failed Jisc CETIS MASHe

The University of Phoenix have been in the news recently having been awarded US Patent US8341148 B1 for the ‘Academic activity stream’:

Abstract
A method and computer-readable medium for generating an activity stream is provided. The activity stream includes a ranked set of objects that are presented to one or more users. The ranking of objects is updated to reflect events associated with objects.

I was alerted to this news in this post by Phil Hill on e-Literate in which he highlighted:

“The patent lists several “embodiments” of the concept – examples of approaches that could be pursued to implement the activity stream. These embodiments include re-ranking of a book chapter based on recent student comments or preferences and notifications when 75% of students have completed an assigned reading.”

As pointed out by Scott Wilson in the comments it looks hard for this patent to stick given the amount of prior art knocking about (especially as I used to use PostRank and still use Google Reader ‘sort by magic’ to make sure the important information stays at the top of my reader). Also the Talis Aspire Reading List Dashboard may address the last case, although it’s unclear if this is prior art.

Another example of ranking based on associated event I stumbled on today was in bookmarking site Diigo. As part of Diigo’s service you can create groups to collaboratively collect and curate resources. As well as a chronological view there is an option to sort by ‘popular’. Here’s an example of a Diigo Group for #etmooc.

I’m not entirely sure what the ranking is based on but it doesn’t appear to solely be on page views. I’d imagine number bookmarks by other users is another factor or the number of times someone hits the ‘Like’ button. Another example of prior art?

An aside: Using Yahoo Pipes to add social share counts to a feed

I had a quick go with pulling resources from the Diigo ‘popular’ page and using social share counts as another factor in ranking results. I got as far as this pipe which scrapes the top 20 popular items (no api/feed available) and then loops through the results using this sub-pipe, which uses the sharedcount.com API to take a url and see how many times it’s been shared across social networks (here’s a more general pipe that adds social counts to any RSS feed).

pipes feed with social counts

On one hand because a lot of the bookmarked resource aren’t brand new the counts might be a weak indicator of something (you may want to normalise the weighting based on age of resource), but overall this feels like a rabbit hole (not least because I couldn’t use the social share data to rank the results), so I’m tagging this as a failed idea.

It did get me wondering if within a open course (cMOOC) context pulling bookmarked resources into your course hub using FeedWordPress and then getting participants to rate might be … umm interesting (GD Star Ratings plugin looks good for this although I did spot on the etmooc hub they are using WP PostRatings).

I came, I saw, I failed. This was a potentially promising hack that didn’t work out. Hopefully you’ll get as much benefit from failure, as from success.

Today I can across oomfo (from the same makers as FusionCharts):

oomfo is a plug-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that brings all the awesomeness of FusionCharts Suite XT to PowerPoint. Its wizard-based interface helps you create great-looking animated and interactive charts in minutes.

Using oomfo, you can create specialized charts like Waterfall, Pareto, Marimekko, Funnel and Pyramid, which PowerPoint forgot to add. Additionally, you can connect to live data sources like Excel, SalesForce, Google Docs and your own back-end systems

I was interested in the Google Docs integration but so far I can only find a Google Analytics connector. It was disappointing to discover that this relied on the user hosting a PHP file on their own webserver. Disappointment turned into shock when I then discovered to get even this to work required the user to pass unencrypted Google usernames and passwords in plaintext!

All the connector file is doing is formatting data from the Google Analytics API in an oomfo/FusionChart XML format. Below is an example for a single series bar chart:

My thought was if I wrap data from a Google Spreadsheet around the Google Apps Script ContentService I could generate the required XML for oomfo to generate the chart in PowerPoint, no hosting of files, no passing of passwords.

Using my simple electronic voting system hack as a data source I was able to reuse this example on Stackoverflow on how to create a rss feed using class ContentService to create a template and code shown here. Deploying this code as a service/web app gives me a url I can query to get oomfo formatted xml. So if I want responses tagged ‘dev1’ I use:

https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbw79D4L2nZ2chj9Q4bZxQPkd-nLNr1PFjyzdNHgSj_HSFGTkCc/exec?id=dev1

Unfortunately when I try to use this as an external data source for oomfo I get ‘Unable to retrieve data from the specified URL’:

To check it’s not malformed xml I’ve downloaded the generated markup and uploaded to dropbox, which does work. So I’m not sure if oomfo is unable to follow query redirection or if Apps Script is preventing the data from being used by oomfo (if anyone has any suggestions, that would be great).

There you go. How you can’t embed live data from Google Spreadsheet with Apps Script ContentService in PowerPoint using oomfo.