iBorrow Assembly

On 11th December, 2009, a delegation from the University of Sheffield (weCAMP Project) and Buckinghamshire New University (SMART Project) visited Canterbury Christ Church University to take part in a JISC sponsored assembly with the iBorrow Project team. Also in attendance was Adrian Wheal (the project’s Technical Consultant) and Stephen Steadman (the project’s external Evaluator).

The delegation were treated to a tour of Augustine House (AH) and were able to see, first hand, how the iBorrow netbooks were being used by the students (though as this was the last day of term, the building was not as busy as usual). We had brief presentations and reports from Geoff Kimmons (iBorrow netbooks and Virtualisation) and Chris French (WiFi Access). This went extremely well and was very well received by the delegates. Phil Poole and Wayne Barry gave reports on how the pedagogic research was going and the assembly were treated to images taken from the old Library to compare and contrast with AH.

After lunch, the assembly had a discussion on the Benefits Realisation programme where the University of Sheffield are putting in a £15,000 bid (with Christ Church and Bucks New as partners) to do some modelling using floor plans taken from Augustine House that will allow the iBorrow team to overlay the tracking data over it so that they can develop a more richer picture on how space is being used by students over time.

iBorrow Pedagogic Research Report

Dr Lynne Graham-Matheson, of the Pedagogic Research team, has written a brief report on the different research activities that have taken place in the (old) library and the new facilities at Augustine House (AH).

Before AH opened (September 2009), we undertook research in the (old) library with a view to establishing a baseline of information about library use which could be compared with work in the new building. This took place between April and July 2009.  The research was opportunistic – resources were limited and so surveys and observations had to be carried out when researchers (members of staff and student volunteers) were available. The timing was dictated by the removal of some staff from the (old) library building and the closure of the library as part of the building development work.

 Data were gathered through:

• observations of students using the (old) library
• a student survey
• an online staff survey (academic staff)
• interviews with key AH staff
• observations of student using AH before the iBorrow netbooks became available

These various activities were intended only to provide a benchmark to use as a comparison with the iBorrow data and we did not expect to draw any firm conclusions. A particularly interesting finding was the way in which many staff appeared not to have thought about the impact that AH could have on their teaching, except perhaps in a negative way, focusing on the distance between main campus and AH, which they saw as limiting their opportunities to, for example, set tasks whereby students needed to find information in the library and report back.

With the iBorrow tracking data going live in October 2009, this will enable us to understand how learning spaces are being used by students through the deployment of different data capturing methods:

• location tracking data
• direct observation and interviews with students in AH
• “vox pop” Facebook group on iBorrow
• pedagogic scenarios (looking at the relationship between staff – student – space)

Once AH opened, it quickly became apparent that some staff were turning this to their advantage, planning their teaching so they could organise a visit to AH for several hours, perhaps including lunch, and organising research activities, discussion groups and tutorials. A few examples:

• PGCE students are directed to use the curriculum resources area for a set task. While working they take time to have lunch and to meet with tutors about their learning journals
• Students taking the same course at Broadstairs and Chatham meet for a study day with collaborative tasks at AH
• The tutor assigns students a task, and sits and works in the coffee shop, so is available for any students who need help
• First year students are given an assignment task, taken to AH to find books and resources and begin to plan their assignment – the tutor is on hand to help if needed
• Individual tutorials can take place while students are working on individual or group tasks – tutor can be in the coffee shop working, no ‘dead’ time waiting for students to arrive (although probably not an appropriate space to deal with difficult issues)
• Taking a group of part-time or mature students to work in AH, have coffee together etc can help them to bond as a group and feel part of the university.
• Students spend the day working in AH to prepare a group presentation using the whiteboards, video etc and then present to the other groups at the end of the day.
• Students in parallel teaching groups are set a collaborative task to work on in groups in AH. Tutors determine the groups so that the students have the opportunity to work with fellow students they have not met before.

With the help of Prof Betty Collis, we have developed a pro forma, for staff to record their teaching activities. These will be analysed into a set of ‘scenarios’, which can be used for staff development purposes. An example of how this might be done is as follows:

A group of students (Dimension 1c) in nursing are getting ready for an initial practicum experience in a local hospital (Dimension 4c) and need to anticipate issues and problems that they will confront (Dimension 2a). Each student has prepared a list of key problems that he/she expects to have to confront and submitted them in advance to a shared workspace (folder) in the VLE (Dimension 7a). Before their group session they read each others’ lists (Dimension 3a) and come prepared to take the lead on discussing what to do about one of the issues if members of the group confront it in practice (Dimension 5b). The instructor has requested that each group submit a brief report via the VLE about the issues that were discussed (Dimensions 6a and 7a) which she will in turn use as a basis for discussion in the next face-to-face session of the module. The instructor indicated that the students could contact her by phone or chat if they needed help and if she was available she would reply directly (Dimension 7b). The students arrange to meet in a semi-enclosed collaborative area for their discussion (Dimension 8, Zone 4).

