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/

Here are a few highlights. For details, pleased browse the portfolio.

March 2000

Open Source Wisdom

I delivered a paper, Open Sources: A Higher Consciousness in Software Development, at To Catch the Bird of Heaven: A conference on ‘wisdom’, which took place 27-29 March 2000, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.   I’ve kept a brief programme summary.

4 November 2001

Public Release of NetWedit

I released NetWedit with GPL license, possibly the world’s first cross-platform JavaScript-powered rich text editor, deployed in a teaching-based CMS, where Oxford’s Theology Faculty could maintain their own profiles.  Read more in Adventures in the Read/Write Web.

2002

Editing XML with XSLT

The Interactive Audio Comprehension Materials (IACM) project at Oxford University’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages enabled academics to generate learning paths, including audio segments, with all data stored in XML.
I devised a means of editing XML using XSLT, based on correctness preserving transformations; changes to specific nodes were targeted with XPATH. Beyond the technical achievement there are significant reflections on structure and flow.

2002-2003

CD2Go – A static web production system

I conceived and implemented an extension of a CGI/Perl website to a static web production system, preserving all the interactive multimedia content. Inherently secure, the content remains online, though browsers no long support most interactive functions. The same system was used for a Japanese site.

09/2004 – 04/2005

RAMBLE project

As Principle Investigator of this ostensibly technical project at Oxford, showcasing service-oriented architecture (SOA) between personal learning spaces and institutional LMS, I uncovered insights into the conditions that foster deeper learning, as intimated in an article for Ariadne.

December 2010

New Architecture for Social Networking Online

I gave my first paper on a multi-dimensional relationship model based on the Buddha’s teachings, the foundations for the Sigala project. This was in the social sciences track at the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science at Mahidol University, Thailand.

2019-2021

A Vision for the History of Science Museum

On a different note, I have applied a holistic approach to envisioning how a museum can be a hub for a scientific ecosystem with proper accountability across the University. The blog post illustrates the ongoing process of refinement to my ideas.

2021

Offline Search for WordPress

Twenty years after starting work on CD2Go, I returned to the problem of searching static snapshots of CMS, now updated to WordPress. After some radical changes to an existing plugin, I now have a solution (which you can try out by downloading the Sigala research site.)