We are organising the competition to investigate what clues might be available to a person seeking to decode anonymised information that the University might from time to time release. We assume that the curious can assemble a reasonably complete profile of University members and we would like to know what information an attacker might have available from public sources. The reason for organising a competition is that we anticipate that you will be more innovative than us in thinking of ways of acquiring and assembling the data, and that there will be a wide range of possible approaches.

The project will run for 6 weeks from Monday August 1st, 2011 through to midnight on Monday September 12th, 2011. Submissions should be in the form of a web site with profile data pages for individuals, together with a ‘data manual’ addressing the judging criteria below and a zip file of the code necessary to collect and present the data in the web pages. Questions should be addressed to data-challenge@caret.cam.ac.uk

Judging will necessarily be subjective, but we will use a panel of judges that will include respected members of the University and at least one external judge. Nevertheless, criteria will include:
-     Volume of data discovered. Duplicated data will be discounted and effort should be made to eliminate duplicate information from entries.
-    Academic relevance of the information. We are not interested in where a person dined on a given Sunday, but in data that can reasonably be said to be part of their academic profile.
-    Coverage of the University. The proportion of university members covered by the profile data assembled.
-    Verifiability of the data. Where/how was the data sourced so that we can respond to challenges concerning validity?
-    Accuracy of the data. If the data about an individual contains inaccuracies, it may reduce the utility of the rest of the information about that individual.
-    Maintainability of the data. How easy will it be to re-run the data collection to keep it up to date, should that be desirable?
-    Authority of data. Whether established by independent verification or citation of authoritative source (e.g. department web site) any analysis of likely authority of the information will enhance the value of the data.
-    Willingness to share approaches and techniques. There will be a strong preference for projects that either make their techniques and code available through an open licence, or make the techniques and code available to the University. Publishing of the techniques and code is also encouraged.

We are not interested in information at any cost; entries are expected to demonstrate ethical behaviour.

Although the sources should all be public, it is not our intention to publish the aggregated data ourselves. Rather, each person’s data will be made available to the person concerned through a Raven-protected page and comments will be collected. Such comments will not affect the judging.

Background:

This challenge is part of a JISC project to investigate the release of system log data in anonymised form. In analyzing the likelihood of identifying an individual from the anonymised data, it is thought valuable to understand what background information about a given individual might it be possible to assemble from public sources. This challenge will help us understand the scope and nature of such publicly available data.

A few of Bert’s pet peeves are unnecessary CSS and people who don’t pick their battles. He came back to Cambridge to start full time development for Sakai and still gets much joy and satisfaction out of developing.

Out of the office, Bert enjoys watching football and played it for about 15 years. “I was really competitive when I was young. Nowadays I still am but I prefer the social part to actually winning the match. Watching the game at home with a few friends is really all I need to relax after a week of work.” Aside from sports, Bert likes to play a game or enjoy a sunny day. He’s always open for conversation as long as you pick your battles (and don’t show CSS no-nos).

The Steeple project itself was conceived among a group of early adopters of institutional podcasting. Since the start of the Steeple project there have been very rapid developments within the UK HEI community, leading to widespread interest in the adoption of institutional podcasting. The Steeple project has therefore attracted strong interest within the wider UK HEI community, leading to request for support through workshops, further documentation, and for help in adoption of Steeple tools.  A number of HEIs asked for detailed advice on technology and policy, and visited the Steeple sites for workshops and consultations, and/or engaged in sustained email conversations.

Steeple BR will seek to address the issue of community support, making Steeple outputs available and working towards creating a sustainable community of interest in the UK. It is a key component of this project to engage with institutions (both those already in contact with Steeple, and new ones) through outreach visits and calls to understand their requirements, to explore the challenges, blockers and opportunities as regards institutional podcasting for them, and to determine the way in which the Steeple outputs can be of benefit to them.

Today celebrates the achievements of Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer programme for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine.

To mark the day, bloggers around the world have pledged to write a post about a female heroine of science and technology. Though Ada’s programme never ran (the engine was never built) she remains an important figure in the development of computer programming. Perhaps just as importantly she is seen today as a role model for women working in science and technology.

Cambridge University has a tendency to change slower than other Universities and undoubtedly those outside may see us as antiquated or at best quaint, but inside we see things differently. While there are undoubtedly some areas of research which are still male dominated, women increasingly hold positions of importance and power in the University. We have a female vice chancellor and more recently, with the appointment of Anne Jarvis, a female head of the library.

In our office we are lucky to have a number of bright intelligent women working in programming and IT support. Sultan, Anne, Chris and Verity have very different roles but all have broken into what are unfortunately still male dominated areas of work. These talented women are central to so many of CARET’s projects and they inspire us all with their creativity and determination. Thank you ladies!

If you want to join in celebrating the day it’s not too late – you can pledge your support at http://findingada.com/.

This Widget is a product of the Arcadia Programme, and was developed by the University Library in collaboration with CARET. The Arcadia Project blog is worth reading if you are interested in web application projects and the creative ideas in this direction being developed for the University. (You can also get the latest updates on Harriet’s research here too)

She has furthered her study with university courses in Maths, Lexical Computing, Computational Linguistics, and Systems Analysis as well as courses in Medieval bookbinding.

Now based at the University of Cambridge, she works as a Senior developer at CARET mainly focusing on Digital Humanities projects such as Darwin Correspondence Project, Shahnama, Henslow Correspondence, and Chopin. She has also been a lead developer on the multinational collaboration project CollectionSpace, an open source museum collection management tool.

As a keen advocate of creating tools that empower experts to achieve their aims, rather than impose restrictions on them. Her research interests are around the use and development of reusable and extensible tools for data management in the humanities world, and their implications for aggregation and exposing data to a wider audience whilst allowing the academic to retain authority and control over the data.

Some of these people may be eating a cheese scone

CARET’s famous cappuccino machine, or cheese scones amongst the iconic architecture of the University Library? The catering andthe architecture of the two institutions may be like chalk and cheese, but both CARET and the Library share a preoccupation with the ways in which new technologies can support the work of the University.

That’s why CARET was delighted when Harriet Truscott, who’s been working as Lead Researcher on the CourseTools project for the last year, was awarded an Arcadia Fellowship. She’s now leaving behind the cappuccino machine for a while, to take up residence amongst rare books and high-tech IT projects at the University Library.

The Arcadia Programme is a three-year programme exploring the role of academic libraries in a digital age, and creating new programmes and services, in particular

for our undergraduates. Talented people from across the UK were invited to apply for Fellowships at the University Library, with past Fellows researching topics from, the role of reading lists to the scholarly opportunities offered by digital ‘mash-ups’. Harriet will be researching the potential impact of storing past exam papers in an entirely digital format. This would allow college libraries to do away with the need to bind and store large numbers of exam papers each year, and allow students to access past exam papers easily for revision during vacations.

“It sounds like a ridiculously simple problem, but when you look into it, there’s been surprisingly little research into how students can best use past papers to revise,” Harriet explained. “I’m hoping to have a couple of prototypes of alternativesready by the Lent vacation, so that students can try them out and have their say on what’s most useful to them.”

However, thinking back to her student days, Harriet does have one concernover her new home: “I’m sure the cheese scones used to be twice the size.”

Anne is a talented and thoughtful developer. Her main goal is to make software which is easy to use and has a clear purpose. She came to CARET after a spell away from work raising her children, whilst volunteering at Aptivate – a non profit organisation which develops IT services to aid International development. In the past she’d worked in IT for Reuters on stock exchange feeds and also spent time in the USA building software for companies distributing baby clothes and for a wine warehouse. She’s also worked at Coutts bank, and spent time above a funeral parlour (spooky!) while working for a London based software company.

Anne enjoys visiting National Trust properties in her spare time, dabbling in a little watercolour painting and gardening. Most impressive is the amazing igloo she built in her back garden!

Following the success of the reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost last year, the English Faculty celebrated the bicentenary of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s birth with readings of his poems. CARET’s Pete Cook was on hand all day to record the performances of members of the English Faculty, which was streamed live on the 23rd of October.

If you missed the live event, or you’d like to listen again to your favourite poems you can find podcasts of all the performances at www.english.cam.ac.uk/tennyson/index.htm

CORRAL is funded by JISC, lead by Dennis Wheeler, and includes the University of Sunderland, the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, and the British Atmospheric Data Centre.

Maintaining one’s profile is an important activity, but one which can be very tedious. We’re hoping to make things simpler, by adding some automatic help in the area of a scholarly profile that gets out of date the quickest: the publications list. CARET is working with the University Library and Symplectic Ltd to create a scholarly networking platform, inside our Sakai-based virtual research environment CamTools, to support researchers sharing their profiles, connecting with others and driving new collaborations. We will enable academics to upload a new paper, and automatically have it placed in the institutional repository and added to their online profile, and also use information about the paper to recommend new connections within the network.

This project fits nicely alongside, and following on from, our Academic Networking study. It’s also linked to our work for the American Academy of Religion, which looks at the scholarly network from the point of view of the discipline and learned society (whereas ConnectedWorks studies the institutional angle).

