Quandry Looks Promising For Developing Interactive Case Studies

I came across a relatively inexpensive shareware product (lite version is free...full version is only $50) last week that I think would have potential for use in developing web-based interactive case studies. It is called "Quandry" from HalfBaked Software (don't let the name fool you).

"Quandary is an application for creating Web-based Action Mazes. An Action Maze is a kind of interactive case-study; the user is presented with a situation, and a number of choices as to a course of action to deal with it. On choosing one of the options, the resulting situation is then presented, again with a set of options. Working through this branching tree is like negotiating a maze, hence the name 'Action Maze'."

The product offers not only a decision tree type structure but also has transactional capabilities that you can incorporate into the exercise such as resource management, item inventories, etc. Some of the new features in version 2 include:

Assets can now have decimal place settings.

Transactions can add, subtract, multiply, divide and do other complex math with asset values.

Exercises can have timers.

Web output no longer depends on frames.

Exercises can be uploaded to www.hotpotatoes.net, and student results and actions can be stored.

New Wizards can be used to create some basic interaction types such as multiple-choice questions.

Unicode support allows the use of languages such as Japanese and Russian directly in the interface.

Transactions can now be added in three places: on ENTRY to a decision point, on a LINK (as before), and on EXIT from a decision point. This gives more flexibility in the structuring of complex mazes, and reduces the need to duplicate transactions in many places.

At this time Version 2 is available only for the Windows platform. It also requires browsers which fully support W3C standards (such as Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7). Version 1 is available for both Windows and Mac and is compatible with all browsers released within the last 5 years.

Wireless Handhelds Superior to Response Pads

I was catching up on my reading and noticed the TS article on wireless response pads. I had not yet read that article so I took a look and explored the website link to the company that produces the response pads. For lecture interactivity I think a group Weblog environment might be a more practical solution rather than an investment in a proprietary hardware system (no offense intended to my fellow authors at the Technology Source). Now that we have wireless installed throughout most of the classroom spaces on campus, I think we will see more students coming to class with their own internet-enabled devices whether they are full size laptops or handhelds. Here in Education we have also implemented a "COW" cart filled with wireless Gateway laptops that we provide to instructors for classroom use. The instructor could use their own wireless laptop to instantaneously post questions to a class web log then students could post their reactions and questions via the comment function.

The Pollxn comment plugin for the Blosxom Weblog product (http://www.blosxom.com) I have been evaluating has a setting to require posters to enter their name and e-mail address before posting their comment. This would help to ensure appropriate identification for credit purposes.

For wireless exam purposes, a tool like Dragon Web Surveys by Waves In Motion (http://www.wmotion.com) enables an instructor to easily develop an online exam with points assigned to questions and, if configured to process responses immediately upon receipt, provides the instructor with a web link to results as they are submitted. It also has a branching capability that enables the development of adaptive learning strategies based on a student's responses. Students access the exam from a simple web link using any wireless-enabled device. Since students would be using their own devices, the instructor also does not have to deal with distributing and collecting response devices before each class.

Long URL caused problem with blog display in Safari

Blosxom Test Notes: Thanks to Dr. Jason Hoffman for pointing out a long URL in a post that was causing the Mac browser, Safari, to extend the center column of the GLD blog and therefore required Safari users to scroll to the right to read posts. John Hibbs was so sure it was his post that had caused the problem that I focussed on it looking for long links and was quite frustrated when I didn't really find any. Now I'm embarrassed (blush) because it was one of my posts with a really long amazon link that was the culprit. I also didn't really need it anyway since I have the magiclink plugin installed and had inserted a reference to the ISBN number which the magiclink plugin automatically links to the correct Amazon inventory record anyway.

UTF Encoding Plugin Preserves RSS Integrity in Global Environment

Blosxom Test Notes: A big Thank You to Rainer Volz of Virtual Projects for writing a plugin for Blosxom that encodes posts as UTF-8 and preserves the integrity of the RSS output with posts containing accented characters. It was becoming a daily task to edit posts to eliminate accented characters in an effort to maintain a valid RSS news feed.

Text Mining and Web Log Analysis

"With the aid of text mining, Michael N. Liebman, a research director at the University of Pennsylvania, is exploring whether bearing a child later in life has any link to postmenopausal diseases."

"Text-mining programs, unlike search engines that display lists of documents that contain certain keywords, go further, categorizing information, making links between otherwise unconnected documents and providing visual maps (some look like tree branches or spokes on a wheel) to lead users down new pathways that they might not have been aware of."

