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The 2nd and 3rd of March saw the 7th annual Enhancement Themes conference. As with the past two year I was a delegate at this event, but this time in the slightly different role of one of the exhibitors. In between showcasing some of the JISC wares I managed to slip into some of the keynote sessions. Each year the Enhancement themes do a great job is finding presenters who are incredibly influential and thought provoking. This year my favourite was Professor George Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor of Higher Education at Indiana University Bloomington, and founding director of widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE*).

Unlike the NSS which is looking at general student satisfaction, NSSE is a survey which aims to “assess the extent to which students engage in educational practices associated with high levels of learning and development”. It assesses this by asking how students spend their time and what they gain from attending their institution. My understanding is that NSSE is

using engagement as an indicator of “grades, persistence, student satisfaction and gains across a range of desired outcomes”

The survey is broken into four main areas: student behaviours; institutional actions and requirements; reactions to the institution; and student background information. For examples of type of questions asked you can view past and present NSSE surveys.

The NSSE has been widely adopted in North America (US: 3million responses from 1,400 institutions; Canada: 64 HEIs), South Africa and Australia and been used since 2000 resulting in a rice dataset.

Student engagement varies more within than between institutions

The NSSE has found that there is more local than inter institutional variation in student engagement. i.e. there is little difference in student engagement between the best and the worse institutions, but the differences between institutional departments is major. 

‘How can you get students more engaged?’ I hear you ask, why with ‘high-impact’ learning activities. As it happens George has written book on the topic, High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Although it wasn’t explicitly mentioned I image George has used the NSSE survey to identify ‘high-impact’ activities. His top 10 were:

• First-Year Seminars and Experiences
• Common Intellectual Experiences
• Learning Communities
• Writing-Intensive Courses
• Collaborative Assignments and Projects
• “Science as Science Is Done”; Undergraduate Research
• Diversity/Global Learning
• Community-Based Learning
• Internships
• Capstone Courses and Projects

There are some Americanisms in this list but hopefully you get the picture. I would say all of these activities are reflected in the existing academic research on best teaching/learning practices.

Engaging in these activities George suggested that students are more likely to:

• Invest time and effort
• Interact with faculty and peers about substantive matters
• Experience diversity
• Get more frequent feedback
• Reflect & integrate learning
• Discover relevance of learning through real-world applications

The Enhancement Themes have already generated a number of resources covering these areas including research teaching linkages, integrative assessment and assessment, the first year and responding to student needs (as well as flexible delivery). The conference also saw the publication of 5 new briefing papers under the current ‘Graduates for the 21st Century strand:

• Assessment
• Employability
• First Year
• Research-Teaching Linkages
• Responding to Student Needs

In George’s presentation he highlighted three action steps:

1. Use engaging pedagogies campus wide
2. Put money where it will make a difference to student success
3. Ensure programs are high quality 

I’m sure you would agree that all of these are what we are striving for anyway and not particularly earth shattering. If you adopted the NSSE locally there is an opportunity to use the data diagnostically to identify the your ‘local variations’, identifying courses that are not engaging students. I’m sure many of you are already doing this through end of module surveys, but I would recommend looking at the NSSE questions to see if these need to be re-examined.

Slides for all the conference keynote sessions including George Kuh’s are available on the Enhancement Themes plenary presentations page (videos of the sessions will be available shortly).

*pronounced Nessie, hence the title of this post

Prof Moriarty's Law Class Using Clickers2
Originally uploaded by Phil's Fotos

As we start a new year now seems like an ideal opportunity to revisit some of my old posts, pull out some common themes and reflect on what was and potentially what will be.

For my first theme I want to revisit electronic voting systems (EVS). EVS has been used in education for a number of years. This particular technology has had a well documented positive impact the learner experience, particularly attainment and retention, yet still hasn’t received mass adoption. One of the reasons is probably the cost of bespoke hardware and software. With the increasing mass adoption of mobile phones with Internet connectivity via 3G or campus wi-fi networks there is increasing potential to use student owned devices for in-class voting.

Cans and strings

Over the past 12 months I’ve made a series of posts on how this model could be used. First was the very experimental ‘DIY-PI’. The thinking behind this was to run a local web server with very basic web based voting software which students could then interact with over a shared wi-fi connection. The result was very much a ‘two cans and a string’ solution and never intended as a final product. The post, DIY: A wi-fi student response system, outlines the argument for using mobile phones as voting handsets and containing links to a short demonstration video and the source code used to create DIY-PI.

One of the issues with DIY-PI is, whilst it uses existing open source technology, it requires custom coding to handle the voting and it is fair to say my efforts are very rough around the edge.

Twitter for voting

The model of voting via student owned devices was one I revisited later in the year with TwEVS. TwEVS removes the need for custom coding, instead it mashes existing free web services including twitter to allow electronic voting style interaction. The two posts which cover this are Twitter + voting/polling + Yahoo Pipes = TwEVS (The Making Of) and Electronic voting and interactive lectures using twitter (TwEVS).

This work culminated in a presentation at the University of St. Andrews for the eLearning Alliance. Even though this solution removes a lot of the techie programming it still requires a degree of knowledge to create and embed custom urls into PowerPoint.

Shortly after I made this presentation I was made aware of work by Timo Elliot which used the same concept of conducting votes via twitter but he has a much more elegant twitter integration with PowerPoint.