He first joined us as an Erasmus student from Howest University, at the same time as his colleague Simon. Joining CARET provided him with the ideal first step in his career – ‘I have the chance to work on many different projects and with different clients, to learn new [programming] languages and to interact with so many talented people’. He was encouraged to come back to CARET full time as most other jobs in his area require programmers to limit themselves to one programming language and one task. At CARET he says ‘You are given a wide range of opportunities, I love that decisions are open to discussion and that I have responsibility and the opportunity to learn through experience’

Christian’s first foray into web design was aged 11, when he helped a teacher to design a website for his school. He admits it was slow, clunky and not very pretty, but teachers, pupils and parents loved it. This spurred him on and throughout high school he taught himself CSS and HTML, deciding that he would go to college to study Web Technology

Christian is an experienced sailor and started aged 13. He spent the summer of 2009 teaching people to sail catamarans. He really loved seeing other people experience sailing for the first time, and noticed that some have an innate ability – a feel for the water, the wind and the boat. There are few places Christian would rather be than relaxing on the open water in a boat, quiet and calm. He says it’s difficult to describe the feeling of sailing for the first time, but once you’ve tried it it’s impossible to stop.

During the redevelopment of the CARET website we had time to take stock and look back at past projects. Remembering successful projects and happy clients made us feel proud of our department and our colleagues. We found ourselves thinking that there must be some way to share this feeling with the rest of our colleagues. Too often, pressure of work prevents us from pausing to celebrate our triumphs, and instead we can only stop to fix problems that have come up, missing out on the wonderful things we’ve achieved.

We decided on a simple solution, naming one of the cupboards in our kitchen ‘The Cupboard of Success’. We encourage people to stick up post it notes detailing their successes large or small, or praising one of their colleagues. This little corner of CARET is devoted to blowing out own trumpet and it fills up quickly. It encourages us to focus on the positive aspects of our work from Ian and Nicolaas both being awarded Sakai Fellowships, to the growing popularity of CamTools across the University. Smaller achievements are also welcomed, Dan survived a day talking about metadata this month and Rhiannon shared her Maltesers in August.

When project deadlines loom and inboxes are overflowing, a few moments to reflect on our successes can really spur us on.

Working on the Academic Networking project was a great start for Oszkar, along with Tjhien he worked with Flow Interactive several months developing ways to bring commercial practices of user centred design to higher education. Oszkar also contributes to the front end workings and design of Sakai. As well as his formal work in CARET Oszkar also took on the role of mentor to many of our summer students and helped to make their experience at CARET much richer.

Prior to working at CARET Oszkar lived and worked in London producing language learning materials; his company also worked on non-profit resources for Africa. This philanthropic streak continued when Oszkar and some of his colleagues set up Mayamiko. The charity aims to help African women by building a cotton factory and teaching them sewing and weaving skills. They also plan to set up a nursery beside the factory allowing women the freedom to work outside the home and create a sustainable income for themselves and their families.

Oszkar describes himself as the biggest AC/DC fan on earth, he plays guitar and is interested in the arts. He also makes an incredible Gulyás.

He continues to work on the development of the Sakai 3 Kernel, and will help out with some of the user facing functionality. He’s also part of the team working on Grapple, a European wide project creating an adaptive learning environment which is continually improved through analysing the way students use the tools. Simon works mainly in Java but is looking forward to learning new skills at CARET, and gaining a broader sense of his discipline.

In his break between carefree student and CARET employee Simon cycled the 600km of the North Sea cycle route from his home in Belgium to the border of Denmark . He hopes to complete the British side of the path, from Felixtowe to John O’Groats while he’s in the UK – though perhaps not all at once! Apart from cycling Simon enjoys relaxing after work with a beer (preferably something Belgian), going to the cinema and attempting to play badminton.

Amyas also enjoyed the challenges of mentoring a Google Summer of Code student (based on another continent) in 2009.
He has a PhD in Engineering which focused on semiconductor lasers and their use in telecoms technology. He’s also a Science and Engineering Ambassador,  in this role he concentrates on electronic engineering and decarbonisation. Amyas used to work for Alertme.com where he ran lots of market/user/technology analysis, designed user interactions and looked after IP. He enjoys coding, but wouldn’t describe himself as ‘major league’. Amyas is an all rounder, who contributes to many aspects of CARET’s work. He is always keen to lend a helping hand, especially to our summer students.

In his spare time (what spare time?) Amyas enjoys rowing and is a member of Rob Roy and Darwin. He plays go, is an amateur astronomer and makes fantastic marmalade!

The Sakai project is a collaborative open source project, providing a management system for courses that is used by over 160 educational institutions worldwide, used to manage research collaborations as well as day to day teaching. Sakai forms the basis of CamTools.

Only six fellowships are awarded each year and so it is a particular honour to be singled out by the community for such praise. CARET of course is incredibly proud that our colleagues have received this distinction.

Here are some short videos of Nicolaas and Ian, recorded after they were awarded their fellowships.

Every day she responds to queries from our users via email. Each email is
carefully logged so that issues can be tracked  and used to help update our
documentation and online faqs, making using CamTools even easier to use!

Before joining CARET she worked for Central Administration at the University and has also worked on the EPIC Norfolk cancer research project, tracking the day to day lives of thousands of volunteers to discover links between disease and lifestyle.

Not content with having an undergraduate degree in Anglo Saxon Norse and
Celtic and a research post grad in Ecclesiastical History, Verity is now
studying Computing and Mathmatical Sciences with the Open University! She has a complete and detailed knowledge of an incredible amount of subjects and keeps us entertained with stories of Irish round towers, obscure University ordinances, historical nautical novels , in fact Verity seems to know something about almost any topic you care to mention.

When she’s not working or studying Verity loves to escape with her fiance on
holidays by train. While researching her degree she travelled all over Europe
by train, highlights include scary tiny mountain railways in Switzerland and
pootling along slowly in rural France. Her top rated journey is the overnight
sleeper from Paris to Rome – in first class of course!

A lot of Tony’s free time is spent working for the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) who are dedicated to providing open source software and nurturing the talent of those writing it. Currently Tony is doing a lot of infastructure work for them but he’s also a member of the HTTPD PMC, and is an ASF member. He does manage to tear himself away from his MacBook to go shoot some photos, clay pigeon shooting, plays the drums and teach others.  Tony lives in Waterbeach and has swapped his London commute for a 14 mile cycle ride…

The articles,‘ Web 2.0: Creating a customised online library using Connotea’ and ‘Web 2.0: Bringing lecture notes to life using a wiki tool’ are part of a series of case studies published by the HEA Centre for Bioscience. The Centre provides resources written by bioscience practioners to help support teaching and learning in higher education in the UK.

Despite his love of research and teaching, Will’s never forgotten his roots in the commercial sector, and was a finalist in the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs’ Business Plan Competition, with “The Idea Belt”, a company to sell innovation management software to mid-sized companies. Rumour has it that Will was also seen at CUE’s Tigers of Tomorrow, taking The Intelligent Book out to the commercial learning sector.

Will left CARET in 2009, taking up a prestigious new post back in Brisbane.

Apart from being great fun, Virtual Anatomy explored how the medium of 3D could be used to create novel resources for anatomy education. Rather than promoting interaction through inspection – the model in which a virtual object is rotated and magnified – the Virtual Anatomy team considered the potential for immersion and interactivity. Through this model, they hoped to actively engage students with the complex spatial features and relationships involved in anatomical knowledge.

The research concentrated on developing a prototype system, using a simple model of the digestive system and the Zanzarah game engine, kindly donated by Funatics Development. Key research questions included “What types of interaction, navigation and games-like engagement might be educationally valuable?”, and “How does spatial knowledge gained in such virtual environments translate into the real world?”

Molstruc is designed to be sufficiently generic that it can be used in other Triposes, including parts of the Medical and Veterinary Science Tripos and the Engineering Tripos. People interested in using it in their courses should contact the CamTools helpdesk.

Led by Harriet Truscott, CARET researched the students’ behaviour and needs in detail. One of the first findings was that the students often didn’t realise how much they didn’t understand. Simply carrying out an exercise known as ‘glossing’ (explaining the meaning of key phrases) transformed the students’ awareness, both of the play itself and of their own learning needs. Accordingly, CARET designed a tool, Exegesis, to support students in glossing, but also recommended that the Faculty should hold a lecture to explain the role of glossing in understanding Renaissance literature. (It’s proof of how well the research identified students’ needs that the first ‘glossing’ lecture was besieged by eager students, with people having to be turned away.)

Since the Faculty’s teaching budget was limited, it was important that the tool did not take up more than a designated amount of teaching officers’ time. Exegesis was designed to allow students to collaborate and learn from each other: students can either share their own work and in exchagne see that of other students, or keep their work private and not see others’ work. “Glossing isn’t about getting the right answers, but instead about understanding what a good gloss is and how to get to that point. By looking at each others’ glosses, students quickly realise what makes a good gloss and what is inadequate, and can work on improving their own skills,” says Harriet.

Other Faculties wishing to use the Exegesis tool should contact Harriet Truscott for more information.