"Currently these programs are used by academic researchers and companies, but information scientists expect that to change. Lower-cost text-mining tools eventually will be offered to ordinary people who want to dig into medical or political issues using public documents. Madan Pandit, an expert in text analysis in Bangalore, India, who runs a Web site called K-Praxis (k-praxis.com), has suggested that text mining could help people make sense of voluminous documents that are already on the Web, like the 858-page report on the congressional inquiry into intelligence failures regarding the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

As we develop online communities of practice sharing observations and daily discoveries through such technologies as web logs, text mining tools could prove invaluable in analyzing disparate findings and pointing out possible relationships and new paths of inquiry. Although the two products mentioned in the article, Clear Forest and SPSS offer products in the $75,000 and up range, less expensive products are already in development. Products like PolyAnalyst from Megaputer provide taxonomy-based categorization for approximately $2,100 (education pricing). Netica's Bayesian network tools can be purchased for as little as $285 (education pricing). Perhaps the ultimate solution will be a hybrid of some of these programs.

Added Author Email Field

Blosxom Test Notes: I added an author email field to the submission form and modified my article format file to automatically link this field with a mailto link. Big thanks to Anthony Wendell Kay for helping me with the Perl syntax.

Headlines plugin works for list of recent posts

I had to switch from the recent entries plugin to the headlines plugin to include a list of properly linked recent post headlines in the web log layout. The recent entries plugin was designed for a category-linked rather than a date-linked weblog and the plugin author said it would take a complete rewrite to get it to work with the default date-based blosxom web log.

The author of the recent entries plugin suggested I try the headlines plugin and it works like a charm!

Random Text and Improved Formatting Plugins Added

Blosxom Test Notes: Today, I added a plugin to deliver a random quote file to the weblog (to offer words of wisdom) and another plugin to format messages more elegantly.

I tried to use the textright plugin to correct problems with foreign characters but it did not seem to make any difference. Perhaps I misunderstood what the plugin is supposed to do.

Our Perl programmer Jon Miyake also helped me with the syntax I needed for my article format file so if a poster leaves one of the fields blank, it simply does not ouput that line. This not only improves the appearance of the post but prevents invalidation of the RSS output file.

We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture

This book with an introduction by blogging guru Rebecca Blood looks interesting.

"0738207411"[amazon]

This is an example of the automatic Amazon book link facilitated by the Blosxom plugin "magiclink"

This same plugin can link a word like "syntax"[dict] directly to its definition in http://www.dictionary.com

Features such as these make the blosxom program more versatile than many commercial programs

Last Build Date Plugin Now Outputs RFC 822 Date

Blosxom Test notes: Big thanks to Joe Francis for updating the lastbuilddate plugin so that it now outputs a valid RFC 822 Date. He also identified the problem I was having with the plugin outputting a date of zero:

"Plugins that provide their own entries routine and do not return the story files in the %files hash will cause lastbuilddate to find no date. In this circumstance lastbuilddate will not emit a field. To work around this, rename lastbuilddate so that it executes ahead of these plugins. For example, rename to 00lastbuilddate."

I don't really know what the %files hash is but I do know that renaming the plugin as indicated makes it work perfectly in my configuration.

Checking the Format for an Article post

Blosxom Test Notes: I adjusted the name of the format library to see if blosxom will now recognize my custom post format file.

CGI module upgrade breaks Blosxom in IE 6

Blosxom Test Notes: I thought I was going crazy. I had been working happily with Blosxom for several weeks and came in Wednesday morning and all of a sudden, when I tried to view my weblog in Internet Explorer 6, my browser was prompting me as if it considered the file a downloadable Mime type. The day before I had asked the system personnel to upgrade the File::Spec module to the latest version so the recententries plugin would work. I called them back and asked them if they had done anything to the overall server settings that would cause this behavior. Everyone seemed baffled, especially since the Weblog still loaded properly in Mozilla, Netscape, Opera and older versions of IE. I even went to the trouble of uninstalling all the plugins, downloading a fresh copy of Blosxom and reconfiguring and resetting the file permissions but nothing changed. This afternoon, one of the Perl technicians called me back and together we reviewed the content-type settings produced by the Blosxom script. He noticed that the script was outputting an extra space before the ending semi-colon in the Content_type statement. So he changed line 262 of the Blosxom cgi file thus:

Was: $content_type =~ s!\n.*!!s;

Needs to be: $content_type =~ s!\s*\n\s*.*!!s;

Now it once more works with IE 6. He suspects that when the systems people updated the cgi modules, one of new modules must have been less forgiving than the older version. I thought I would share our experience with you in case it might help others.

