2009-05-06 Rewards and Instrumentation Conf Call

2009-05-06 Rewards and Instrumentation Conf Call
In attendance

•  TECH @ Berkeley (510-642-9595)
  • Dan Garcia
  • James Ide
  • William Li
  • Sara LaVigna
  • Danica Shei
  • Daisy Zhou
  • Scotty Hoag
• Lois Delcambre @ Portal State (503-725-2405)
• Greg Hislop @ Drexel (610-359-9267) 

Notes

• ENSEMBLE's drupal vs TECH's plone -- how do we get them to interact and share the instrumentation
• Our vision of what we'd like to see. I love planetmath.org's top users feature. What do we want to do differently?
• What categories (and weights) should we give users credit for?
  • rating
  • creating new content
  • using content in their courses
  • remixing content
  • forum discussions
• Using OpenID for username centralization
• Building "anti-gaming-the-system" features
• Standards for logging
  • LD: "Ed Fox wanted me to mention that there may be some interest (maybe at W3C?) or elsewhere to have a standard for log information, from a digital library or from a web site.  I'm not sure of the details.  But, if there were a standard for logging, then we could consider gathering together logs from various participant sites to do various kinds of analysis.  Some folks want to do social network analysis.  But for this committee, it has to do with instrumentation/rewards."
  • DG: "Would love to see a standard emerge for log information... That would certainly help immensely"
• Anti-duplication
  • LD: "I wonder if we should use a de-duplication routine to try and identify when resources present in more than one repository are actually the same.  Ed said that such routines exist - probably in the form of plagiarism detectors."
  • DG: "Yes, de-duplication is certainly needed. We recently had one moderator add "CS Unplugged" to "curriculum repositories" on TECH even though it was already on "Sans-computer activities"!
• James mentions specific features in the works.
  • Sacn URLs to link to specific resources.
  • Check what people have contributed in all various catagories/subcatagories.
• Resource Assignment problem: No Google analytics numbers associated with the number of downloads.
• Downloads VS. Actual Usage numbers:
  • We want to know how much the software is being used, not just downloaded.
  • Point System to encourage usage.
    • Lois mentions: Point system has little meaning to new users. All it says is who posts a lot. How useful is this to new/casual users?
    • Is the point of the point system for the public, or for the administration/deans?
  • Comments to add to articles.
  • Need a way to keep track of what's being used the most often by the users.
• Portal Level/Architecture:
  • Most people just Google for the resources that they are looking for.
  • Community is the valuable part of the TECH project. Google search can't provide that.
• Resource marking and tagging.
  • Relevant resources should be easy for users to find.
  • Example: Data sets for topic X should be easy to find because other users have tagged the data sets with X.
• Ensemble-Plone Cross Compatibility
  • Need to make both systems work with each other.
  • Need to allow Ensemble to "crawl" the Plone site information.
  • Open ID
    • Login system where one account created at any Open ID site can log into any other Open ID supported site with that same account.
    • Problems:
      • Information can not flow between the Open ID sites for privacy reasons. (Not useful for culling data)
      • May not have wide spread usage across the web.
• What do people use most within Ensemble?
• Engineering Pathway: Another good example to look at.
• Administrative
  • May need some 3rd party to police/monitor content.
  • Anti-Gaming: Need to keep users from "Gaming the system".
• Remote Ensemble Collaboration
  • Steve Carpenter
  • Steve Edwards
• Bring Sally in for next meeting.

Demo Page
http://nyc.cs.berkeley.edu/sigcse/
 
http://planetmath.org/