Designed through collaboration between teachers, pupils and Cambridge University English Faculty, Converse inspires young people’s imaginations and introduces them to some of the world’s most wonderful writing. From Shakespeare’s insults, to playing variant-texts

“We believe there’s no need for a trade-off between ‘intellectual’ and ‘fun,’” said Harriet Truscott, the Project Lead. “We think that stretching your brain, finding new ways of thinking, and experiencing those ‘aha!’ moments are huge fun, but they’re also what learning and school is all about.” Harriet was determined to create resources that supported learning in its broadest sense, having seen too much ‘educational’ software which constricts learning to what a computer can measure. “I think it’s important to recognise that often, these resources will be used in a classroom context, and that they should support that, rather than fighting against it. A lot of the Converse resources are designed as starting points for pair-work and classroom discussion. Over the course of the project, we visited huge numbers of schools across the country, and watched how they used our resources in practice. Then, we went back and changed the things that didn’t work in practice, and kept the features that did.”

Does Harriet have a particular favourite resource? “Definitely! My Masters thesis was on the importance of textual variants, and I love one Wilfred Owen resource, which encourages students to consider the different words that Owen experimented with in his famous poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum’. It just shows how high-quality intellectual materials can create a stimulating and thought-provoking classroom activity.”

The project was developed in close collaboration with Newman School in Rotherham, a specialist school for children with a wide variety of different learning needs, including emotional difficulties and physical disabilities. Their input shaped a website with a broad appeal, from passionate writers to some very reluctant readers!

The Rotherham teenagers were particularly proud to personally present their work to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, during her visit to the University of Cambridge.

Both the University of Cambridge and MIT have distinctive educational characters. Part of the goal for TfLN was to determine what specific practices and approaches to teaching and learning contribute to these – while at the same time seeking to identify areas of commonality across the two institutions and higher education as a whole.

TfLN provided support for faculties, departments and other groups in undertaking research and development projects with a specific focus of improving teaching and learning. The project generated and shared theoretical and practical knowledge about pedagogical practices and the conditions that promote their use in support of students’ learning.

The project produced a series of papers and briefings, and an online research methods toolkit for others to use. The Plant Sciences project within TFLN was awarded the BERA/SAGE award for the most outstanding ‘Research into Practice’ project in post-compulsory education in 2007. With the recruitment of several members of the Plant Sciences team to work at CARET, the framed award certificate, too, has come to CARET and would be hung on the wall in the Evaluation Group’s working area, except that the walls are too hard to bang nails in.

We’re looking for people to join in a 90-minute group workshop and a 90-minute individual interview. You’ll also keep a diary about your life for five days. (The study is taking place between Tues 13th Jan and Thurs 22nd Jan) In exchange for this, we’re offering £30 of book vouchers. We hope you’ll find the research fun and thought-provoking, but we don’t want to tell you too much about it in advance in case we bias your thinking.

We’re trying to get a representative group of people, so we’re asking lots of people to express interest, and we’ll then select a group for the study who we think reflect a good range of the type of people doing graduate study and research at Cambridge.

To express an interest, please follow this link and fill in the brief questionnaire about yourself: research study survey.

Corinne believes passionately that students should be supported in developing the writing practices that they need for their academic careers: “Although it’s academic writing, it’s also very personal for students – their identity is bound up in their writing.” She first came to see this when Director of the Academic Writing Centre at Bilkent University, in Ankara, Turkey. In addition to her teaching, and directorial responsibilities there, Corinne began a PhD on academic second-language writing, researching how international postgrads constructed an identity as an academic writer in English. Returning to England and pausing briefly to have three children, Corinne completed her PhD and moved to Cambridge. Now working on the Transkills project, Corinne works one day a week at Centre for Personal and Professional Development and the rest of the time is seconded to CARET, a way of working that she’s finding very stimulating.

Matthew’s work at SASRI was focussed on the development of sugarcane crop simulation models for research and application and decision-support programs for various stakeholders in the SA sugarcane industry. This involved quite a lot of Fortran coding, data analysis, database development, web programming, scientific writing and a pleasing amount of tramping through fields of sugarcane. Prior to this, he worked as web server programmer, assisting with the development of a Content Management System called ‘Angazi’, which is loosely translated from isiZulu as “I don’t know”. He has experience of applying reasonably established technologies in resource-contrained environments, in ways sensitive to institutional needs and conventions. Matthew is looking forward to increasing his knowledge of emerging technologies while maintaining a pragmatic approach to all aspects of his work at CARET.

However, Dan is modest about his role, part of his programming philosophy being that computer programming should be the easy part of a project. He regrets the change in educational software that he’s seen over his lifetime: “The really good education software was written in the day when it was written by teachers. It was closer to the teacher’s educational aims, although perhaps the graphics weren’t pretty!” Dan hopes to reverse this trend in software projects and return the programming power to the subject expert. “After all”, Dan says “it’s often easier to teach programming and design to the specialist than to teach the specialism to the software developer.” As such, he’s working on a number of projects which aim to allow the specialist to take charge, using the tool exactly as they like.

After work, Dan relaxes by writing, and at the cinema and theatre. “I dont have any ambition to publish, which gives me an incredible freedom to try out different things,” he says. ‘Different things’ means everything from short stories to one-act plays, and experimenting with the styles of everyone from Dylan Thomas to Charles Dickens.

And, for those wondering, his profile picture shows him on honeymoon – in Greenland.

Both before and during her many years at CARET, Harriet explored the outer reaches of the teaching technology landscape.

She taught English to senior ranks of the Ukrainian army, in an era when a photocopier was only rumoured to exist somewhere on the other side of Kiev; ran the day to day management for a company which developed state-of-the-art teaching software for primary schools; and reorganized technology-based teaching in a number of large, complex organizations.

At CARET, Harriet developed web-based computer software, but has also printed books using a press little changed from those used by Gutenberg and Caxton.

Her Masters thesis focused on attitudes to the physical embodiment of texts in the pre-print world, drawing parallels to a post-print future.

Harriet’s wide ranging experience in teaching technologies left her with a subtle and careful grasp of the potential role of technology in teaching. More than a simple matter of degree, or of merely choosing one medium over another, Harriet keenly observes the interaction between technologies and the classroom, lecture theatre, or laboratory.

Another focus of Harriet’s work at CARET concerned people’s expectations of technologies: where they can intervene to help improve their teaching and learning, and where they may be more of a hindrance than a help.

Harriet took the role of creative lead at CARET, combining keen design and writing skills with a person-centered outlook, and an aptitude for programming and software development. However, she feels success is most easily achieved by bringing experts on board early within a project. In Lent 2010, Harriet was awarded an Arcadia Fellowship at the University Library and Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Harriet is a keen gardener, and when not designing her own contemporary-style garden, volunteers for the National Trust restoring historic gardens.

She is evaluating repositories and finding new ways to interact with the wealth of information available online. She believes we can make better use of current resources by making them more accessible and by designing systems that retrieve more valuable information.

Last year Agustina went on cruises in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, she loves travelling and discovering new places.

Her main focus is on how people go about the process of learning and how organisations affect this process. At the root of all this research is a desire to empower those being researched; after all they are the ones who will reap the benefits of the outcomes.

Helen is an experienced taxidermist, a keen gardener and enjoys surfing, albeit not very well.

Guy then moved to join us at CARET, respecting the University’s mission of research and education. Guy’s patience, cheerfulness and willingness to help made him a well-loved member of the team from the start. It’s not surprising that Guy has a deep interest in ‘green’ computing and champions energy efficiency within CARET, regularly encouraging his colleagues to play their part cutting the University’s energy consumption.

You can’t know Guy for long without realising his great passion: juggling. Guy attends juggling conventions across Europe and makes regular appearances juggling with fire at college May Balls. He hopes that one day he will succeed in teaching everyone at CARET to juggle with him.

EGRET explored how small software projects, especially those using new technologies (such as user-generated content, and automatic data sharing through “feeds” of information), can thrive and grow in higher education. EGRET specifically examined the Talks.cam service as a case study, as it matured at Cambridge, and also investigated what user-generated content means for academic IT systems. EGRET has ties to our JISC Academic Networking project, which has identified events, such as academic seminars, as an important aspect of scholarly networking for many academics.

Learn more about Talks.cam here, or have a go with the service yourself here (anyone can use Talks.cam, but it helps if you are based in or visiting Cambridge, UK). If you are interested in the EGRET project itself, have a look at our project blog where we shared some of our activities and also most project outputs, such as reports.

Students seeking work placements can do the same, or contact one of our people directly if there is someone specific you might like to work with.

Jobs at CARET are always posted on jobs.ac.uk – just search for CARET!

Current vacancies

There are no current vacancies at CARET

Stephanie has a number of years’ experience covering a wide range of administrative and marketing activities. Her experience includes office management for a firm of architects, Personal Assistant to directors, and more recently Marketing and Events Co-ordinator at The Generics Group plc, an international technology consulting, development and investment organisation. Stephanie’s professional qualifications include the Royal Society of Arts Diploma for Personal Assistants and the Chartered Institute of Marketing Certificate in Marketing.

In her spare time, she enjoys long walks in the countryside, studying history of art and growing pumpkins.

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If you have any technical problems while browsing our pages, please let us know and we will try to fix it (email webmaster@caret.cam.ac.uk).

