Date: 2004-2005

Brief: This project was to demonstrate how service-oriented architecture (SOA) could link personal learning spaces and institutional systems.

Roles: Principle Investigator (JISC-funded project, staff member of the Learning Technologies Group, Oxford University Computing Service), systems analyst and systems administrator. This was concurrent to my main role of running WebLearn, Oxford University’s centrally-hosted virtual learning environment.

Solution: I established a small team of about six, including colleagues in Chemistry and Medical Sciences. We devised a workflow that encompassed student blogging on a handheld device and WebLearn. Technically, the post content was shared through RSS and Atom feeds, restricted by server and application configurations; I oversaw the development of a new blogging component in the VLE. Whilst establishing blogging as a reflective learning activity, I also uncovered insights into the conditions that foster deeper learning, as intimated in an article for Ariadne. Furthermore, the project had a more general impact on mobile developments at the University.

URL: http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ramble/

Date: 2019-2020 (staff member); November 2021 (consultant)

Brief: A digital asset management system (ResourceSpace, fully-supported by Montala) was procured for the History of Science Museum, along with other departments in Oxford University’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM). The DAMS was used as an intranet, primarily for its object photography. It needed broad stakeholder adoption and to be integrated with the existing collections management system (Axiell EMu).

Roles: As the coordinator of digital projects at HSM, I was involved in the selection of the DAMS and then was responsible for its implementation, including the ingestion of tranches, together with documentation and basic training. For the consultancy I provided further support for this process.

Solution: Considerable preparation was required before we could use the system. I undertook or oversaw a number of stages, including the development of policy comprising a digital preservation policy, retention schedules and data protection. These ran alongside a digital assets audit, metadata specification process (involving all potential stakeholders), system requirements, data export, cleansing, munging and ingestion. As it was messy, I developed a Digital Assets Toolkit, comprising a set of custom scripts for some of the heavy lifting.

URL: https://www.glam.ox.ac.uk/digital-asset-management-system-dams-project

2009-2012, 2014-2020

Role: Systems developer (as a staff member of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford)

Brief: Develop and maintain the main Website for the Museum (but not the social media channels) and integrate the collections management system (KE EMu).

Solution: I oversaw the redevelopment of the WordPress site in 2010, mostly into one multisite instance, including previously disparate elements such as the collections search, and then its gradual refinement through to 2012. I overhauled the server provision, standardising on Debian Linux, in University data centres.

Security was enhanced at various levels, through content caches, script hardening, Apache mod Security with a fine-tuned ruleset, and integration with the University’s single sign-on system, first with Stanford Webauth and then with Shibboleth (to better support federation), registering and configuring a Service Provider (Apache module) and then configuring a WordPress plugin to invoke Shibboleth for authentication.

Subsequent work on the site focused on the design and instantiation of content, such as special exhibition sites (see example below). From 2017 onwards, it mainly concerned the digital preservation of legacy online exhibits during the migration to a centrally managed service, to which I also contributed substantially.

URLs
https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/ (main site until 2018), home page now redirecting to:
https://hsm.ox.ac.uk/ (main site from 2019 onwards).
https://blogs.mhs.ox.ac.uk/
Slides: integration of the collections database using the KE EMu PHP5 API.

–

MHS Special Exhibition: Back from the Dead – Demystifying Antibiotics

2016

Brief: To provide a website to accompany the Special Exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science (since renamed, History of Science Museum). Content needed to be easy to maintain by staff in various teams.

Solution: Using the existing WP multisite infrastructure I was able to create a number of special exhibition sites relatively easily, using responsive off-the-shelf themes. The basic structure was up and running very quickly and could be refined on an ongoing basis. Care was taken to ensure that educational aspects, especially, were made accessible.

URL: https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/backfromthedead/

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)

Gems of Earth and Air

February 2015 – May 2015 

Brief: Oxford University Museum of Natural History Collections had amassed numerous separate PostgreSQL databases with limited online access. They were in the process of migrating all into a single instance of the EMu collections management system and needed a new unified web interface. Initial attempts had proved unsatisfactory in design and functionality. This beta site, aka Gems of Earth and Air, was to prove the viability through a subset of collections, according to readiness of collections data.

Roles: Consultant, systems architect and developer.

Solution: This was a bespoke solution using a full-stack development process. Working with the Heads of IT, Library and Archives, and digital collections at the Museum, I delivered a new, unified online system that brought together three collections (Life, Earth, and Archives), with narrative-driven browsing and fine-grained search. Following requirements elicitation in Balsamiq, I conceived a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture using the IMu API and Twig templates with Bootstrap for a responsive web site. Each stage was documented.

