials and forthcoming demonstrations

Been a very busy time with the project approaching completion alongside the semester flying by. The plug-in has been used in lecture theatres here on campus over the duration of the semester with the only issue being linked to permissions when logging in as a temporary user. A couple of weeks ago the plug-in was demo'd at the making web 2 work for you workshop and low and behold the web insert worked well but WILD fell a bit flat on its backside because of problems with PowerPoint versions and the wireless connectivity. Next week we have a couple of user sessions planned for demonstration and I hope that it will encourage a range of campus staff to trial the sytem over the second semester.

End of a good thing

Well at the end of today I (keith) will be leaving wild as a full time payed programmer :(

BUT FEAR NOT! I will be Returning as a Post grad student to work on WILD some more!

I would like to thank Darren S and Darren M for the support and for the oppotunity to work on this fantastic project. I hope my masters can expand the wild project more, as i will be working 12 hours a day on it (-4 hours for food and coffee and -6 for WOW).

For a little up date, we have a working Demo (text input only) of the WILD web interface. and we have also 2 other test systems on the go, one that is a copy of the demo but with working upload and the start of multiple choice activities.

I have also started some templates for the system in my spare time, heres a looky at one:

Default: Here

WILD: Here (with some mini Alterations by Darren S)

Teaching an "old" dog, new tricks

OK, I'm not a fantastic Web Dev and tbh there are gaps in my learning, i know enough to get me by and produce some reasonable stuff.

This project has made me have to take a step back and at the same time, take a step up. Today i have learned that to make a web page you do not need to put ANY html in it at all.... this was some what of a daunting concept, since my learning is centre around traditional HTML/CSS etc. So now we throw in OOP PHP... well as Darren Stephens will attest to, i was some what perplex/confused/down right Stupefied!

OOP (for people that do not know) stands for Object Orientated Programming. In first year of my BSc we touched on this and if I'm honest i fell over at the first attempt.. i simply was not very good at it. i have struggled to grasp the concept of OOP ever since. to my surprise i manged to explain to a non Programmer how OOP works (in an abstract context)

I told martin (one of the Players on my pool team) that OOP works something like this:

A house is a OBJECT
A house has windows which is a CLASS with in the object
A window has ATTRIBUTES like size colour
A window has METHODS like Open close
A window can have an INSTANCE of the class, so Stained glass is different type of Window but still falls in the class of window.

he got the jist of it, but tbh i wasn't 100% sure if i was right about it, but i digress.

the following is a snippet of Code from the wild project html Client page:

Coorrrrreecctiiioonnnn i was going to, but basically Blogger wont let me and i could not find any thing in the help pages to change this...

I'll be back later with Screenshots...

a disgruntled ~Keith

EDIT

Told you i would be back! Ok our HTML code samples:

in here you can see the standard HTML is present and the php function for connecting to a database and calling a query.

Ok now this is the same code in OOP PHP:

In the words of a favorate Character of mine "It not even sound same!"

Mobiles for Project

We are now entering into the testing phase of our project and for the past few weeks i've been trying to source some iPhones through the institution in line with our project budget. Ultimatley it seems to no avail with O2 corporate we're looking at 24 month contracts and £250 per phone (not an option). There are two reasons I would like iPhones for this project, 1) They come with 12 months of web access and 2) Interface wise they work extremely well. Going to have to see, tomorrow, whether or not I can put 10 iPhones on my credit card otherwise its time to look at sourcing other options. First choice at the moment would be 10 Android phones network free then free sims and the purchase of top up cards from 3, who offer quite a nice included web package.

We'll see what happens over the next week, just from expecting things to be straightforward we move into the realms of the not possible.

Better late than never!

Ok i haven’t been to good with the blog so time for an update.

First of all, JISCRI in Manchester, was for me, new Experience. for me. I have never had the opportunity to visit a developer conference before, and i enjoyed it. I don’t mind admitting that i was a little shy and left allot of the talking to Darren and Darren (from here on i should call them DnD but i feel the law suits from Wizards of the coast :) )

It was good to see the different things that where going on in the JISC world (though there was a LOT of stuff that seemed to do the same things (just my opinion!)). The project that caught my eye was the shuffl one. The use of JQuery to create index cards to store notes (with out database Backend) was very kool. only one thing JISC guy.... PLEASE don’t make me go to the city of Manchester’s stadium again..... unless the Red half of Manchester are playing there!

Ahem that aside....