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Getting to CARET….

by bus – from Drummer Street bus station

CARET is a brisk 5 minute walk from Cambridge’s main bus station on Drummer Street.

Walk away from the park, along Emmanuel Street towards the NatWest Bank, which is on the corner of Emmanuel and St Andrew’s Street. Continue along St Andrew’s Street, which curves around to the left.

At the traffic lights, take the first turning to the right into Downing Street, which turns into Pembroke Street. Continue until you reach a main intersection (often busy with cars and bicycles turning from and in all directions).

There is a pedestrian crossing around the right corner. Mill Lane is directly across the busy main road, which is Trumpington Street, as you walk up from Pembroke Street.

Entrance to CARET is via the third car park with the ground-level barrier on the right, nearest the river.

Come along to the end of the building and follow it around to the right and you will see the signs.

CARET is on the first floor.

by car – not recommended!

There is no car parking at 16 Mill Lane. Sometimes there are pay-and-display spaces along Trumpington Street.

Alternatively, there is an NCP multi-storey car park on Pembroke Street, which is directly opposite Mill Lane. Turn off to the right into Pembroke Street if you’re coming up Trumpington Street, and to the left if you’re coming from Silver Street.

CARET is on the first floor.

by Park and Ride

There are five Cambridge Park & Ride sites around the outskirts of Cambridge. Park your car at the most appropriate site, then catch a bus into Drummer Street bus station. http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/transport/around/parkandride/

To get to CARET, follow our directions from the bus station.

by train

A bus link runs every 10 minutes from the railway station to the bus station at Drummer Street. If you choose to take the little red and yellow hopper, get off at Drummer Street.

Alternatively, if you would like to walk, it is a brisk 20-minute walk.

1. As you come out of the station, keep walking straight ahead, to the end of Station Road.
2. Turn right onto Hills Road and keep walking towards the town centre until you come to a main intersection with traffic lights, and a church on the left corner and a Lloyds TSB bank obliquely opposite the church.
3. Turn left on to the main road, which is Lensfield Road.
4. Keep walking until you come to a mini but busy roundabout.
5. Turn right onto Trumpington Street and keep walking past the Fitzwilliam Museum on the left, Browns Restaurant on the right, until you come to a busy intersection but no traffic lights.
6. Turn left onto Mill Lane and walk down to the third car park on the right with the ground level barrier.
7. Walk to the end of the building and turn right; you will see the entrance to CARET.

These Collections Management Systems cover every activity and process which a museum undertakes upon the objects in its care: their description and preservation; their location and condition; information for future exhibitions and articles; insurance and origin; and much more.

With this role at the centre of the activities of a museum, and because they often stand in for the objects themselves when decisions are made about the running of a museum, the nature of a museum is profoundly affected by the nature of its collections management system, almost as much as by the nature of the objects themselves.

As their Collections Management System helps define their character and purpose, museums are therefore very particular about the exact form of their collections management system, what information is recorded and how it is represented.

The Collection Space project is funded by the Mellon Foundation to build an open-source collections management system which can be used by a broad range of museums. In collaboration with work at the University of Toronto on user interfaces, and at Unversity of California, Berkeley on databases and enterprise integration, CARET will contribute a key middle component of this new collections management system: the ability to configure and tailor this Collections Management System to match the needs of each museum.

All too often, a museum changes its practices to meet the requirements of their software. Through providing a rich but simple means of configuring the Collections Management System, CARET’s contribution to Collection Space will ensure that, instead, the software can be easily changed by local experts to match the requirements of the museums.

1. Technology is changing rapidly and the long term ‘dominant designs’ that will endure more than 3-5 years are not yet known. It is currently impossible to predict how long this period of rapid change will last.
2. Current Cambridge teaching models (a campus-based curriculum and substantial small-group teaching) are widely regarded as optimal by many researchers in Education. In such a setting, online provision is unlikely to become a major component of mainstream undergraduate learning and teaching for some time. It will be essential to determine which eLearning innovations represent enhancement of a highly regarded system.
3. The application of technology to teaching and learning is expensive. The value of technology in the distance learning setting is clear, but outside that setting it will be important to manage the risks arising from the resource requirements for technology-based innovation.

CARET eLearning strategy objectives:

• The University of Cambridge will be aware of important developments in eLearning around the world.
• The University will be in a position to determine which developments in eLearning may enhance learning and teaching at Cambridge.
• The University will have a mechanism for the acquisition or development of promising eLearning innovations, the evaluation of their impact, and the embedding of successful innovations.

Therefore, CARET will:

• Seek to identify and develop innovations that enhance current learning and teaching practice by making learning and teaching ‘better’ or ‘easier’
• Operate as an innovation unit
• Support R&D with University learning and teaching innovators
  • Incubate services within CARET and transfer successful innovations to established service delivery units
  • Evaluate all innovations in the broad learning and teaching context
• Minimise risk and expenditure by seeking external funding wherever possible

While the current document addresses the deployment of University resources within CARET in support of eLearning, it is not yet a comprehensive eLearning strategy for the University and is in the process of being being developed. If eLearning is defined as

“The use of electronic technology to support, enhance or deliver learning”

then services such as the University Computing Service Public Workstation Facility (which makes commercial software packages available to students), aspects of the Language Centre (blended face-to-face and online course delivery) and many college and departmental initiatives fall within the definition of eLearning. The CARET strategy does not address the resource allocation in support of eLearning for other parts of the University.

As CTO at CARET, Ian has been deeply involved with CamTools and Sakai, as well as other community source projects such as Kuali Student. He is leading development of the new kernel (K2) for Sakai.

Ian is always ready to plan for the big picture, starting work now on the software that will support what he knows University will need in the future. He cares passionately about creating software which is easy to use and does what people want, and loves talking to students about what they want from Sakai.

Ian was awarded one of the first Sakai Fellowships, and speaks regularly at open source conferences and events around the world.

In his spare time, Ian enjoys exploring anything cool and interesting on the web, algorithms, and offshore sailing out of wireless range.

He can really make events look the way he wants, with even stroppy children appearing adoring and attentive!

Staying ahead of the game in learning and research is challenging at the best of times: that’s why we’re here to support you.

Our award-winning team of experts is dedicated to supplying researchers and teaching professionals with best in the latest developments in educational software. Our core services and tools are free to use and we can work with you to develop bespoke projects through funding.

If you work for the University

Anyone at the University of Cambridge engaged in teaching, learning, research and administration can use our services.

We can advise you on different ways to use technology to support your work and share with you some of the latest and best solutions from around the world.

We also provide a range of powerful web tools which are used throughout Cambridge and beyond, including CamTools, our virtual learning and research environment, Talks.cam (for publicising lectures of all kinds), and more. You can use these tools to support your teaching and collaborations. There are also lots of wonderful examples created by other University staff that can inspire and guide you.

Where funding is available, we can also develop tailor-made solutions. For hand-crafted websites, manuscript-based projects, or data wrangling, contact Chris Martin (chris@caret.cam.ac.uk). For ideas related to CamTools, Talks.cam, video and audio services, or social networking, contact John Norman (john@caret.cam.ac.uk). For any other enquiries please email letshelp@caret.cam.ac.uk

If you are already a CamTools user, we would love to hear from you – we are building a CamTools community where users support each other and provide examples of great CamTools sites for new users. If you’d like to join, please email John Norman (john@caret.cam.ac.uk) and let him know how CamTools helps you.

If you work for an organisation who sponsors research or technology development

We work with national and international organisations who fund and support innovative educational technology research and development. CARET takes on contracts focused on developing technologies to support teaching, learning and research, as well as investigating the needs and landscape in these areas. CARET also has a growing group of researchers involved in a wide variety of projects concerned with new technologies in higher education, ranging from needs analysis and evaluation to broader research investigations.

We share everything we learn (as far as possible) in academic papers, blogs, and as robust open source software.

We are always happy to talk to new organisations to discuss projects we could work on together; contact John Norman (john@caret.cam.ac.uk) to find out more.

If you work with a community source project

We’re passionate about community source software, and get involved in a wide range of projects, building sustainable solutions and communities to nurture them. Many CARET staff contribute to mailing lists, speak at conferences and workshops, and upload new software to all kinds of projects, not just higher education applications.

If you are looking for help with CamTools, Talks.cam, or any of our other services

Please go to our support page.

If you’re a student at the University of Cambridge

You might be interested in getting involved. Contact Anne-Sophie De Baets (asd38@caret.cam.ac.uk) if you’d like to help with user testing of our products or user research about how you study.

If you’re still not sure who to contact

If you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for here then please email us at letshelp@caret.cam.ac.uk

Laura manages a range of projects at CARET and is also product manager for CamTools and Talks.cam. She bridges the gap between technology and our clients and users, shaping the development of our key services and products so that they best meet the needs of the University.

In her spare time Laura serves on several committees with her fellow engineers, and campaigns for practical solutions to climate change.

A self-confessed neophile, John combines a passion for innovation and a commitment to open source software with his considerable industry knowledge to help facilitate University collaboration both internally and internationally.

John has led Caret since 2003 following a career as an entrepreneur setting up medical devices companies in the US and across Europe. An engineer by training, John worked in the steel and oil industries (which included a stint in the Algerian Sahara) before moving into business start ups. The most successful of these was Summit Technology Inc which went public at $200Million after just 18 months and later sold to the Alcon division of Nestle for $900Million.

