About the Intelligent Book

Metrics

2011-12-14T23:31:00.000-08:00

Just what are students actually studying in your class, and what aren't they looking at? Are they reading your notes? Are they only reading your notes and nothing else? How would you know?

One of the big advantages I'm hoping to provide in the Intelligent Book is that you can discover how and when students are interacting with the course – including how they are interacting with material you didn't write. From this you can get a better sense of how the students are going, and how the course is going.

Using metrics in education has been in the news recently, so this is a fairly timely post.

The first of many interactive charts has gone into the Intelligent Book. Below are a couple of screenshots of charts from an undergraduate Software Studio course. The first shows the stats as a whole; the second is from selecting a particular day. About two-fifths of students' interactions were with pages other than the lecture slides, and an eighth were with external websites.

Finalist in education category, The Australian Innovation Challenge

2011-11-25T11:30:00.001-08:00

If you look on page 14 of today's Weekend Australian (or in the story online), you'll see the Intelligent Book is one of the finalists in the education category of The Australian Innovation Challenge.

A few visitors might come by this site today, so I've added a quick sketch introduction both here and on http://theintelligentbook.com

The course we ran at UQ this semester was on a private server, but soon I'll make a public course available on The Intelligent Book so you can try it out too. Twitter (theintelligentb), Google Plus, or an email to wbillingsley (at) theintelligentbook.com should get you updates on that.

Social Practice Questions (part 1)

2011-10-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

For the software studio course, we've uploaded a set of practice questions for students to look through in their revision. These questions are polls where students have to vote before they can see how others voted, but the live chat runs down the side just the same. This lets students answer the question individually, but it also acts as a prompt for them to discuss their own and others' misconceptions (the different answers people will have made) among the class.

The questions we've uploaded are multiple choice, but there are some more exciting kinds of question we'll be supporting soon. (Hence the "part 1" in the post title.)

Up next, metrics...

Sometimes it's nice just to scroll...

2011-10-21T00:24:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's lecture, at one point I was relating the topic to some code that students have had to work with. In the Intelligent Book, it's fairly easy -- the slides are HTML, so syntax highlighted code on a slide is straightforward, and the fact that even small code samples are usually bigger than the screen isn't an issue because I could just scroll. The students were familiar with the code, and I wasn't scrolling very far, so students getting lost because of the scrolling wasn't going to be an issue.

It was only after the lecture that I realised I'd taken for granted how easy it was. The last time I had to do a presentation with code in it using PowerPoint, it took ages getting the code to fit into a PowerPoint slide in a readable manner.

Not writing slides

2011-10-17T01:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the best material to show isn't your own. Suppose, for instance, you want to give a very short introduction to two competing projects and explain the history of contention between them. Why write slides (a secondary source), when you can take students on a quick tour of what the projects have written about each other (primary sources)?

So, last week, when I wanted to give a quick introduction to what OSGi and OpenJDK's Project Jigsaw (two competing modularity frameworks for Java) were about, and a little bit of the history between them, this is the situation I was in. So, as you can see below the slides for the presentation aren't slides -- the content entries in the presentation are the external web pages, and as you click next it takes you to the next page I wanted to talk about.

Of course, this isn't actually a new feature -- it's just the first talk in the course that's happened to consist almost entirely of a tour of external content.

At first glance of the screenshots, you might think "That text is very small". But because it's a live webpage, actually it works out perfectly well -- while I was presenting and talking about it, I could interact with it using the regular browser or desktop controls. "Cmd +" to make text bigger, drag to highlight text, or as I was presenting on a Mac, press the Control key and scroll the mousewheel to zoom the screen onto a particular bit of text. Showing people around dense text on an external webpage is actually pretty easy, and it means that if students review the presentation at home, they have the full text of what I was talking about right in front of them, not just a slide.

Indexing inside presentations

2011-09-07T04:58:00.000-07:00

I don't know if you've noticed, but slide 1 of any presentation is usually the least useful to a revising student. I don't know a single student who the night before the exam has had a burning need to look at the slide that says "Lecture 3: Version control" in big letters on an otherwise blank slide, rather than say look up the algorithm that's on slide 15 of 40. But if you use most online presentation systems, Boring Slide 1 is the only slide you can get a direct link to.

This is where the Intelligent Book's idea that the lecture presentations are included in the textbook comes in. Each slide in the presentation is turned into a content entry, and that means it can have its own topic that can be different (more fine-grained) than the topic of the presentation as a whole. And that means that from that most traditional of old textbook features -- the alphabetical index -- you can hop straight to the slide on "Longest Common Subsequence", or your favourite algorithm topic. And of course you can page forwards and backwards through the presentation when you get there.

(To be honest, when the course started this semester with the re-jigged version of the Intelligent Book, I hadn't put the alphabetical index back in yet, so it's been a mid-term addition. And that does mean that student groups so far have often uploaded all their slides under just the one topic. But now it's back in there, we're making use of it. The screenshot above has fewer topics than it will -- we're up to 380 content entries in the book so far, and I expect we should be at about 150 topics.... I'll update the screenshot next week!)

