R

For the last week I've been playing with a new tool for analysing data - R. It's quite an amazing tool. It's a programming language, but one specialized for vector and matrix mathematics - which is ideal for statistical analysis. My initial test data set was ticket tracking data from work - I've been using Excel, and had a very large, clumsy spreadsheet with the same formula repeated thousands of times in order to calculate what tickets were open at what time. After a few hours of reading the R documentation and experimenting, I was able to turn the simple line graph I had in Excel into a really nice stacked bar graph in R - in a fraction of a second it reads my CSV of 128 tickets, calculates from the opening and closing dates how many tickets were open when, and builds a bar chart of how many are open, when, and for which service that we offer (over 60 services are represented).

I was very impressed by R's power and expressiveness. Some things seem a bit harder than they need to be, but that's probably just because I don't know my way around properly yet.

I've now started to work on my log file data. It took quite a while to read in 16 million lines of logs, but now operations across those log file lines are surprisingly quick - in six seconds it'll give me a list of all the IP addresses, and how many accesses can from each (which has lead to one surprising, non-PhD related discovery, which I'll need to follow up at work). Some operations seem to take more memory than I have on my machine (which is now 32GB), but so far I've found a different way to do each calculation, so it's not too bad. And I can do things like a sweet logarithmic scale histogram of lengths of user sessions (spoiler: they're mostly short!), with only a few minutes of playing around to figure out what a histogram is.

Exploring alternative avenues

As the usage stats on my software are still very low, I'm looking at alternative research paths for my PhD. I'm still hoping to crack the nut on designing a successful social learning tool, but am hedging my bets.

So currently I'm researching other projects similar to mine - looking for Social Networks embedded within LMSes (or vice-versa). There are a range of interesting things out there that have popped up recently, for example:

• Lore - a very elegant looking LMS with a strong social networking component. The idea behind it seems to be that the social components are independent of the courses you're in (though they can be used within the courses), so you can build a social network across courses and Universities. It's the most elegant looking LMS I've ever seen, though they have been bought out and their blog seems to have gone dead, so I worry that they won't be around for long.
• Chamilo - less elegant, but similar to Lore in concept. Because it's downloadable, and you install it locally, you won't get the international cross-linkages that Lore provides, but the social features seem OK
• Earsketch - a very nice social network built around music projects at a University. Seems well-designed and engaging

I'm having trouble finding good Medical social networking learning tools - the one I have found seems to have failed. Ideally, I'd find a few examples in closely related fields. The aim is to find a collection of projects as similar as possible to mine, and examine the various approaches to design and development, and hopefully from that come up with some knowledge about what approaches are successful in this space, and possibly inform my own project and improve my design.

Engaging teachers with my research

One of the key challenges of my research is that in the course I'm performing my research on, my main role is not that of a teacher; it's that of a technologist. I'm a part of the team that develops the software that the students use, and that my social resource sharing tools are built into. This means that I don't have any direct influence of the students - I can't rock up to my lecture and say "hey you guys, post some resources, and interact through these tools". I can't make use of the tools a requirement for a pass mark in the course.

I've tried to turn this into a virtue - it makes my design research purer in a sense. If the students start using the tools, then it's the value of the tools themselves which is the reason, not other pressures on them to conform. But it would be nice to have some engagement with teachers, if some of them pointed students in the direction of these tools when asked by students how they could share curriculum materials. The staff running the course have decided that they'd rather not engage with these tools - they asked me specifically to ensure that the content in the social networking tools would be hidden from staff view, so that they wouldn't then get pressure to improve the curriculum based on the student resources. This was a bit disappointing, but understandable. What it means, though, is that staff who would have been interested in these tools, and would have encouraged students to use these tools, do not even know they exist. As a result they are probably suggesting the students set up their own wikis, Facebook pages, or other tools, to share learning resources. I've come across a few of these - one I found in the very nascent stage, and suggested the use of my sharing tool, but they have dropped off the radar; another went as far as finding project funding to build a wiki, but then I started working with them and added features to my system to meet their needs (they have also dropped off the radar, now interested in other projects).