As well as his liking for gadgets and new technology (you should see the cappuccino machine in the office) he is a keen sailor and once competed in the prestigious Fastnet race.

]]> http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/page/john-norman-2/feed 0 http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/page/example-quote http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/page/example-quote#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:55:21 +0000 admin http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/?p=233 CARET have a brilliant coffee machine

We do make sure our projects are supported but it is important to remember that we don’t have a 24/7 helpdesk. We offer email support for everything, and by emailing the appropriate address (see below) you’ll receive the best and fastest response. We have a great many users and projects to support so please bear in mind that when things get busy, we may not be able to respond instantly.

Non-CARET services

Although CARET provide services that have names starting with “Cam”, we don’t make CamSIS, CamGrad, Hermes and many other services here at the University of Cambridge.

• For questions about Raven, Hermes, and more, please contact the University Computing Service.
• For CamSIS and CHRIS and CamGRAD, please contact MISD (Management Information Services Division).

CamTools

For help with CamTools, first try our support pages which are full of useful guides and do check out our videos too. If these pages don’t help you, then you can email our helpdesk at camtoolshelp@admin.cam.ac.uk

If there are features you’d like to see in CamTools, or if you’d like to talk more about how CamTools can support your research or teaching, or are interested in working with us to develop CamTools further, please email camtoolshelp@admin.cam.ac.uk

Talks.cam

The Talks.cam help pages are your first port of call. If you can’t find what you are looking for there, or have suggestions for enhancements to Talks.cam, email webmaster@talks.cam.ac.uk

If you are looking for a Talks service for your university or organisation, or would like to work with us to develop Talks further, please contact helpdesk@caret.cam.ac.uk

Survey Tools

CARET has provided a range of tools over the years to support University surveys of all kinds. At the moment, the only active tool we support is SWIFT, which is part of CamTools. SWIFT replaced the previous online student feedback tool, Ostrakon, and supports both anonymous and authenticated surveys; it’s easy to survey groups of students within a CamTools site.

For help with SWIFT, or any enquiries about making surveys at Cambridge, contact camtoolshelp@admin.cam.ac.uk

CARET holds a university wide licence for Qualtrics. Qualtrics enables users to create their own web-based survey and conduct statistical analysis on the results. CARET has arranged this pilot of Qualtrics service on behalf of the University. If you have any questions about the Qualtrics software, please contact qualtrics@caret.cam.ac.uk

Anything Else

If your issue is not addressed above, please contact our helpdesk on helpdesk@caret.cam.ac.uk

Copyright Info

For information about copyright in the University, including how scanned materials can be used, go to our copyright page.

Get involved

If you are interested in working for CARET, joining us as a visitor or on a student placement, or wish to learn more about any of our activities, please contact Stephanie Saunders (stephanie@caret.cam.ac.uk).

CARET eLearning Strategy

Find out more about the University’s policy.

We design stuff that helps researchers bring their discoveries to light, and we create online learning spaces for lecturers and students. We love working with people who are ahead of the game and making their ideas come alive – it means that together we can push technology forward and then share those tools with the rest of the world. CARET also has a growing group of researchers involved in a wide variety of activities related to new technologies in higher education, ranging from needs analysis and evaluation to broader, externally funded research projects.

Innovation

Basically we are an innovation unit focused on learning and research technologies here at the University of Cambridge. Essentially innovation is a creative process that endeavors to solve problems by exploring a range of ideas and concepts. There are no assurances of success; until discoveries are made how can we know what will work and what will fail? In a world where avoiding risk becomes an obstacle to innovation, it is important to remember that sometimes the greatest risk is to take no risk at all.

At CARET we really care about establishing a creative space where talented people can bring their ideas into being and realise the potential of their discoveries. At all stages of development we use our expertise to work out how best to take things forward, understanding that while some of our projects will become widely used successful products, others may remain thriving in their own little niches. Find out more about what we can do for you.

Open Source

We are committed to the principals of open source software and develop robust applications. We play a leading role in many major international community source projects including Sakai, Fluid, Dspace and OpenCast. We also publish our work in accessible forms, research briefings, books and peer-reviewed research journals.

Awards

We were given a European Schoolnet’s eLearning award in 2005 for the Personal Demons project. The Plant Sciences team supported by CARET won first prize in the SAGE awards for the most outstanding “research into practice” education project in 2007.

General enquiries

Stephanie Saunders
Administrator
Monday – Thursday, 9.30 – 3.30
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 765040

Katy Cherry
Assistant Administrator
Monday – Friday, 9 – 4.30
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 765357

CARET, 1st Floor, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1SB

Fax: 44 (0) 1223 765505

How to find us

Jobs and Work Experience
If you’re interested in working for CARET, or you want to find out about work experience opportunities visit our Opportunities page.

Essentially we are an innovation unit focused on learning and research technologies here at the University of Cambridge. But what does innovation actually mean? Well here at CARET we think it goes something like this…

Innovation is the process of venturing into the unknown, walking down paths untrod by conventional minds. There are no assurances of success, until discoveries are made how can we know what will work and what will fail? In a world where avoiding risk becomes an obstacle to innovation it is important to remember that sometimes the greatest risk is to take no risk at all.

At CARET we endeavour to establish a creative space where talented people can bring their ideas into being and realise the potential of their discoveries. At all stages of development we use our expertise to work out how best to take things forward, understanding that while some of our projects will become widely used successful products, others may remain thriving in their own little niches.

This wonderful resource has been designed for students and scholars of early modern English letters, history, theology, and philosophy–for anyone whose research will embrace original English manuscript sources in this period. Drawing on the rich manuscript holdings of some of the older Cambridge colleges, it presents an extensive archive of manuscript images unparalleled in printed guides and introductions. Joined to this you will find a range of pedagogical materials–transcription conventions, tips on dating, a bibliography and list of links–suitable for beginners, but convenient also for continuing reference.

The idea of using the Mystery Plays as a focus for developing a website for teaching medieval literature and visual culture was conceived by Barry Windeatt, Professor of English in the Faculty; the general conception of the site was then developed in collaboration with Claire Daunton and other colleagues.

The images are mostly of English origin and from the later Middle Ages, with an emphasis on material from East Anglia, one of medieval England’s most dynamic regions. Images have been selected to represent the rich diversity of artistic forms and media, including painting, stained glass, alabaster, textiles, and sculpture. Images were the books of all those who could not read in the Middle Ages, and through ‘Medieval Imaginations’ you can reconstruct something of the visual culture that once surrounded medieval people and gave meaning to their world.

Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn have changed the way we use the internet. Any individual can have an online presence, share resources, meet like-minded people and keep in touch with friends. Increasingly researchers have started to make use of social networking sites to support communication and collaboration, and we’re also looking into how social applications can help students learn. We know that a key part of the university experience is meeting and connecting with new people, and we believe that we can nurture and enhance these real relationships with online social tools.

Demos, a British think tank, has published findings that show bosses should not stop their staff using social networking sites because they could actually benefit their firms. So the next time you’re updating your profile and your manager walks past, there’s no need to quickly switch to that Excel spreadsheet!

We call the idea of academic systems which connect people “scholarly networking,” to highlight the differences with consumer social networks.  We focus on the benefits to academics and students, and are investigating the various ways in which scholarly networking is coming into being – oriented around universities and departments, or around disciplines, hosted in academia or in the commercial sector or elsewhere, and so on.  Dr. Laura James spoke at the Arcadia Programme seminar in April 2009 on this topic, and you can listen to the podcast here. CARET is working on a range of projects connected to scholarly networking – here are some highlights.

For researchers starting out in their careers across many universities

One of our projects seeks to identify and draw together the aspects of these tools that prove most useful to researchers in education. We are focusing on those researchers in their early careers in particular, when the building of networks of colleagues is initiated. The findings will lead to the development of new software and applications to enhance the existing TLRP-BERA virtual research environment.

If you’d like to get involved in the project you can sign up to be a beta-tester and take part in discussions on the TLRP site: http://groups.tlrp.org

To support teaching and learning at Cambridge

Another team at CARET are busily investigating how students and staff at Cambridge communicate about their work and study. We hope to identify areas where more support – from social applications – can help, and to build those into CamTools over the next 18 months.

Read more about the JISC Academic Networking project here.

For some years, research projects within the ESRC’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) have been offered a helping hand with these tasks (and many more) by their Virtual Research Environment (VRE). From the start, they’ve been supported by a CARET team, researching their needs and designing software to help.

Four years on, researchers are using the VRE to support project management, communication and engagement with research participants. Teams collect, store and analyse qualitative and quantitative data, take part in collaborative drafting and writing, and publicise project activities using news and email tools. Groups of researchers have established ‘worksites’, working together on collaborative writing tasks such as producing conference papers, drafting responses to consultation and preparing research proposals. Meanwhile, some seminar series use the VRE to allow online collaboration between face to face meetings.

For other groups and networks, the VRE has become a communications hub: members rarely ‘log in’ but administrators can use the browser-based tools to manage email lists, make announcements to members, and offer access to documents.