To give another example where this is useful, this year we broke what had been one lecture up into two talks separated by a demo -- "Unit testing", with a demo on JUnit, followed by "Code coverage" with a demo using the course's Sonar install. But for various reasons my colleague was a little pushed for time on preparing the talks, so we needed to reuse one PowerPoint presentation for both talks. So how do you make the link on the course contents page to the Code Coverage talk work? It's in the middle of the slide deck! Simple. Upload the one presentation, and because the slides can have different topics, we tagged the slides on code coverage with the topic "code coverage", and then the topic lookup link for "Code Coverage" from the course contents page worked just fine.

Live polls in lectures without clickers or cards

2011-08-10T00:52:00.000-07:00

In the first lecture of each course, I often like to ask the audience a few quick poll questions. But as I don't have easy access to a set of "clickers", this always involved handing out red and green cards to every student (at the start of the lecture), asking them to hold up a card, and pointing a webcam at the audience so they could see the result in the swathe of green or red that appeared. It was visually quite impressive, but a bit of a pain handing out all the cards, collecting them up, and not actually having the numbers at the end of it.

This time, I did it the easy way... a live poll in the Intelligent Book, updating dynamically as the students voted using their laptops, phones, or tablets.

It was really quite fun seeing it in the room, watching the results streaming in as student made (or moved) their votes.

Social bookmarking against slides

2011-08-08T05:45:00.000-07:00

The course I'm helping teach this semester needed a feature that was in The Intelligent Book back when I was a PhD student: social bookmarking against slides.

A lecture slide isn't the only resource for a topic. Often, both during the lecture and for students afterwards, it's very useful to be able to hop from the lecture slides to other resources and back again. Click the "Alternatives" button, click the page, show it, and then when I hit Next at the top, I'm right back progressing through my presentation.

Much nicer than the horrible old "Other resources" slide PowerPoint lectures tend to have, with a bunch of links lumped together that might relate to any of the 40 slides in the talk. And when presenting, much nicer than having to keep track of a bunch of open browser windows and wait while the projector and laptop do their little dance every time I Alt-Tab in our out of a PowerPoint presentation.

For CSSE2003 Software Studio, this "Alternatives" button is particularly important. The students are going to be giving some of the talks and the material is going to be examinable. So there was the question "What if they do bad presentations and miss something out? Will all the rest of the students appeal their exam results on the grounds they weren't taught the material?" Our answer: "No problem. If they miss something out in their slides, we'll pin a better explanation right next to it, in their presentation (and probably mark it to show up first)."

Next course, next feature...

2011-06-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

After the successful mini-experiment with live on-screen chat last semester, the course I'm teaching next semester needs another of The Intelligent Book's features for teaching reasons. So, it looks like it's going to get its first full run on a university course, in about a month. More details to follow...

Just gave a lecture with live chat on the main screen

2011-05-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

This semester, I've been teaching CSSE3002 for the University of Queensland. So, I've started putting together an updated version of the Intelligent Book, experimenting with a few new features.

Today, I gave the lecture with live chat on the main screen, in the browser. And I am very happy to say that not only did it enliven the lecture with some (mostly on-topic) chat, but there were several questions students might not have been game to put their hand up and ask!

(If you're wondering why there's the comment from "Fred Brooks", there was a photo of him on a previous slide, about The Mythical Man Month. So a student thought he'd say hello on Fred's behalf!)

Accidental downtime

2008-11-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

The site has been down for a couple of weeks, and will probably take a few days to return (we need to re-set it up). Many apologies, this is due to a mix-up with the hosting provider.

Docwit - coming soon

2008-10-15T15:30:00.001-07:00

Coming soon to the Intelligent Book is an update to the way that content is edited to support real-time collaborative editing. If two people edit the same page at the same time, they will see each other's changes as they happen. (Well, with maybe a 30 second delay.) This is a way of editing that users have become used to with sites like Live Workspace, Acrobat.com, and Google Docs.

The code is actually already in the Intelligent Book, we just haven't turned it on yet. One way of thinking about it is that it does docs with TinyMCE. The same code is also intended to go into the Sakai 3 content management system, so I've set up an open source project for it called Docwit.

Demo

2008-09-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

The demo from the Tigers of Tomorrow event is live at http://demo.theintelligentbook.com. Sorry for the slight delay -- we had a couple of layout bugs that meant it didn't look right in some browsers we hadn't tested with yet. We've now fixed those issues, and it works with most of the recent browsers (Firefox 2 and 3, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3).

Oh, if you're interested, you can also go to http://demo.theintelligentbook.com/bla.mmcq?questionId=2bi and try a "searching question" or two (better alternative to multiple choice).

Demo site plans

2008-09-01T04:38:00.000-07:00

We're setting up the demo site at www.theintelligentbook.com. It'll take a couple of days for the DNS settings to propagate (translation: for the Internet to discover where the server is). The demo itself is planned to go live for the 17th September, for the Cambridge Enterprise Conference Tigers of Tomorrow event.