I'm hoping I'm not rediscovering the well-understood model of teacher driven social learning - that's been done to death. It works, but its not new and interesting. I still want the students to spontaneously start using the tools built into their virtual learning environment, but I don't know if I'm barking up the wrong tree or if I just haven't yet found the right bits of interface design to lower the barriers to entry enough that they start flooding in.

Social networks and the zombie apocalypse

Today I read a short story called Feature Development for Social Networking, by Ben Rosenbaum, which tells two parallel stories of the use and development of social networking features during the early stages of a zombie apocalypse. It was fascinating, as it was a very accurate portrayal of how these things actually go down in software feature development - the arguments about how a feature will be implemented (who can use the feature; precedents to justify certain aspects of the feature; what the feature can be integrated with; arguments about the approval process), and the rush to get the feature in at the right time are all very reminiscent of my experiences as a software developer.

The story also very elegantly shows the way a social networking site straddles the virtual and physical. Social network sites don't exist in a separate "cyberspace" - they are attached to many points in the real world, and effectively act as information shortcuts between those points. Most of those points in the real world are people, but more and more social networking sites link to places and objects, as we like* venues and organizations, and check in to locations. The social networking site is a bridge between different parts of the real world, more so than many other online experiences. The story reflects this: the feature being developed is done so in response to a real-world event - the zombie apocalypse - and the people reacting to the zombie apocalypse through the social networking tools are using it to communicate these real-world events and interactions they've had.

As a last note, when I was trying to dig up the story (I read it earlier today) to link to on this blog, I found Zombie Friends, and zombie themed social network, and Zombie Passions, a zombie themed dating site. O brave new world, that has such people in't!

* I've italicized these worlds to indicate I'm referring to the social networking meaning of them; we're past the point where wrapping quotes around them makes sense, as they're no longer a novelty; in some places, the social networking version is the primary meaning of these terms.

New avenues

I'm sure you, the frequent reader of this blog, are now well aware that I'm not getting the wagonloads of data that I'd been hoping for, which is leading to some disappointment on my part. This hasn't escaped my supervisor's notice, and we've started discussing a Plan B - how I can turn what I'm doing into a viable PhD even if the usage never takes off.

The first part will be to finally sit down and conduct a series of interviews with students - this has been part of the plan from the start, but I've been waiting for the right time - I was hoping to catch the first wave of usage, and interview students just as usage is starting to seriously take off. But it's looking like a sensible move to interview a group of students sooner rather than later, so I'm going to start work on that early in the new year, with the aim of interviewing 8 students in Q1 2014.

The next thing I'll do differently was suggested by my supervisor, and it seems like a nifty idea. The plan is to start doing some research into what other projects are out there doing similar things. Other people are bound to have had similar ideas, and by comparing across a range of projects I'll have some interesting things to talk about for my thesis, but I might also find some important insights that I've missed, and that might help my project. I'll be searching for similar projects, and I guess categorizing them in a range of dimensions of similarity to my project:

• social networks for learning
• embedded social networks in LMS
• custom-built social tools
• linking student interaction to learning objectives
• university student participants
• medical elearning
• resource sharing (vs. discussion, etc.)
• self starting, voluntary network (as opposed to required and assessable)
• low/no staff participation

 I'll search for these project through the literature, through web searching, and if necessary through word of mouth. Once I've found a few (maybe half a dozen or a dozen), and gathered as much information as possible, I can interview the creators of the system to discuss their ideas and how successful they were. To what did they attribute the success or failure of their network? What pedagogical and design ideas lead to the creation of the network? What did they have to change?

This search should result in some interesting ideas. At worst, it's an interesting small chapter in my thesis, and my main research plan will come good and I'll have some solid data to look at. At best, it will be the core of my thesis, with my DBR work being one of a number of examples that I use, and one I have particular insight into.