As patterns emerge from the data analysis and the observations the gains of cross-referencing and correlating the information from these two modes of data collection will be illustrated for the sector.

iBorrow Wireless Technical Report

Chris French, of the Network Technical team, has written a technical report that outlines the issues and difficulties encouuntered during the iBorrow project and how they went about resolving them. The Network Technical team were responsible for the wireless connectivity and real time location systems for device tracking and data capture.

Download: Wireless Technical Report (.docx)

iBorrow Client Technical Report

Geoff Kimmons, of the Client Technical team, has written a technical report that outlines the issues and difficulties encouuntered during the iBorrow project and how they went about resolving them. The Client Technical team were responsible for the netbook build, terminal services configuration and the development and configuration of the virtualisation (App-V) services.

Download: Client Technical Report (.doc)

iBorrow in action

Below are some images of the iBorrow netbooks in action. To see more images of the iBorrow netbooks, please visit this Flickr site.

Augustine House

Augustine House, Canterbury Christ Church University’s £35 million state-of-the-art Library and Student Services Centre, opened it’s doors to both student and staff on Monday 28th September, 2009. It represents the biggest building project undertaken by the University since the first campus was built in 1963. Library, learning spaces, staff offices and student services stretches across 4 floors.

Unfortunately, due to some technical issues with the security gates at Augustine House, the 200 iBorrow netbooks were not made available. Student and staff would have to wait until the last week in October 2009 before they were unveiled. It soon became clear that the iBorrow netbooks had exceeded all of our expectations and proved to be immensely popular with students as they provided the flexibility and mobility that a fixed desktop computer could never achieve. The following comment from a student is typical of the feedback that we have been getting:

 ”I had my first encounter today and thought it was a brilliant little piece of technology and a really good idea I don’t have a laptop/netbook so I found that being able to go anywhere and chill out rather than being tied to a desk was a really good way to work. Thank you!“

More images of Augustine House and the iBorrow netbooks in action can be found at this Flickr site.

The Library Observation Study – An Update

We reported that we were planning to observe and photograph students in the existing Library before one of its’ key components, the Integrated Support Services (ISS) Help Desk, was removed from the premises forever to it’s temporary home in the Erasmus block. The study took place between 27 April – 3 May, 2009.

The library survey is now complete and had 275 responses. Unfortunately, the OMR scanner that we are using went down, so we are not able to provide a full report just yet. However, the project researcher was able to provide a brief report was.  The survey showed that about 50% of the students currently bring their own laptops (which was higher than we expected) and that 77% of the students would borrow an iBorrow netbook, only 2 of them said that they wouldn’t use a netbook as they felt that they would be blamed if there was any damage done to the netbook.

This all looks very encouraging and we hope to have a full report in the very near future.

weCAMP Assembly

On 29th May, 2009, a delegation from Canterbury Christ Church University visited the University of Sheffield to take part in a JISC sponsored assembly with the weCAMP Project team.

The assembly explored the potential for collaboration between the two projects. weCAMP providing the visual platform upon which the iBorrow location tracking data could be displayed to facilitate the research and dissemination of  project findings. The weCAMP team demonstrated progress with the uCampus platform. The iBorrow team were able to explore how data could usefully be displayed in the models. Coloured zones and ‘clouds’ or individual laptops were discussed as was the usability of 3D Models in this context. Although no firm decisions could be made without experimentation the consensus was that 2D+ projections with transparent floors would be a possible starting point. If the user could pick from a range of fixed views and associate these with subsets of the data available from a menu this was most likely to be user friendly. It was highly unlikely that the level of expertise to create new views, fly-throughs or edit data would be available outside of specifically trained personnel within an institution. CCCU/iBorrow offers an opportunity for a full scale demonstration of the uCampus system informing research and delivering a rich source of information which can inform institutional decision making.

The weCAMP demonstration also highlighted the potential for adding “user-generated” data to the model. Students or staff could add text, pictures and podcasts thus potentially creating an “experience database” which could be explored by others across the web. The potential of this was felt to be exciting in terms of the iBorrow pedagogic research strand which would add to what the sector knows about large scale learning spaces and dissemination to the sector.

The teams agreed that there was enormous potential for the respective projects to benefit from a close association.

Agreed actions:

• weCAMP  to generate a guide for CCCU to develop a digital model that can be uploaded into uCampus.
• Evaluation this will assist weCAMP  in its dissemination.
• iBorrow will employ a designer to generate the digital model asap
• A further assembly was agreed for November to be held in Canterbury with some sector stakeholders invited too, e.g. SCONUL, AUDE.
• Explore joint bid to JISC for benefits realisation funding

Package Sequencing with App-V

March 2009

The following applications have been sequenced to run under App-V, these include:

• Office 2007 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Publisher, Onenote, PictureManager)
• SPSS 16
• Minitab 15
• Adobe Photoshop CS
• Crocodile Clips (this is just for a test and is not part of the iBorrow suite of software)
• Adobe Reader plugin
• Adobe Flashplayer plugin
• Adobe Shockwave plugin
• Java plugin

This will be the bulk of the software that will be provided fo the iBorrow netbooks. The plugins, themselves, will be exposed as part of one local Internet Eexplorer 7 session.