From being a simple ‘helping hand’, TLRP researchers have taken their VRE further, using it as the foundation for innovative research designs. Through the VRE, research participants can engage anonymously or pseudonymously in online discussions, and it has also been used as part of a pilot evaluation of innovative online consultation processes. This has allowed researchers to explore new patterns of research engagement, associated ethical issues and ‘mixed methods’ research approaches in which digital data is analysed alongside those collected ‘face-to-face’.

Along with the TLRP’s DSpace Digital Repository (http://www.tlrp.org/dspace), which contains over 1200 research publications and other project outputs, the VRE has been an integral part of this major research programme.

To find out more, and to see the VRE in action, go to http://groups.tlrp.org/

The ‘Transforming Perspectives’ project (the name was selected to represent both the ‘threshold concept’ and their potential impact) was an ESRC/EPSRC funded project which sought to explore what these concepts might be, how they are currently taught and learned, and how new technologies might support learners in understanding them. A project team at CARET worked with an interdisciplinary group of teachers and learners to develop case studies of threshold concepts in ten varied disciplinary settings ranging from theology to sports science and engineering to english literature. This allowed a review of the nature and role of the concepts, which were seen to have a significant role in defining disciplinary identities – they were part of the expert ‘way of thinking’.

The work of the project helped formulate the ideas and approaches which were to feed into our current “Ensemble: Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case Based Learning” project – which is contining the exploration of what is troublesome, controversial and contested in different subject areas.

The Course Tools project  supports University lecturers and administrative staff in creating and updating courses, creating administrative tools to allow fast and flexible access to course information and planning.

In our pathfinder project with the Natural Science Tripos, lecturers and administrators are currently working with project members to choose the areas they feel will benefit most from the introduction of software.

Between 2009 and 2013, the project will develop tools which will ultimately be available for use across the University.

All members of the University are very warmly invited to contribute their suggestions for aspects of development and reviewing courses for the project team to investigate. To make suggestions, please contact Dr Amyas Phillips (amyas.phillips@caret.cam.ac.uk).

Over the course of the project, we will explore the potential benefits of administrative software tools to University members, and investigate the drawbacks.  Our research methodology is designed to take account not only of technical implementation issues but also of complexities of the institutional settings and the pedagogic process.

As part of the project, we will evaluate the potential of Kuali Student, a student information system designed by a number of Universities in collaboration, to meet the needs of Cambridge staff and students.

The project is funded by JISC.

JISC supports UK further & higher education and research by
providing leadership in the use of Information and Communications
Technology in support of learning, teaching, research and
administration. JISC receives funding from all the UK further and
higher education funding councils.

Jenny Koenig applied for a Technology and Teaching Award to support this work and although her application was unsuccessful, CARET encouraged Jenny to persist. We were able to point out some drivers behind eLearning technologies, which helped Jenny and the faculty understand the benefits to them. CARET also broke down the barriers to adopting new tools, with accessible information and a strong ability to understand and relate to the problems that the students were having, and the ways in which the University needed to address them.

Jenny worked with CARET staff over a period of time, learning about and experimenting with different educational technology tools and methods. Some tools simply weren’t suitable, because they required too much technical ability, or were too expensive or labour intensive, but eventually we lit upon Camtasia, which was just right for Jenny. She was able to develop her own style of teaching using Camtasia, and later on when she wanted to add practice questions, CARET suggested CourseGenie, which fitted in too.

“having people to ask, who provided answers and encouraged me to actually use eLearning, was vital!” Jenny Koenig

CARET are delighted to have helped Jenny with her project, and that she has been able to take her teaching forward herself. Jenny stays in close touch with CARET and we look forward to empowering her, and others, in the future.

Sakai has taken shape as a software suite ready for any University to customise it, adding in precisely the tools that meet their members’ needs. At Cambridge, the Sakai software is best known as our customised version, CamTools (although we host other Sakai installations too). From the University of Cape Town, we’ve borrowed a plagiarism detection module; from the Universidad Fernando Pessoa in Portugal a tool to allow lecturers to check how often students are downloading their lecture handouts. “We’ve found it inspiring to see so many Universities freely exchanging the tools they’ve developed,” said CARET’s Harriet Truscott, one of the team responsible for customising Sakai for Cambridge’s needs. “This type of collaborative software can cut costs substantially, but the world of new teaching ideas it’s opened up to us is perhaps even more important.”

Cambridge is actively driving development of the latest parts of Sakai, in both the “K2” project to deliver a new back end engine for Sakai, and also the Sakai 3 user experience which includes social networking and more. With the re-election of our director, John Norman, to the Sakai Foundation Board, we look forward to continuing to push forward the boundaries of collaboration and learning systems for higher education within the Sakai community.

Academic networking will support and enhance the connections between people that are one of the key aspects of life and work at Cambridge.

Our new tools for content creation will give all our users the ability to create beautiful and rich content, whether it is to share with site members or the whole world, and to include “active” items such as polls, videos, and more.

CARET is truly at the forefront of Sakai development this year, and is collaborating with others in the Sakai community to develop Sakai 3 – we’ll be one of the first to get Sakai 3 into production for our users at the University of Cambridge, so this is a really exciting time for us all.

We’ll be sharing much more about this project as it develops, including examples of how you might use it to support your teaching, learning or research. Watch this space!

Get involved

If you would like to take part in testing to help our development of next generation CamTools, contact Laura James (laura@caret.cam.ac.uk).

If you would like to see a demonstration of what is coming in next generation CamTools, contact John Norman (john@caret.cam.ac.uk) or  Laura James (laura@caret.cam.ac.uk).

The  University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and the Open University came together in the JISC-funded Steeple project, which aimed to make it easier for University members to share and find videos online, create and disseminate podcasts and to look at the institutional changes necessary for this to happen. The project found that there is no catch- all solution for these changes but have built a strong and active community sharing best practices and processes.

The final executive summary shares the projects outcomes and resources on managing institutional change, institutional podcasting, distribution portals and infastructure needs as well as links to community support.

CARET is supporting Steeple with research and documentation of current processes and systems on the Steeple wiki through the Benefits Realisation extension project (lead by Dr Bjoern Hassler) which is taking the outputs of Steeple to other universities around the UK, and exploring ways in which this kind of system can be sustained.  In addition, we are working with the University Computing Service and the Office of External Affairs and Communications to create the Steeple portal, a user-friendly showcase for public video and audio content, which will be used at the University of Cambridge from early 2010.

We all understand the need for organization, and we have a pretty good idea who it is that keeps our groups in good shape, ready for its vital tasks: the overworked departmental administrator; the dedicated committee chair; the ingenious laboratory technician. How rarely central administration and institutional IT seem to feature in that list! So how can the University hope to genuinely reduce the workload of these vital departmental staff?

A few years ago, the orthodox solution would be to embark upon an investigative exercise of questionnaires and interviews, followed by feverish tool making, and culminating in the presentation of a finished artefact to the University. An enlightened project manager may have repeated this process a few times, hoping that the tool will improve with each iteration.

At CARET we have started to explore an innovative approach to solving these age-old problems. We noticed that, from time-to-time, some departmental organisers with the appropriate skills find some time to work on administrative tools of their own. These tools, where they exist, usually meet the needs of their department much more closely than anything brought in from outside. Where such home-grown tools exist, could they be of use to another department? Is it possible that with just a few simple changes we could widen the application of these tools without reducing their precision? That’s what we set out to discover.

A while ago, Richard Prager at Cambridge University Engineering Department addressed the thorny issue of the fair allocation of teaching with a custom tool. Through the use of weightings, Richard uses this tool to compare each academic’s teaching activity.

With the increase of modular courses, allocating students to appropriate exams consumes ever more effort. With Rachael Padman, we have worked on creating a tool for the Cavendish Laboratory which helps students register for exams.

CARET, Engineering, and the Cavendish Laboratory have taken these two hand-crafted tools, and experimented with ways to broaden their usefulness.  At the Cavendish, our work has initiated a review and possible extension of CamSIS by MISD to provide new exam entry options for the whole University.  The Judge Business School, Veterinary Medicine, Divinity, Mineral and Materials Science, Chemistry, Biochemistry, English and other departments have all trialled an individually-customised system for administering teaching allocations. Their reaction and enthusiasm has been overwhelmingly positive.

The project is now complete but CARET will continue to assess whether this federated approach could develop into a genuinely grass-roots approach to University administration, and whether it could be used again for future IT projects. We have also found that the prototype systems created by academics can be interpreted as powerful specifications for the systems they really need.

The final report of the project will shortly be available from the JISC project website.

As well as various articles on the project blog, we have produced two white papers detailing the principles of an innovative ‘trunkless’ model of software development

The Trunkless Development Model

Principles of Simple Software Development

The real power of Talks.cam is syndication: bringing the talks to people who want to attend them. When you make an account on Talks.cam (and anyone can – it’s open to all), you create a list of talks you are interested in. This could include one or two individual talks which you find by searching for the speakers you enjoy, or lists of seminar series which you have an interest in (whether a research group’s weekly discussions, or a set of evening public lectures on a popular topic). It might even include the talks list of a friend. Simply select how you want to hear about these talks – displayed in your calendar, as a webpage you can bookmark, or an email reminder before each event – and it will happen. You can also use Talks.cam within another webpage (for instance, that of a department or society) as a simple way of keeping event information up-to-date.

