Protecting our Customers

· ostephens

2nd talk of the conference is about Information Security.

Information Security is starting to be taken a lot more seriously in HE. We have seen threats increase (e.g. Code Red, Blaster), and we are now seeing more pressure to manage the risks. The speakers (Mike Roch
, University of Reading and Andrew Cormack, UKERNA) suggest that there is a need for a ‘toolkit’ for Information security.

One possible framework for this is BS7799. However, this standard has not been widely adopted for accrediation purposes, but it may still be useful as a toolkit. There is now an updated version of the standard (ISO/IEC17799:2000), which is more descriptive and has more support from the governing bodies.

So – what is in BS7799-2:2002?

Information Security Policy
Organisational Security
Asset classification and control
Personnel security
Physical and environmental Policy
Communications and operations management
Access control
System development and maintenance
Business continuity management
Legal compliance

However, there are some things missing that perhaps is relevant to HE, which generally relate to the flexibility our users expect (attaching their own equipment to the institutional network, use of the network for social use, etc.)

It took a while to get round to it, but these are the speakers recommendations as to what policy documents are required:

  • Information Security
  • Operations
  • Business continutity plan
  • Staff/student
  • Compliance
  • Information handling
  • Network management
  • System design
  • System management
  • Software management
  • User management
  • Acceptable use

There may also be a need for

  • Outsourcing
  • Mobile computing
  • Teleworking
  • Cryptography
  • Wireless networking

This all seem very well, and some of these policies we already have, but some suggestions seem completely impractical. It’s all very well having a policy saying ‘if you encrypt information, it must be retrievable’ but pretty much impossible to enforce.

Overall I’m thinking – oh god, not more policies. I do see the point, but lets get this done as easily, and painlessly as possible.

m-Learning

· ostephens

I’m at the UCISA conference for the next 3 days. The first talk is on ‘m’-learning – where the m stands for mobile.

The speaker (Mike Sharples, University of Birmingham) argued that the profile of mobile technology matched up incredibly well with the current profile of Learning.

Learning has changed over the last 10 years to become:

Learner centred
Individualised
Collaborative
Situated
Ubiquitous
Lifelong

Mike argued that Mobile technology is also personalised and ubiquitous. However, it seemed to me that actually ‘connectivity’ is actually key here – and indeed the speaker referred extensively to wireless technology.

Mike summarised recent surveys showing that laptop ownership is increasing amongst students [31% (Leeds), 43% (Birmingham), 73% (LSE)], and also referred to the Dearing report statement that ‘We expect that by 2005/06 all students will be required to have access to their own portable computer.’

He also highlighted the fact that mobile phone ownership is incredibly high [96% (Dundee)], and referred to PDA ownership. However, for me this isn’t really the issue – it’s what they use them for. The line between a PDA and a mobile is now pretty slim (my Palm is really a glorified Calendar – which I could probably do on my phone, or even my iPod)

Anyway, the speaker went onto suggest that there were the following consequences:

  • The need for a shift from universtiy provided PCs to students with personal laptops
  • Students demanding to connect laptops, and other devices , to the university network
  • Demand for wireless connectivity
  • Divide between students with and without wireless laptops
  • Students with multimedia phones, PDA, tablets, etc.

Interestingly universities may already have wireless networks running. Birmingham found that there were many wireless networks running across the campus, but many were insecure, and no overarching plan.

At Birmingham they have used the following solutions in place:

Access points – 20 HP/Lucent WavePoint/AP2000
Wireless Standard: 802.11b with Wireless Distribution Systems (i.e. relays)
Authentication: MAC address via RADIUS server
Firewall: IPTables with NAT
Client registration via web-based forms
Rollout by Info Services across campus (wireless network physically separate from the other University network)
Guide produced by MS and University

I wonder if the technical solutions (MAC Address based authentication, IPTables and Client registration) are scalable?

In some cases they ‘beam’ in wirless access rather than having internal access points (e.g. Library)

So – what is the impact on teaching and learning? Birmingham have run a couple of interesting sounding projects…

Student Learning Organiser
Configured iPAQs (with wireless) to contain essential tools for learning/organisation (rather than business presumably?).
Students could also add their own software (including MP3 players/tracks, Chinese/English dictionary, VoIP and Video using a ‘netmeeting’ type application to keep in touch with family)

Results:
Usability issues – battery life, data loss, extra thing to carry
No best single tool. Found that Timetable was the most popular application (just), followed by Web browser and Instant messaging, and then Email.

This I find disappointing. Using it to track your timetable seems prosaic – and not really much better than a piece of paper. Although timetables can change a few times, over the year I would think that they would be pretty static. What I guess I really wanted to see was something that showed the pervasiveness of the technology really added value.

Content was ‘suprisingly’ (the speakers word, not mine) important – e.g. Viewing powerpoint slides for upcoming lectures (although all science students)

Wireless access found to be really important – in fact once the wireless access was done they felt (in the words of the speaker) ‘crippled’.