Attempts have also been made to sequence Adobe Design CS3. Unfortunately, there are issues with the Photoshop CS3 component that have yet to be resolved.

For the time being, the team suggests that :

• installed Design CS3 locally on the terminal server and make it available through the RemoteApps component.
• performed comparison with the App-V installation of Photoshop CS on terminal server.
• when accessed on the terminal server, i.e. through remote login, bothversions performed equally well in the freehand doodle test.
• however, when the team ran the RemoteApps version on a Microsoft Vista client, the performance dropped significantly compared to the (locally executed) App-V version (i.e. RemoteApps doodles were a lot more angular than App-V doodles.)
• this simple test highlights the difference between RemoteApps and App-V. RemoteApps executes on the server, App-V executes locally. For graphical applications, where there is a lot of communication between the host and the client this leads to performance degradation.

May 2009

Additional applications have been sequenced to run under App-V, these include:

• Serif PhotoPlus 10
• Serif MoviePlus 4.0
• Dolphin EasyConverter
• Symbol Draw
• SCalc
• SimPress
• SWriter
• OpenOffice (Writer, Math, Impress, Draw, Calc, Base)
• Crocodile Physics 605
• Audacity
• ATLAS.ti 5.2
• Paint.NET

The Highs and Lows with the ASUS 1000H

April 2009

The User Technology Team started to configure the ASUS 1000H with Microsoft Vista as part of it’s 3 icon strategy to bring it in line with the University’s overall Vista strategy. The start up times were proven to be slow, and the connection to Eduroam was equally slow. Once they managed to get logged in, the performance was acceptable after defragmenting, indexing, and removing any surplus start up programs.

The team believed that Sophos (the antivirus application) is the main culprit for the ASUS’ slowness and came to the consensus of opinion that Microsoft’s Vista is too slow to run on a N270. The Team went about using a  cut down version of Windows XP called Windows XP Fundamentals. This, basically, just provides an RDP session to a terminal server; there’s no Internet Explorer, Wordpad or IP config. Although Sophos was installed, it did raise the questions whether it was entirely necessary. This configuration demonstrated that getting a connection to a Terminal Server was taking upto 4 minutes, for the following reasons:

• Delay with Sophos initiation
• Delay in obtaining IP address via Eduroam?? Could this be the DHCP?
• Delay in authenticating Eduroam?? Was this down to the connection?

With regards to TS2008 with App-V; this seems to be very slow in installing applications. So initial tests for this set up have not been encouraging. The model is based upon the one provided by the University of Kent, but the launching of applications via App-V have been slow and not within an acceptable standard. It is thought that the separation of the App-v SQL server from the Management Server may not be an efficient model as trials in NDR were far better, but the model was for SQL and Management on the same server. So, the team were looking to trial this model in NHR hence the new APPVMGMT request.

May 2009

It appears that the ASUS 1000H has been dropped by the manufacturers! We will need to order 200 by the middle of May. We’ve spoken to suppliers XMA and GeTech regarding this dilemma, and why the product has been dropped. They reported back suggesting that consumers preferred the 160 GB HDD to the 40GB SSD. It’s interesting to note that the Dell Mini 10 has just been made available and this only has 8GB SSD – does this reflect the fact that local storage should not be an issue?

In the end, we have ordered 200 white ASUS 1000H. However, these come with standard hard drives, so a further 200 8GB solid state drives (SSD) have also been ordered. We are currently have a configuration issue with the netbook in that, if it is left idle for too long then it will shut down.

Despite our best efforts to get the netbooks to work under Vista (as part of our Vista strategy). We have to concede that we will be using Microsoft XP Fundamentals, as Microsoft XP is clearly the operating system of choice for the Atom processor.

During the monthly Working Group meeting, it was felt that an information/user leaflet would need to be developed which will include specific things that students should be aware of,  i.e. the netbook will not work outside Augustine House; if left idle, the netbook will shut down; and issues regarding charging the netbook up and battery life etc.

The User Technology Team continued to develop the Microsoft Terminal Server 2008 along with Microsoft App-V. They have developed a procedure that, once connected to the network, the users will log in and obtain software through application streaming strategies. What this effectively means is that no software will be installed on the terminal server, thus enabling greater flexibility in software delivery (differing versions of the same product) and software development.

The configuration of the App-V software is heavily reliant upon open Firewall ports , which was the problem in April 2009. The system are now working effectively. However, the Eduroam connection still remains a problem as it requires PKI certification. On a positive note, the team confirmed that further applications could be added to the device as the process had gone well and they are confident that the baseline service has been achieved.