Finally Got Calendar Plugin Working

Blosxom Test Notes: Well, today I finally got the Archive Calendar plugin working. There was a syntax error in line 348 of the plugin. The mode parameter and closing semicolon had been omitted. It should be modified to read: or mkdir $blosxom::plugin_state_dir,755; I used the $calendar$month_calendar variable in my head.html file so it displays just the month and not a separate year display because I wanted it to be smaller. I've written to Todd and asked if there is a way to also omit the Day headings to make it smaller still. I also created a stylesheet with calendar settings in it but can't seem to get it to read the stylesheet. I asked Todd about that too.

Modified Calendar Plugin to Shrink the Calendar

I wanted to make the archive calendar created by the calendar plugin smaller so I wrote to Todd Larason, the author, and he said:

You have a couple options.

1. make flavour files for the calendar; if you just want to remove the day of week headers, then make empty files named calendar.month_sub_head.html, calendar.month_sub_day.html and calendar.month_sub_foot.html (replace the 'html' with your flavour name(s))

2. edit the plugin; if you have lots of flavours, this might be easier. near the bottom of the file, find the line that says "__DATA__". a fwe lines below that are lines that start "error month_sub_head", "error month_sub_day" and "error month_sub_foot"; just remove those lines.

3. don't remove the day headers, just shorten them; in the configuration section at the beginning, change @dowabbr = qw/Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat/ if ($#dowabbr != 6); to @dowabbr = qw/S M Tu W Th F S/ if ($#dowabbr != 6); or something similar

4. use CSS. In the CSS file, add a style like:

.month-calendar-day-head {display: none;}

so the headers are still there, they just don't get displayed.

I created a CSS file and linked it to the head portion of head flavour file but couldn't get it to recognize it. So, I opted to remark out the three related error lines in the plugin itself. I will write back to Todd and see if the style-sheet link needs to be elsewhere.

Using Autolink with a Glossary File

Blosxom Test Notes: I thought of a way to use Fletcher's Autolink plugin to link to a glossary of terms or professional acronyms that may be not included in Dictionary.com. I'm going to create a glossary.html file with anchors then simply add the word with it's related link to the glossary file in my autolinks file.

Magic Link Script Updated to Correct Problem with Dictionary.com

Blosxom Test Notes: I tried the Magiclink plugin and it almost worked. I submitted a post which included "syntax"[dict]. It linked the word

and went to http://www.Dictionary.com but could not find the word because it kept the quotes around it for the search. I tried removing the quotes but then I did not get the link and the [dict] part just showed up as part of the post. I posted my problem to the Blosxom discussion list and plugin author Bruce Alderson made an adjustment to the plugin and now it works!!! Thanks, Bruce!

May have solution to Recent Entries plugin error

I submitted the error message I was getting upon executing the recent entries plugin to Jon Miyake, our Perl expert at the Computing Center. He sent me an email back telling me that the error was caused by an outdated filespec on our Unix server. I have sent a request to have the filespec object updated to our systems engineers. I'm hoping they will get the file updated soon and that will resolve the problem. I would like to use this plugin because it produces a list of the Titles of the most recent posts. I think this is a handy timesaver since I tend to be a bit verbose in my posts. Readers can just click on the topic of greatest interest and avoid scrolling down to the article they want to read.

Archive problem resolved in Blogger weblogs

As I have been working on Blosxom and viewing my error logs, I have noticed that some of my Blogger weblog archives have been triggering error messages and links to the archive files are not showing up on the weblog. I had two weblogs that were working fine. One was my very first weblog where the archive files were stored in the root folder of my public_html directory. The other, however, was one of my newer weblogs where the archive files were stored in the directory I had created for archives under the root folder but when I checked the archive file settings, path to the archives was set to my root folder then the archive directory was set to "" to let Blogger find the files by default. This was working even though the other three weblogs where I had specifically set the archive path to the specific archive folder and set the specific directory location were not. So I changed their archive settings so the path to the archives was set to my root public_html folder and the directory set to "" like the one that was working and voila! All of my archive links appeared. I'll have to revise my Blogger settings instructions.

Using Date Time variable for Submission Filename

Blosxom Evaluation Notes: Rather than use the category field for a filename, I have consulted with our Perl programmers and they provided me with a snippet that will assign the date and time (down to the second) for the filename.

I like this solution much better because the length of the filename is the same for all files and the filename itself provides valuable creation date information.

Blogger Pro to be offered free

I was surprised today to get an e-mail from Blogger saying that they now plan to roll the features formerly only available in the pay version, Blogger Pro, into their free version. That will make it possible for my faculty to obtain Blogger accounts and have RSS support without paying for anything. I guess this was made possible by Google's deep pockets since Google bought out Pyra labs, Blogger's original developers.