Tablet computers for student learning
3 groups of 6 students
Personal and shared learning:
Multimedia logbook
Groupwork and E-mentorying
Lecture support
Learning Management

The early results (after c. 3 months) are:

  • Student population already well connected, including wireless homes (this is Birmingham btw)
  • Some students reluctant to take part (seemed suprising for electronic engineering students)
  • The originally cautious students have become some of the most daring in their use (multimedia log books)
  • Informal note taking and communication are key
  • Shared workspaces (useing SharePoint server)
  • Keyboard is a ‘must have’ – they need a laptop plus, not a laptop minus!

A third project was described, which seemed to be much more of a mish-mash, using different examples of learning outside the classroom. Examples included a partnership with the Uffizi gallery, and also a botanical gardens. In the second example, staff at the gardens could transmit images from the garden back to the classroom by wireless LAN or WAN.

Overall the speaker concluded that we faced the following challenges in HE:

  • From computer service provision to support for students’ own devices
  • Managing student expectations
  • New learning spaces – which can exploit these new technologies and methods
  • Assessing effectiveness

How to build a website?

· ostephens

We are about to start redesigning our library website. At the same time I want to rework the technical basis of the site.

Currently the site is static html. I want to separate presentation from data, as well as making it easy to update for the staff responsible for the data. The kind of thing I’m thinking about is that the staff who change the opening hours on the notice board, should also change them web. However, I don’t think they should need to know html to do this.

I’m also interested in the possibility of some new technologies such as blogs and wikis. Obviously a blog might be great for news (with an rss of course), and a wiki might be a way of providing faq type answers to our users (and even get their input to the faqs)

Anyway, none of this is really rocket science, but I’ve got some limitations and questions.

Firstly – the limitations. I really need to stick within the technology infrastructure supported by the College. This is basically MS based, with the library web pages sitting on W2K server, using IIS. Other library systems (LMS, federated search, link server) all run on UNIX and Apache.

Secondly, I’m not sure if we should use xml and xslt to acheive the aim of separating data from presentation, just use xhtml and css, or do a database driven site – or use a database backend to support either of the other methods.

Finally, I’ve come to realise that I’ve always thought of the library web presence as having several components: The OPAC; The Resource Discovery Tool; the Website. However, it seems clear that visitors only perceive a single web presence, and don’t understand why the ‘opac’ is separate to information about our opening hours. Part of the challenge is going to be integrating our ‘applications’ into our website in a reasonably seamless way, but without overwhelming the user with too many options at once.

Although we are in the early stages of the design – looking at stakeholders and content needs – and I want any technical solution to support the needs not drive them – I am eager to get some of the issues sorted out now.

Discussion board standards

· ostephens

While taking part in the VLEs: Beyond The Fringe… And Into The Mainstream it occured to me that the discussion group software could be better from the ‘reading’ point of view.

In fact, had the discussion group had an rss feed, I could have read the postings in a much more convenient fashion, and kept up with the 4 separate discussions that were going on.

I’d got further than this though. RSS obviously doesn’t quite serve the needs of bulletin boards (threading, sequencing etc.), but surely it wouldn’t be difficult to define discussion groups as xml output rather than html, and have a simple messaging format to be able to post as well as read posts.

It’s just occured to me, that, of course, the existing news readers do this – so why are e-learning systems not delivering standard bulletin board formats so I can ‘subscribe’ in my news reader? On the other hand, does discussion board software from outside the e-learning sphere support this? What are the problems?

It suddenly seemed clear to me that if in the future (as some people suggest) learners will be more picky about where they do qualifications, and they will buy courses online from a variety of sources, they will need some way to ‘aggregate’ their courses in a single environment (rather than the current practice where each institution is running their own ‘learning environment’, and if the user is going to take courses from 2 institutions, they have to interact with 2 learning environments).

Since there is also talk of ‘exploding’ the VLE/LMS into it’s components parts, and discussion board system which is readable by a standard news reader seems like a sensible idea? I’m just wondering about how complex it needs to get… Perhaps a bulletin board software supporting RSS is a better idea? I’ve gone round in a circle on this – obviously needs more thought and research.

‘Personal’ researcher

· ostephens

The introduction of federated search engines (e.g. MetaLib) seems to open up an opportunity for some kind of ‘automatic researcher’. I’m thinking of a piece of software that would do sequential searches on a variety of sources, and put together a ‘reading list’ of relevant references.

Just to describe how this might work:

The researcher puts together a list of keywords, and defines a starting point (e.g. a list of databases).
The federated search engine does a search on the databases specified by the researcher
From the results, the software could compile a number different search ‘facets’ to then continue to search on these facets. These facets could be, for example, subject words not specified in the original list and author names.
Alternatively it could something like find all the papers which cite, or are cited by, a paper retrieved by the original search.

The effectiveness of this kind of functionality would depend on the databases available for cross-searching, how effectively the results can be ‘relevance’ ranked, and how much structure their is in the retrieved records (the more context available for the retrieved records, the better I guess).

In combination with a link-server (e.g. SFX) and local library catalogue, you can even see this being able to prioritise the material easily available to the researcher…

I think all the pieces are actually already in place for this, but the functionality isn’t quite there yet. I wonder if anyone would be interested in funding a bit of research in this area… – a couple of months work with a federated search engine supplier should really be enough to get this up and running.

