I’ll be at the The Domain in Melbourne on the 28th August if anyone wants to talk about Tiny Rock.
Brad Howarth will be interviewing Tony Wheeler from Lonely Planet.
RSVP here if you want to come along.
Contents
Scribd Platform for Teacher Resources
Ive finally moved my teacher resources from Scribd to Tiny Rock, well kind of. All the documents plus 150 new ones are still stored on Scribd but displayed on Tiny Rock without all the Scribd guff. The benefit is that I can use the Scribd interface to manage the collection and still maintain a strong brand on Tiny Rock. Its also a lot easier to monetise the work through ads.
The technology is great, the only thing I can say is that it is a little slow. Basically I just wrote a couple of PHP pages to interface with Scribd and a bit of fancy caching to a local database to speed it up. I still have the same opinion of PHP though, its crud and encourages poor coding practices.
The bottom line, the Scribd Platform is fantastic and you would be mad to reinvent the wheel. Just use it!
The Real Low Hanging Fruit
Seth Godin has a great explanation in his latest post on the importance of choosing wisely when it comes to vehicle efficiencies. He then links this concept to marketing in the most poignant way.
Since my brother and I are into Ecomodding at the moment I found the post particularly interesting. The 20 June Podcast [mp3] from Science Magazine covers the same topic. Richard Larrick talks about the issue but in terms of how different methods of calculation effect how we perceive the efficiencies of our vehicles.
Here in Australia we generally use Litres per 100 Kilometres which give a nice intuitive feel for how efficient a vehicle is, or as one of my students pointed out, is useful because comparisons become easier. Miles per Gallon gives unintuitive results because it is an inverse relationship for the thing we care about, fuel.
Imagine what a difference improving fuel efficiencies would make to the carbon crisis. Both Seth and Richard demonstrate how easily it could be done, simply changing the way we present information. I think that’s the low hanging fruit.
Fantastic Review of Software
Jason de Nys has done a great review of Termites and Monkey which has been referenced by Paul McMahon.
I’m pleased to find out that educators are finding the software useful in the classroom. Although I get immediate feedback from colleagues, somehow international feedback gives me a real buzz. Thanks!
Creating Productive Groups is now FREE
Monkey is now completely cost free, just like Termites. The 30 person limitation has been removed and licence keys are no longer required. Grab the latest version, there are also a few improvements and bug fixes.
Go forth and create productive groups for your classroom, business, team, or whatever. Then spread the word by writing a testimonial.
Chinese Characters in Ruby
Don’t you love it when stuff just works! We have been waiting for Litmus to fall over for the last two weeks, it is being pushed way beyond its original design requirements and we are completely blown away by how well it is managing.
Litmus was designed to be easily installed by teachers onto a school machine and serve a handful of students at any one time. At the moment it is comfortably handling hundreds of international students live on the Internet, even with Chinese characters!
Check out this screenshot.
Litmus was developed in Ruby a long time ago, about a year before Rails was released. Since nothing production ready existed we built our own framework. We used a bunch of technologies: Webrick and Erb for the server, Madeline for sessions, a flat-file persistence layer using YAML, and Redcloth and PDF-Writer for fancy views.
An interesting and unintentional side-effect of the structure is that it load balances out of the box. Just start up a few more Ruby processes and point them at the session and data locations. Unfortunately, the system is IO bound because of a very naive file locking mechanism. The ugly underbelly of not prematurely optimizing.
Once a few things are hardened up and some extra functionality is developed we will do a public release. Until then it will continue to be used for scientific literacy research purposes.
Scientific Literacy Research Software
Litmus is currently being used in another international study. Hundreds of University and Secondary students from Nanjing in China to Schools in South Africa are being tested. The purpose is to compare the scientific literacy results of previous paper based assessments with the new software. Many many hours of hand marking have already been saved. And more importantly many students have had their language difficulties diagnosed. It’s great to be involved in such an innovative and useful project.
Check out this screenshot.
We will be offering a public release soon but if you are an institution interested in being involved in the study please contact Mitch or myself.
Spammed Tiny Rock Testimonials
The Tiny Rock Testimonials page was spammed, what a badge of honour! Over a period of a few days 5 testimonials appeared advertising Russian brides. What’s interesting is that a human did it. The page is a custom HTML form with a kludgy PHP backend, no CMS or other fancyness. Why would anyone invest time into coding something up to spam my little testimonials form.
Surprisingly, manually deleting the posts from the database with SQL was less frustrating than I anticipated. It was certainly quicker than extending the CR into full CRUD.
Litmus the Scientific Literacy Software
Have placed a link on Tiny Rock to a demo version of Litmus, the scientific literacy software. Havn’t yet decided how long it will stay there for, so get in fast if you would like look at the work in progress.
Naturally, any feedback would be appreciated.
* Trial Over: Hope everyone who used the system enjoyed it, thanks for all the great feedback!
Create The Best Class Lists with Monkey
In my opinion the best use for Monkey is creating faculty class lists of students in a school. Here are the steps:
- Prepare a CSV file of student data and import it into Monkey
- Record the web of relationships among the students
- Update the group size to the number and size of the classes you need
- To stream the classes select the “Group Ability” checkbox
- Click generate and watch the Monkey place each student into their best class
You will now be left with a set optimum classes, students with bad relationships in separate classes and students with good relationships in the same class. If you chose to stream then each class will also contain students clustered around an average mark, but the software would have still done its best to keep those relationships in order.
Good, one less barrier to students achieving their educational outcomes and one less headache for school executives and teachers. There is nothing worse than spending every lesson on behaviour management, lets get those class lists right this time.