Talks.cam has grown hugely since then, with users contributing their ideas and developers making them real. Over 10,000 talks are listed, with over 1000 of them in the future.

Talks is now a CARET service and is used widely in the University of Cambridge and beyond. The EGRET project supported the creation of new features for Talks.cam, and helped it become part of the University of Cambridge infrastructure.

Get involved

If you are interested in helping support Talks.cam, or getting a Talks service for your own university or organisation, please contact Laura James.

Fran currently works as a Research Associate on the Ensemble project (Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case Based Learning) .

Her practical and philosophical approach to research extends into her interest in technology. It’s important to translate the results of research into real solutions for students and staff.Fran has a particular interest in the dynamics of small group teaching, and in particular the supervision system that is so unique to Cambridge.

When not in the office, Fran can be found on her allotment tending vegetables and sporting a pair of her vast collection of wellies.

Fran blogs at http://www.francestracy.co.uk/

He is most proud of his work supporting VRE’s, previously with Coursework and now with CamTools. As the numbers of users on Camtools increases Daniel maintains the stability of our service to the University.

Daniel has a degree in Computer Science from Cambridge University and is a graduate of Gonville and Caius College. He is an amazing trombone player, and has performed at the Royal Albert Hall.

We tempted him away from Google where he was a search engine specialist; with the promise of a job that would allow him to explore his passion for Computer/Human Interaction. Tjhien first encountered CHI during his degree in Industrial Design at Delft University of Technology. It was at about the same time that little computer panels became ubiquitous on everyday objects and the internet was reaching out into our homes at an exponential rate. Tjhien realised that this was where the future lay for him.

On an ideal day, several weeks worth of diagrams and notes suddenly coalesce, and as Tjhien himself puts it ‘a bolt of lightning hits you and you suddenly realise how simple the solution is’. CHI is still a relatively unexploited field and we are proud to have Tjhien as our own intrepid explorer.

Katy earned a Masters in Plant Pathology at Imperial College London before moving to Plant Sciences where she worked on an award winning pedagogical project, focusing on using research to develop online tools to compliment teaching and learning within the department.

She’s an expert on antiques, and if you ever need to find her in the office just head for the orchids!

]]> http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/page/katy-jordan/feed 0 http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/page/anne-sophie-de-baets http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/page/anne-sophie-de-baets#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:58:49 +0000 caret http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/?p=80 Anne-Sophie has always believed passionately that education can transform children’s lives, and looking around her, she saw plenty of children who needed this help. So it was no surprise to her friends and family when she decided to study for a BA in Education at the Artevelde University, in her native Belgium, where she specialised in primary-years education. Very soon, Anne-Sophie started to notice the discrepancy between what was happening in Belgian classrooms and the multimedia tools Belgian technology companies were creating. “During my degree we considered a few aspects of using technology in the classroom”, said Anne-Sophie, “but even now, I don’t think that technology-enhanced learning is used as well as it should be in many schools. In fact, in Britain they even use technologies we don’t know at all in Belgian schools, like the interactive whiteboards.” Anne-Sophie believes that technology and computers can support a range of learning styles and different educational needs in the classroom, as well as having a huge motivating factor. At the same time, she’s concerned about the potential for social exclusion that using high-tech equipment in learning can create. “You can’t force parents to buy a computer,” she points out, “so there’s a danger that rich children have the best education.”

Hearing about CARET’s pioneering work in the field of technology-enhanced learning, Anne-Sophie decided to take her Education degree in a different direction, and came to join our team of researchers and support staff. She very much enjoys life as an education researcher, where she recognises many of the same issues at Cambridge University that she became aware of in the primary classroom, including disparities in access to expensive technologies. At the same time, she is constantly reflecting on how research methodologies could be taken back into the primary classroom. “Young children need to look at their way of learning at some point, and that can be really hard,” says Anne-Sophie. Because many of the research methodologies Anne-Sophie is working with are about drawing out connections and developing concepts in visual ways, she feels that they could well be used with surprisingly young children. If Anne-Sophie does return to the primary classroom, it’s sure she’ll have a wealth of ideas, experience and research to bring to it.

Fortunately these days Katy is much more at home in front of a computer. She provides administrative support to all of CARET’s staff and is often the first face you see when you walk in the door. She still insists on using a paper diary, much to the consternation of certain staff. If you want to know how the coffee machine works, where the red pens are or why the printer isn’t working then you should ask her. Katy also designs communications material for CARET itself and for individual projects. She organises and runs events of all kinds, and loves to see conference attendees having a good time.

Katy is constantly amazed by the creativity of her colleagues, who are in turn amazed by hers, and seeks to support all CARET projects by providing a fridge full of chocolate as well as a listening ear.

In her spare time, Katy relishes the sense of achievement she gets from making new things, and is deeply involved with the resurgence of the craft movement, knitting, sewing, baking, painting and more.

Anja is based at the Faculty of Education, spending one day a week with us at CARET, and has a gift for explaining the most technically complex situation in language that anyone can understand. She’s always looking out for new ways to use computers in teaching and research, and finds that the Faculty of Education is a rich mine of ideas, which she can bring back into CARET. Anja now spends her CARET day sharing the rich pedagogical strategies she discovers with people across the University, and helping them get the most out of CamTools.

In addition to this, Anja is the University’s Licensing Co-Ordinator for the CLA Scanning licence (which permits multiple copying of published print materials for students on a course). She shares her knowledge via the Scanning information page: any more specific queries should be directed to Anja via the scanning@caret.cam.ac.uk. As Anja is only available one day a week, please allow plenty of time for her to respond to your query!

Patrick has worked as a teacher in every phase of the education system from early years to PhD supervision. He researches professional development and research capacity-building, and in particular the role played by network technologies in supporting research and enabling new research approaches, methods and relationships. He has published widely in these areas and is writing (with Prof Bob McCormick, Alison Fox and Richard Procter) a book on teacher networks for Routledge – this will be published in early 2010.

He is currently convenor of the BERA Special Interest Group on New Technologies in Education and a member of the conference committee for the CAL (Computer Assisted Learning) 2009 conference.

Some Recent Publications

Carmichael, P. (2007) ‘Technological Development, Capacity Building and Knowledge Construction in Education Research’ Technology, Pedagogy and Education 16(3) pp. 235-247

Laterza, V., Carmichael, P., and Procter, R. (2007) ‘The Doubtful Guest? A Virtual Research Environment for Education’ Technology, Pedagogy and Education 16(3) pp. 249-267

Thorpe, M., Kubiak, C., McCormick, R., and Carmichael, P. (2007) ‘Talk in Virtual Contexts: Reflecting on Participation and Online Learning Methods’ Pedagogy, Culture and Society 15(3) pp. 349-366

Carmichael, P. (2008) ‘Secondary Qualitative Analysis with Internet Resources’ in : Blank, G., Fielding, N. and Lee, R. (eds.) The Handbook of Online Research Methods (London: Sage)

Carmichael, P. (2008) ‘The Semantic Web and ‘Web 3.0’ in: Selwyn, N. (ed.) Education 2.0? Designing the web for teaching and learning (London: ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme)

More Information

Patrick’s website (which has more details of his projects and publications) is at: http://www.hiddencities.net

As finance controller, Sara produces figures which help the CARET management team get reports which mean something, whilst still fitting within the rules and regulations of the University of Cambridge. She translates all our projects into numbers, to monitor our finances and keep us on track, and ensures that our clients are happy with our work.

Sara is originally from Portugal, and when she’s not oiling the wheels of CARET’s operations, she spends time with her beloved daughter.

Antranig is constantly seeking to practice and improve his Chinese language skills, and the students who regularly visit CARET from Tsinghua University, Beijing, are often surprised to be greeted at the front door to CARET in Mandarin!

Raymond believes passionately that software should be easy to use and totally reliable: “Software should be a tool that makes your life better, in the background, rather than a focus or a distraction”. When developing a new piece of software Raymond likes to see it through to the very end, he works closely with our operations team to ensure the programmes he builds are easy to implement and maintain.

With his thoroughness and attention to detail, it’s not surprising that he’s worked on so many high-stakes projects for the University in the past. What makes Raymond one of our most valuable team members, though, is his ability to put aside ‘tech speak’ and talk about what people want in plain English. He’s now planning to build on this skill and spend more time designing how the software should work, rather than fixing it when it’s broken!

She currently works on the Transkills project, and brings a wealth of experience from her previous job at Brighton University where her research informed real changes in the provision of training for postgraduate researchers.

Marianne loves performing in pantomime, and is more often than not cast as the principal boy, but she prefers playing the villain!

Aaron’s dedication to open source software earned him a place as one of the original Sakai Foundation fellows. As part of this fellowship Aaron came to work at CARET in 2007; before this he worked at Virginia Tech – also his alma mater – as part of the Learning Technology Team. Aaron’s background in both Business IT and in Computer Science gives him an excellent insight into both the theoretical and practical aspects of his work.

He develops flexible, powerful software that can support the demands of the University.