(I’ve used the Ex Libris products as examples here, just because these are the ones that I am familiar with, so I can kind of see how it could work using them. I’m sure the similar products from other vendors could do the same kind of thing)

Web service integration

· ostephens

Several useful web services are starting to emerge, and it’s time to start thinking about integrating them into library management products. The most obvious, and possibly most useful, one that springs to mind is the Google spellchecker. Misspelt searches are still a major source of failed catalogue searches, and if we could do a ‘did you mean xxx’ like Google, it would help our users.

The sad thing is that although I can see this as relatively easy to do outside our LMS, I can’t see anyway of integrating into the web OPAC. My alternative is to start writing an interface outside the LMS, which just seems pointless.

Another useful service is the OCLC ISBNx lookup – you submit an ISBN, and get back a list of ISBNs of related works (e.g. Paperback vs Hardback, previous editions etc.) – again, a neat way of extending the users search for them. As above, integration into the library catalogue interface would seem like the ideal, but I’m currently talking to the team at SFX to see if we can get it integrated into their product

These are not new ideas to the area, and Art Rhyno has already done this anyway, but it’s something that I’d like to do if I get the time. It would also be nice to see these as part of standard LMS functionality…

To LMS or not to LMS

· ostephens

I’ve become increasingly unconvinced about the benefits of LMSs – such as Blackboard and WebCT. Basically these environments seem to put unnecessary restrictions on how material is made available, and how it is accessed, without adding much benefit.

It’s interesting that these pieces of software are called ‘Learning Management Systems’. In the UK, the idea of the Virtual or Managed Learning Environment’ took off, and still there is a tendency to refer to LMSs as VLEs or MLEs. This, for me, is to miss an important distinction. Blackboard, WebCT and the like are correctly called ‘Learning Management Systems’, as they somehow try to ‘manage’ the learning material. I’m not sure this is helpful, certainly not in the context of UK Higher Education.

So, I believe we should strive to create a virtual or managed ‘learning environment’, but we don’t need an LMS to do so. This should also make it easier to integrate library resources into the material, as there are no artificial barriers to doing this, and you aren’t tied into one particular technology.

So what do we need from a VLE? At the moment our needs are pretty simple:

Web space for courses
Ideally we need to be able to restrict viewing privileges to the students on the course. However, this may not be necessary in all cases…
Discussion group/bulletin board software
Email lists for courses
Ease of publishing/uploading material

I’d like to be able to provide tools for easy content creation by academics. Weblog software would seem ideal for this purpose – but I’m not sure about supporting this (if we were to install Movable Type or something). Possibly Microsoft’s ‘Sharepoint’ software would be worth investigating. Otherwise, perhaps we just need to treat this as another area where web content management software is needed.

Referencing

· ostephens

We are working with e-learning a lot at the moment, mainly on integrating reading/resource lists into the learning environment. We are making some progress on this (although unfortunately it’s all behind closed doors, so I can’t demonstrate here).

Anyway, one idea which came up was that quite often references are not saved for the ‘reading list’, but rather put into the course material at the appropriate point. We thought it would be a great idea if it was possible to just ‘drag’ the reference from the library system by a very short, simple, snippet of code, which could be embedded in any webpage.

This isn’t 100% ideal (it still requires some ability to edit html), and after seeing the stuff that Art Rhynol has just come up with for his Lookup Helper, I’m quite jealous. However, since I’m talking about web material here, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to say ‘and now paste in these 2 lines of code’.

So, how about a solution similar to the one Andy Powell and Pete Cliff came up with for RSS-xpress Lite. This is seems really neat – just very simple.

Speed could be an issue, but I’ll worry about that later…

Your search found no hits

· ostephens

An idea from elsewhere (don’t want to be seen plagiarising, but also don’t know about the etiquette of referencing someone without asking). Google offer a ‘did you mean to search for xxx’ instead – which is a great idea for a start (why doesn’t our library system offer this?) – but how about ‘did you mean to search in’ function. Often our users search for information in the wrong place (e.g. search for journal article details in the library catalogue). Why not do a background search for the same search terms in some other systems (e.g. a federated search engine), and offer as well as giving search results from the system they have started with, let them know how many hits they would have got if they had searched elsewhere.

Google Deskbar

· ostephens

Google Labs have released a beta of the Google Deskbar. This sits in your Windows taskbar and will do google searches for you. What’s neat is that it can be easily adapted to search other resources such as a library catalogue or a federated search tool if you know the syntax.

Although it’s not unique – there are other toolbars around – notably Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar which is open source. However, I found it more difficult to configure than the Google version. I also really like the fact the Google one comes with a stripped down browser included – something that has been (I think) overlooked by many commentators.

One idea that has kicked around the SFX coomunity is an ‘OpenURL’ toolbar/deskbar to help locate full-text online from a citation. Ex Libris, the company which sells SFX has actually created one for their development team to use, but seem unwilling or unable to distribute it to SFX customers. There is also the question of whether our library users will actually be interested…