Ok Bring the Project back up to date we have completed the first functional prototype consisting of:

• Plug-in for MS PowerPoint that can embed an web browser for Wild use or normal web use
• A PHP driven web Interface for a tutor to add, edit activities and create the URLs for the tutor to embed Into the PowerPoint Add-in.
• A PHP client Interface that works on most mobile devices and allows the client to repl to the correct activity
For the Tutor interface we are currently using a standard PHP/xHTML web site, i would like to use some JQuery to make it a little more dynamic, but we'll see.
The Display and the client pages are my little triumph, They are Both Static template that have the information needed for an activity inserted on the fly, simples! (heh) basically you put the Id of the activity into the client and the back end will search for that related activity details, like title, description and put then into the correct parts of the page..... we only need one page then ;)
The display works on the same base.
This morning we had a flying visit from David Flanders, He chatted with genuine interest and seem happy with the progress made, so if he’s happy.... I’m Ecstatic!

~Keith

JISCRI

The three of us made the (shortish) journey down to Manchester on Thursday morning to take in the wonders of the JISCRI workshop. The venue of the Man City ground at Eastlands was a nice one, though Keith, a Man U fan, was slightly less happy about it :-) As it turned out, the MCFC wi-fi network was a touch ropey; not a problem thanks to the open mesh some guys from Southampton had provided. Thanks guys!

We hadn't had a visit from our programme manager yet so it was nice to put faces to names and see that David Flanders was nothing like we had envisaged (in a good way). The main thing we noticed after some of the show and tell and 45 second pitches on the first day was that we were somewhat out on a limb: our project wasn't that similar to anything else there. The closest thing that we saw really was Song Ye's interesting Super Slides project. Darren M had been down this route with SMIL a couple of years before and had tales to swap on morning two with Song Ye.

While Darren M was doing that I was enjoying chatting with Ben Charlton from Kent, while Keith was talking to Alex Bilbie from Lincoln. I was interested in Kent's Reading List stuff as I'd been mulling over how to develop some tools to structure module and course information like module handbooks and specs. Ben was interested in this too and I wondered how data from their system would be exported, especially if they were serious about cross-institutional support. We mused on the idea of what kinds of ontology would be useful, and how they might be underpinned by appropriate RDF. After this, I came back into Keith's conversation with Alex (who'd also gotten involved in a discussion about how useful 3D printing would be for printing bacon). Alex's mobile campus project rang some bells with us, as a developer on our campus is looking at this very area.

I'd never stayed in the Madonald Hotel in Piccadilly before, so was very pleasantly surprised by what greeted us when we got there. So, after a quick shower and a blast on the iPod, we went down to dinner - a real school dinners affair: pizza and chips! Unfortunately, I don't do chees, but the staff were great and I managed to get some bruschetta instead. A few drinks were had and, after listening to what I remember being quite a lot of Stone Roses tracks (spot average age of audience, folks!) , some pleasant time spent with a number of people and a discussion about getting Leopard onto netbooks with the AV guys, I toddled off to my room and the free internet before bed.

The pitches on Thrsday and Friday were all interesting, though of course some were a little more polished than others, particularly on Thursday. Friday's were, without exception so much slicker. And a few of them were really memorable. The ones that stayed in my mind were for Clipper, Xpert and WATT. It's also a pity that we were in our blog interview on Friday as both the bits OSSWatch and agile for small teams sessions that I miessed looked really interesting. Still, can't have everything.

I'm not the most confident of people, so before making the journey down was a touch worried that the very rough prototype of our initial system was going to look a bit weak comapred to other people's work. It didn't. We got encouraging feedback that the project was a worthwhile one and enthusiastic noises from several people. We came back re-energised by WILD and also with a couple of other ideas to float around if things go well. All in all a pretty good two days.

Thanks should go to Mahendra and the troops from UKOLN who kept everything pretty smooth over the two days and looked after us really well. It was a blast, guys.

Some project docs and a working SVN repo are now sitting at : https://sourceforge.net/projects/thewildproject/

Jscrip, Jquery PHP and God damit!

I am currently working on a feature for the wild project which I envisioned when I was drafted in to help. When a tutor wants to add, edit or embed an activity, they will need to get the correct one from an activity set. Let me put this context:

Dr. Livingstone (no not that famous guy) teaches the University of Hamburg(er). The good Doctor is building a presentation for a lecture on the African jungles, and has decided to use an existing activity from another lecture he made with the wild project. Doc L picks the Activity set in the tutor interface via a drop down list and selects the "jungle bells: stories from the green forests" activity set. The next selection drop down list is then populated with the activities from that set, in which Doc L picks "the hills of stranglethorn vale" activity.

On to my problem:

That "cannot" be done with PHP (I "" because I haven’t found an example of it been done) you can set up the query, but that’s about it. Now it can be done with Jscript and something called JQuery which is a Library for java script. I have been looking at Different examples of JQuery and I find it could be useful in a lot of different things for wild, but it something we will be looking at later versions.

I have done some searching around and found a good example of what I am trying to achieve:

http://remysharp.com/2007/01/20/auto-populating-select-boxes-using-jquery-ajax/

(Thanks Remy)

at the moment I am trying to follow the Example he has given but am struggling to get it working locally (not sure I have the correct code in the correct files Etc) but I am confident I can convert this to use a database Ids rather than the values of the select or use the Values of the select to reference the table ids.