URL: http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/collections/ (via archive.org)

–

Jones’ Icones

Date: Sep 2014 – Oct 2014

Brief: Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History Archives & Library had received a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to make more widely available a rare collection of Lepidoptera paintings. This comprised an informational website and a crowdsourcing system to help identify hundreds of moths and butterflies from scanned images of 18th century paintings.

After initial attempts to develop a solution in-house had failed, I was approached as a consultant with the project on a tight timescale of about a month and a half.

Solution: For the website I first implemented a static site based on a responsive house style, with variations in colour and some differences in sections and content type. Most of the effort was on the second part: a customisation of DIYHistory, a system developed by the University of Iowa to crowdsource transcriptions, based on the Omeka CMS + Scribe theme + Scripto plugin + MediaWiki. I supplied documentation describing the development process, mainly in HTML, CSS and PHP, together with various issues for consideration such as watermarks and improving performance for hosting accounts.

The project was successfully completed on time and budget. Significant crowd-sourced contributions were subsequently made.

URL: www.jonesicones.com (via archive.org)

Please click on a thumbnail to access project details and slideshows.

.

Mobility has become the key characteristic of our period. Social and physical mobility, the feeling of a certain sort of freedom, is one of the things that keeps our society together, and the symbol of this freedom is the individually-owned motor-car. Mobility is the key both socially and organizationally to town planning, for mobility is not only concerned with roads but with the whole concept of a mobile, fragmented, community.

[Alison and Peter Smithson, Team 10 Primer, 1962?]

Today we have virtual highways in which mobile phones are the vehicles, which for many symbolise freedom of expression. But do these material enablers lead to mental crutches? How can such freedom be used for our well-being, particularly in education?

I’ve been interested in mobile/handheld/portable computing on and off since the late 1970s, when as a child I used to play with pocket calculators (a Texet 880 and the ‘Little Professor’). Much later I came across general-purpose handheld computing with the Psion devices, but I didn’t own any until a trio of Hewlett Packard devices, namely: HP 320LX, HP Jornada 568, and HP Jornada 720.

Until about 2004, this was mainly a personal interest, where I wiled away many an hour in experimentation, until the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University gave some formal support, allowing me to bid for and subsequently manage an externally-funded project, RAMBLE (on top of my usual work, of course!). Seeing its growing importance, in subsequent years (mostly in my personal time) I promoted the strategic thinking around mobility and ubiquity, and gained sufficient impetus to set up at the beginning of 2008 a Mobile Special Interest Group at OUCS, that gained 20 members across the different sections.

This galvanised interest and led to some important university-wide developments; by April it had become incorporated in graduate skills training.

The links below provide an archive of developments from an earlier decade, which are still useful, especially for the rationale.

• Using X applications on an HP Jornada 720 (2003) — just an intimation of what is possible. The underlying issue concerns thick vs thin computing, especially relevant concerning the delivery of Web content to handheld devices (compare e.g. Opera 9.5 with server-side solutions from the likes of Skyfire).
• RAMBLE (2004-5) — Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments, JISC-funded project concerning mobile blogs and their integration in institutional learning environments.
• Mobile Blogs, Personal Reflections and Learning Environments (2005) A broad overview from Issue 44 of the Ariadne online journal
• Handheld Musings (2004-10) — a personal blog, with various thoughts, especially on OxPDA, an educational assistant to replace the Oxford University pocket diary.
• OxPDA: Pervasive e-Learning in your hands (2005) — Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3, Handheld Musings blog posts.
• From Portability to Ubiquity — What do we mean by ‘Mobile’? (2007)
• OxMobile: Towards a Mobile and Ubiquitous Strategy for the University of Oxford (2008) — a report detailing context, present status and various project proposals to really start embracing handheld and mobile technology at Oxford.
• Notes from an Emerging Mobile SIG at OUCS — A presentation I gave on my last day as SIG coordinator (I was shortly to leave the department to pursue full-time studies).
• Erewhon (2008-9) This strangely named project concerns the development of location-based services, building on a number of initiatives at OUCS, and led to the production service, Mobile Oxford (m.ox.ac.uk), as presented at the 2010 ITSS conference and documented in the WebLearn VLE. It can be seen as a step to fulfilling some of the vision in OxMobile (Tim Fernando remarked that he has used the posts as a kind of checklist).

(My list of mobile devices has since grown to include the HP iPAQ 1940, Asus Eee PC (first and later generations), Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini, Amazon Kindle, Palm Phone, and iPhone SE.

Pause for Thought

So, what of the quote above? It reminds me of the phrase “car-owning democracy,” much cherished in the 1980s. However, it can be argued that the motor car was a symbol of an acquisitive approach has not led to greater well being — Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence gives plenty of food for thought.

Will mobile devices with all their options for personalisation merely encourage a form of consumerism that fails to enrich us as human beings? What about personalisation as a general principle…? How many different ways of serving tea and coffee do we really need?