Aaron is a film afficionado and is extremely impressed by Cambridge’s festivals, when he’s not in the office he’s probably at the Arts Picturehouse!

John has led CARET since 2003 following a career as an entrepreneur setting up medical devices companies in the US and across Europe. An engineer by training, John worked in the steel and oil industries (which included a stint in the Algerian Sahara) before moving into business start ups. The most successful of these was Summit Technology Inc which went public at $200Million after just 18 months and later sold to the Alcon division of Nestle for $900Million.

As well as his like of gadgets and new technology (you should see the cappuccino machine in the office) he is a keen sailor and once competed in the prestigious Fastnet race.

Cambridge’s world-class research and excellent teaching certainly come under Raad’s definition of ‘worthwhile’, which is why he’s been helping Cambridge researchers stay at the head of their field for nearly 10 years. In 2001 Raad designed a pioneering specimen management and review system for a collaboration between Cambridge University and the London Eye Hospital, which gave researchers in different hospitals the ability to examine and discuss pathology slides together over the Internet. Despite the Internet being a much simpler creature back then, Raad created tools which allowed researchers to point out areas of a slide to each other and discuss them in real time. Impressed by the potential of that early system, Raad went on to set up the fledgling CamCommunities system for the University, for use by research collaborations in any discipline. The uptake of the simple CamCommunities system, despite being publicised largely by word-of-mouth, was such that CARET recognised that it was fulfilling a deep need in the University. When CARET took this a step further, and CamCommunities was replaced by CamTools, it’s no surprise that Raad was asked to be one of the team helping University members to get the best out of it, and ensuring the system runs smoothly behind the scenes.

After so many years creating and supporting different research tools, is Raad still as enthusiastic as ever about his work? Definitely. “Active and dynamic places are always exciting to work in, and Cambridge University is certainly that!”, says Raad.

Nicolaas has been involved with learning environments for some time, and first came to CARET as a summer student. Our director, John Norman, asked him to do some “cool stuff” – like a FaceBook application for CamTools – and since then Nicolaas has been at the forefront of CARET’s innovative user interface work, developing new things at a prodigious rate, and sharing what he has built with the wider community. He is now the lead developer at CARET for CamTools and Sakai user interfaces.

Nicolaas co-developed the new user interface for CamTools 2008, and after presenting his work at the Paris Sakai conference in July 2008 has been leading development on the next generation interfaces for CamTools 2009 and Sakai 3. As well as developing himself, Nicolaas has been working on the vision for Sakai 3 and leading 5 developers around the world in front end development for this exciting new system.

He particularly appreciates the freedom to try out new things which CARET provides. Unlike many other universities and departments, CARET has a strong vision of the future which inspires and drives Nicolaas’s work.

Nicolaas has always been interested in language and speech processing, and tries to keep up his tennis and football when he’s not at work. He also relaxes by watching cycling on television, which has a pleasantly hypnotic effect when watched whilst working.

I like working at CARET because it creates an exciting mix of “new things” and “things that are directly useful to people”, sometimes even in one and the same project.

Working with Sakai is hugely rewarding for Nicolaas, and he enjoys engaging with such a bright community of people, who are open to changes and improvements.

This project used user-centric design methods to build a range of social applications for CamTools. Our early explorations to find out how social applications can enhance and support teaching and learning helped us understand that there can be a big overlap with research activity too. We undertook user research with undergraduates, postgraduates and staff at the University to investigate how they communicate and connect with each other today, and synthesised this into design ideas, with help from real user testing, during Spring 2009. We discovered that events, and the social or people-oriented information around them, are important to staff and students alike. We have substantially added to the body of knowledge relating to user-centric design (UCD) practice in UK HE and brought in expertise from the realm of commercial software development.

Early applications will be integrated into next generation CamTools, with further applications following later on. All the software created as part of this project has been released under a community open source licence as part of Sakai.

All our research outputs and our closing summary are available on the Academic Networking blog and our final report is available as a PDF. We’ve published lots of information and practical guides on undertaking user-centric design to help others who may be attempting this for the first time.

Did you know? Over 41% of undergraduates at the University of Cambridge use Facebook several times a day.

We live in an age when we can have at our fingertips the stories of the heroes of such epics. But what we could learn from unravelling the journey of the manuscripts themselves!

The Shahnama Images Project is attempting to achieve just such a feat. To gather together the story of an epic poem as it spread around the world, to capture the explosion of idea which Firdausi wrought upon the world, and to trace the threads of transcription, commerce and artistry as they wind their way through the history of the modern world.

A great deal has been written about The Shahnama, and its pivotal role in the history and identity of historical Persia, modern day Iran, and the Iranian diaspora. No matter where you find yourself in the world, you are never far from a copy of The Shahnama. Shahnamas convalesce in the hum of modern archives; they rot in the humidity of central Africa; they embody the pride and passion of concrete-grey Uzbek and Tajiki institutes; they are cut with razorblades into individual sheets to sell, piece-by-piece, at auctions; they rest on humble shelves in the museums and libraries of Cambridge.

How can such diversity be synthesised? The first aim of The Shahnama Project was for a man with a passion, Professor Charles Melville, to travel the major Shahnama collections of the world, to capture images of Shahnama manuscripts from around the world, concentrating on the manuscript’s exquisite illustrations. Whilst the text remained almost constant, a scribe, artist, or patron’s reaction to the text is captured in its illustrations.

Through extensive international travel, Prof Melville captured thousands of shahnamas, and detailed their structure, origin, condition, and location. These illustrations were then synthesised into a website to allow the casual visitor and serious academic, alike, to discover the shahnamas of the world. Illustrations of the same stanzas from the pages of thousands of manuscripts can be seen simultaneously: giving insight into how an identical subject is interpreted in each culture and age.

It soon became clear, however, that this task was too Herculean for one dedicated academic. If the project was to thrive, it needed a truly co-operative approach to building and nurturing its data. CARET developed a very modern kind of technical artefact for this ancient epic, a distributed computer-based editing and update system based on the world-wide web. Designed to seamlessly allow experts within a museum or library who care for particular manuscripts, to also care for the records of their manuscript, the project had to strike a delicate balance between ease-of-use and academic rigour, elegance and functionality.

This is no half-way house online correction form: museum users have direct access to the database itself, to update it and alter it according to their local knowledge. To achieve this whilst allowing Prof Melville to maintain editorial control required careful thinking and experimentation. Hundreds of updates a week are now carried out by other users, allowing the resource to become a truly community-owned project.

CARET’s work with Prof Melville now concentrates on encouraging scholarly endeavour around the resources: putting the project’s massive bibliographic database online, around and amongst the images; and allowing the creation of lightboxes, presentations, and personal work areas.

Being at the forefront of e-Humanities research isn’t always plain sailing: it requires a commitment to experimentation and innovation which those who have not had close, recent contact with Cambridge University might imagine rare in scholars of a thousand year old poem. But the Shahnama Images Project is fast becoming a beacon for scholars around the world, and a lasting legacy for the project. A thousand years on, ripples from Firdausi’s big idea continue to spread into the challenges of the modern world.

For CARET, the experience of assisting Prof Melville in The Shahnama Project has a number of the key needs for many humanities scholars within the University. CARET are using the experience which we gained on this fascinating project to improve the infrastructure within Cambridge University for handling and discovering scholarly images; for keeping digital information secure and readable for posterity; for representing and manipulating deep scholarly work in the modern, collaborative, globalised world; and for reducing the workload of museums both within the University, and beyond.

In particular, we want to find out what “Web 3.0″ – the semantic web – can bring to this area. The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web, in which the semantics of information on the web are defined, making it easier for both people and computers to find the facts or data they need. It is part of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. We’ll be experimenting with tools that use the semantic web, as well as working out whether there are any theoretical frameworks that can help support these activities.

Ensemble is one of the major projects of the ESRC/EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning Programme and  is by its very nature a collaborative project; CARET is leading teams from five UK universities (the University of Cambridge, City University London, the University of Stirling, the University of East Anglia and the University of Essex), together with project partners at the SIMILE project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Technology, Sydney.

Now, every day over 3,000 University members and their collaborators turn to Camtools to help them in their teaching and research. It’s available to everyone in the University.

For support with CamTools today, please click here.

CamTools is built at CARET on top of a powerful platform called Sakai. We work with other universities around the world (including Yale, Berkeley, Australia National University and many, many others) to design and develop Sakai, and then customise it for use at Cambridge. Sakai is a community source software project, which means that as well as sharing all the source code (as for any open source project), Sakai has a community structure to support and nurture the project, ensuring that it thrives and grows.

As well as supporting people in all kinds of subjects at one university, Sakai and CamTools can be used to connect people in the same discipline across many institutions, around the country or the world. An example of this is the Sakai Virtual Research Environment CARET has built for the UK’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme, where educational researchers can come together regardless of where they work.

We’re developing some great new features for next generation CamTools to let you connect with other CamTools users, as well as designing intuitive tools to help you create and share content online. We’ll have more news about these dynamic developments in 2010.

We’ve also got a page for our staff who have moved on to new challenges, here are our alumni.

At CARET you’ll find space for your ideas and support in the shape of an innovation team dedicated to learning and research technologies, and committed to facilitating collaboration within the University and beyond.