~Keith

Amusing Interface Quirks!

I have spent a few days building templates for the interface for wild. I have found a few things that amuse me with Mozilla FireFox and IE (7/8). I will show you what I mean shortly but first i want to talk interface!

Client:

Originally I envisaged the client being to different interfaces (one for high end devices, one for mobile devices)

But after some tweaking I feel that we might be able to work the larger interface for the mobile devices, simply because of the way the browsers (IE and Firefox) scale the web page:

moving on...

Tutor:

In the previous post I stated that I wish to move away from the traditional web page. its hard for me to explain what I mean but I am going to give it ago.

My idea is to make the web interface feel and work like something you would have in a kiosk or information booth, for instance the interface will not have a navigation bar, in the traditional sense. Also all navigation will happen within an area of the page (a bit like frames but not as evil) and will be in sequence or will be fluent (so one option will lead on to the next until completion).

So I went about creation the tutor interface to mirror the client. The thing I found this was the Scale effect for the tutor client became annoying and I mean REALLY annoying. If I where a lecturer or a teacher, I think I would of being seriously narked with the thing and ditched it.

After this, I decided to set the whole thing as absolute positioning with in the CSS (some people say this is a no no, well to you I :P ) the interface looks and feels a lot neater with this and I have give it some scalability for different browser sizes, I might have also fallen in the trap of creating for 1024X768 but then we cant change this at a later stage.



Display:

the display page was really a no brainer, its just a simple page that displays the data. i had little problems with setting this up.

Right the browser quirks:

as daft as it sounds there is one little quirk that i have noticed;

Firefox:

IE:

I'm using a reset CSS file.... but still it happens... love IE!

~Keith

Interface Design

First and foremost I am no designer, never have been, never will be. I have the artistic talent of donkey, so if this designs don’t look “pretty” go figure. :D

To start with I tried to make a “nice” design; I thought about themes and wanted something “wild” looking, as in wild life or jungle. So I came up with this:

After been told off by my partner (she is a web developer) I was force to re-think, So I decided to go with something more simple and use more neutral colours. I also decided that I would like to move away from a traditional web site, and Try and make the site look more like a system interface, to make it feel more like a program and make the user forget it is really just a web client.

So I created this:



It’s not pink….its blue…I swear!

This interface was "built" in Photoshop and am hoping that i can use the layers to construct the full working interface from it.

~Keith

Creating Functions and Beating Web Servers

1st week of sprint one of the wild project, has seen one of the main parts of the project near completion.

DM and KD Set about and successfully get the add-in for PowerPoint to a working standard (all credit to DM for been so persistent with VBA). DM created an add-in that creates a web browser on the slide, with an invisible text box to enter the URL into. The web browser, on slide change, then takes the URL and displays in the slide show with out the need for a click or action.

On to the web interface/server. KD has created some designs of the interface (which you can view in the documentation, they are pink, but he swears they are light blue on his laptop. KD has also started the functions needed to add activities and other data to the database. KD Wrote them in MySQL but there will be some form of conversion to Postgres also, DS was looking at using the DBX extension in PHP, but currently the installation does not work.

KD has spent a few days trying to install a working web server on to his laptop and to his dismay found that his laptop needs a format. Since previous installs have effected the installation of the PHP ( it cannot find the extentions).

The team are now moving into the second week of the sprint with a view to have the basic system in place. They want:
• the add-in working (check)
• the interface in a basic form(check)
• the interface to take input and store it the database
• the server to generate the client slide interface

The next week (the 2nd week of sprint 1) they will be looking for the response data return and display the response on the embedded slide.

Diagrams and tools

This week (2) in the WILD house, the house mates created a large proportion of the UML and miscellaneous diagrams that are needed for the documentation and journal paper.

Diagrams that were created where:

• Class Diagram
• Sequence Diagrams
• Collaboration Diagrams
• Use case Diagram
• Interface Design
• Story Board

The UML diagrams have been create by a program called Visual Case (http://visualcase.com/index.htm). Although this program if not free, is a reasonable tool for creating UML diagrams. Other tools looked at were ARGO (http://argouml.tigris.org/) and Altova (http://www.altova.com/features_visual_tools.html) of which ARGO is free and powerful and altova is superb but expensive

Some major changes and ideas:

• We are no longer treating the system as just dealing with questions and answers. The system will focus on a wide range of activities and their responses (e.g. A tutor will ask his students to take pictures and send them to the embed)
• Limited action from the environment plug-in. The plug-in will simply open and close a web browser and automatically place a embed area in the presentation.

Working Environment.

