Interactive Audio Comprehension Materials (IACM) II

Date: 2002

Role: Systems developer (as Project Officer in the Academic Computing Development Team (ACDT), Oxford University Computing Services)

Brief: My colleague in ACDT, Paul Groves, had already coded phase 1 of the IACM project, which was an online system for students in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages to sit aural comprehension tests. The system used XML to store the data and XSLT to deliver a series of pages; this included SMIL, delivered using RealAudio. The main weakness was the technical requirement for academic staff to create and maintain XML files using a tool like XMetal. For phase II I was required to develop a more user-friendly web-based system for creating and editing these tests.

Solution: I devised and implemented an extension comprising a series of web forms, whose back-end generated XSLT dynamically based on the web form submissions. The slides below provide a walkthrough of a test version.

References:

• Original project proposal
• Joint paper before this project started (co-author with Sarah Porter et al): Building flexible language-learning systems: Perl and HTML vs. XML and XSL

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Multimedia CD-ROMs for Chinese and Japanese (two projects, one system)

Date: 2001-2003

Role: Systems developer (as Project Officer in the Humanities (later Academic) Computing Development Team (HCDT), Oxford University Computing Services)

Brief: A former member of HCDT, Peter Karas, had already produced a multimedia Chinese website for the Centre for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language at Oxford University. His system used CGI/Perl with Java applets for character drawing exercises. Now the department wished to distribute the materials on a CD-ROM.

Solution: I devised and implemented a CD production system, CD2Go, including a limited administration dashboard. It comprised a new set of Perl scripts that effectively used the existing site as a set of web services, sending output to a mapped folder hierarchy with a predefined naming convention. All anchors were adjusted accordingly. For example,
http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/char.pl?character=wang&charstr=jie,che,xiao,wang,ni,hao,mang,ma,bu,wo,gang,xia,ke,zhe,shi,de,a,xian,zai,yong,xiang,yi,xie,qu,you,ju,mai,piao,o,na,er,ne&home=http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/lesson1.htm
was mapped to:
http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Chinese/lessons/1/char/wang.htm

The successful output was made available for sale in Blackwells and prompted a further project with new teaching structure for Japanese and new web templates created by Joseph Talbot.

URLs (partial content):

• http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Chinese/index.html
• https://ijss.orient.ox.ac.uk/

Roles: Systems developer (as a staff member of the Humanities Computing Development Team, Oxford University Computing Services)

The brief: The Theology Faculty required a web-based system to manage various kinds of information relating to taught courses (undergraduate and postgraduate). A particular requirement was a convenient means for staff to maintain their own profiles with some basic formatting options.

Solution: An existing system, OxArch, written in PHP/MySQL, with ODBC connection to MS Access database, was identified as a suitable starting point as it was used for managing teaching in the School of Archaeology. It was repurposed and expanded for Theology. A novel JavaScript solution, NetWedit, was implemented for rich text editing.

URL: http://resources.theology.ox.ac.uk/ (via archive.org)