KD has listed a short-list of possible environments to begin programming in. in this, we mean programs, not languages. Two environment picked to used were scite and eclipse. Scite is a free to use editor which a can work with most languages. Eclipse is also free, but has a PHP only software that auto fills tags, making typing code much faster.

KD will be opting for eclipse.

Work flow

DM - created and edited the journal, as when diagrams became available and edited them where necessary.

DS - Worked on XML DTD, helped on interface designs and worked on a schemer.

KD – Created UML and other designs, created some interface designs and finished the storyboard.

Sprint 1:-

The main objective of this 4 week period is to get the main bulk of the programming out of the way. The focus will be on the Add-in in the first week and possibly the second week. The remaining time will be aimed at getting a working beta of the client and tutor interface, including a working back end.

Next time on WILD tool:

Interface design: style, function and moving away from a web page.

Design Documentation

The draft Design Documentation is now complete and can be found at http://docs.google.com/View?id=dk34gp5_15r44fsd6.

Blog input developer Week 1 – Wild thing



Initial ideas written down, idea bounced with DM and DS, mostly about add-ins for PP and back end/tutor tool.



IDEAS FOR REDESIGN



Add-in that allows access to a web base server that can dynamically generate the question pages after user input, this system would include:



BETA



PHP based Web server that, in the beginning, allows a tutor to create questions he/she would be using during the presentations, these would be called into PP via an embedded xhtml add-in. the server would create the pages dynamically for the tutor before the call is made. It will create the necessary forms needed for displaying the answers i.e if it is a set of multiple choice questions, it will display the answers and which student picked answer. If it is a live test, as soon as the choice is made, it will be displayed on the slide.
A standards compliant client that can be accessed or installed on mobile devices. The student will be able to Log in with their student number and gain access to the correct lecture slides. The client must be able to return the generated xhtml questions from the server and display them, and then allow the student to answer them.
Add - in for Microsoft PP that allows embedded xhtml to load without having need for an input button. this will allow a tutor to imbedding slide (which will have the web server address embedded) and they can reference the question ID number to bring out the correct questions for that lecture (allowing the ability to pull the same question for lots of lectures)


This was initial ideas for a beta, the overall finish product maybe integrate the entire system in to a PP add-in. Open source would require us to create different add-ins for different packages.

If you want to find out more about the initial prototype system and its implementation, please go to:

Link to paper

First few weeks

Since obtaining the award letter at the beginning of June we've been involved in setting up the infrastructure we need to have in place including organising the contract programmer associated with the project. We had always thought that this could be one of the hardest things to establish for the project in keeping to HR policy and procurement policy within the institution. After meeting with the key players with regards to ensuring project support it has actually turned out to be fairly simple and not the headache that it could have been. So infrastructure wise everything seems to be in place.

The system involves building upon an institutional learning and teaching innovations project we developed a couple of years ago. The tool esentially was a stand alone application which took a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation and embedded dynamic content within it. There were a number of issues with this at the time with one of the largest issues being negotiating Microsoft's 'standards'. The system was trialed fairly successfully in two modules over two semesters and has been translated into a few academic papers. We have this month reviewed the old system and its problems with the view of tackling this grant as an opportunity of working towards the ideal system. A system which at the very least embeds into MS Powerpoint to encourage ease of use within the user community and in addition is extensible enough to be re-packaged for other presentational environments. To this end we have this week spent some time focused on thinking about our system in terms of essential and desirable requirements and have this week put together a release schedule involving three releases with each to be delivered over a four week period.

Next on our agenda over the next few weeks is a focus on the design of the system at conceptual level and then at physical level in the form of UML and class diagrams. The programmer is due to join our team in mid-July and will contribute to the end of this design process.

Finally, a SWOT analysis for the project.

Stengths

Pre-existing prototype system
Already been trialed within a user community - feedback gathered
Understanding of what the ideal infrastucture should be
Know already some of the problems
Team

Weaknesses

MS Powerpoint as a focus - originally for the old innovations project we wished to use a more open tool, such as openoffice, however, MS PP was the only tool which seemed to be able to work for our purposes - as other environments didn't offer structured xHTML - only static images of slides were used.
Developing a community of users
Challenges traditional views of lectures, however, can be used in lots of other scenarios
Not everyone has a wireless tool in classrooms, however, with the advent of always on contracts such as those supplied with the iPhone this becomes less of a problem.

Opportunities

A real opportunity to learn from the problems of the first tool and develop a much more usable and professional product
Dissemination activities for the product including HEA Physical Sciences workshop in October which was already set-up before award
An opportunity to get people excited about our product and thinking about other ways to use it.
Scope on completion to use technology in conjunction with other innovations projects
Scope on completion for professional use of the technology.

Threats

Scope creep
Staffing
Delays in procurement or at various stages of the project

Wild thing project

Welcome to the JISC sponsored WILD Thing project blog.