Voting via text (SMS)

One of the advantages I highlighted about using twitter for voting is that users can setup their account to update messages on twitter via text messaging (SMS). This means even the most basic phones without wireless access can be used, but it still requires students to register for twitter accounts. In the midst of my twitter-for-voting research I came across some other solutions which allow voting via SMS.

The first came courtesy of Sean Eby at polleverywhere.com. This service is specifically designed to make it easy to create and administer voting via SMS (as well as giving users the choice to respond via the web and twitter). One of the feature I like about Poll Everywhere is that they make it very easy to embed polls into your existing PowerPoint presentation. If you have less than 30 people responding to a poll then the service is free (perhaps not enough to test it properly in-class, but still a service worth looking at).

Along similar lines my colleague Adam Blackwood demonstrated how an application for Android mobile phones could be used for voting/polling. More details of this solution are here: ALT-C 2009 I: Mobile technology – proximity push and voting/polling on Android. This solution is slightly different to Poll Everywhere in that votes are administered from the tutors phone using their existing mobile number to collect responses.

A factor which will probably mean SMS voting won’t see mass adoption in the UK is the cost to students for sending a text message although changes in the way mobile contracts are promoted (bundling text messages) may be enough to convince more people to try this solution.

Future trends

It’s unlikely that voting will be for everyone but there is some examples of institutions using student owned phones for collecting responses. The trend appears to be using multiple means, integrating a number of social networking sites, dedicated web interfaces and SMS. An example of this is an application developed by Purdue University, which I highlighted in Hotseat: Any Mobile Will Do. This solution, whilst not explicitly used for voting, also highlights another future trend in this area. The move towards continuing in-class discussion outside the classroom, extending the time students spend actual thinking about new concepts and ideas.

[Final thought: I've been out of the loop with what EVS/clicker manufactures have been doing with their voting software (other than virtual handsets), but I'm sure they must be looking at a similar model of aggregating votes from different sources.]

Things have been quite on the blogging front as we dug out the tinsel to celebrate all things JISC at our Winter Fayre. We managed to squeeze almost 30 different keynotes, workshops and sessions into the day, including two by yours truly.

I had the honour of presenting a short overview of electronic voting present and future in ‘Ask the Audience’ and an opportunity to showcase, what has become a highly honed, Google Wave intro and overview.

I’ve attached both PowerPoints I used below which you are free to pick over and reuse if you like. Just to remind our supported institutions I am available for weddings, birthdays and staff development events (if you are not supported directly by us we are open to offers particularly if they require going to warmer climes ;)

[Both these presentations embed Flash into PowerPoint. To view when prompted you need to enable the content]

Ask The Audience *.ppt (3Mb)

Google Wave 101 *.ppt (1.4Mb)

It’s rare for me to have an idea of my own, instead I rely on mashing up ideas of others. A case in point is taking a post on Pontydysgu 20 things to do in the classroom with Wiffiti and David Hopkins PowerPoint: Embedding YouTube Video, which equals ‘Enabling micro-discussion in PowerPoint using Wiffiti’.

Some background – Wiffiti is a free web service which allows to to upload an image, users can then publish messages in real time which are overlaid. Message can be submitted via SMS, twitter, flickr or via the web. Below I’ve embedded the example Jenny Hughes used (if you don’t see swirly messages it is probably because your network goes through a proxy server. Potentially a big issue if using it on campus – I’ve let the developer know):

In Jenny’s post she list some educational uses of Wiffiti. The obvious application for me is to stimulate in-class discussion. Like EVS removing the stigma of putting your hand up with an anonymous communication channel. You could of course just like to the Wiffiti page from your presentation but having read David Hopkins how-to on embedding YouTube in PowerPoint I was inspired to look at Wiffitifying PowerPoint. 

Basically all you need to do is:

1. Create your page on Wiffiti
2. Copy the ‘Share this Screen – Movie url’
   [The next part is an edit of David’s instructions]
3. Go to the point in your presentation where you want the Wiffiti to be placed.
4. Make sure you can see the ‘Control Toolbox’ toolbar. [For Office 2007 users if you can't find the 'Control Toolbox' toolbar you might need to enable it by opening PowerPoint -> clicking on the Office icon (top left) -> click 'PowerPoint Options' and within the popular tab make sure the 'Show Developer tab in the Ribbon' is checked]
5. Select the ‘hammer / spanner’ looking icon and then select ‘Shockwave Flash object’ from the subsequent menu list.
6. Then drag the cross-hairs into a square area you want the video to be shown in. You’ll end up with a white box on the screen with two diagonal lines from corner to corner.
7. Right mouse-click in this box and select ‘Properties’ from the list.
8. In the empty ox next to the heading ‘Movie’ paste the URL of your Wiffiti.

Here is a PowerPoint file with the Wiffiti embedded. To see it work you need to be in presentation mode. You may also need to enable Active X Macros.

Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my current interests is using twitter as a live in-class voting tool (TwEVS). Today, via Jane Hart, I was made aware of ‘Free PowerPoint Twitter Tools’ developed by Timo Elliott.

Timo’s solution not only integrates voting within a PowerPoint presentation, but he has some other nice features including a real-time twitter ticker-tap and a feedback wall which pulls questions and response from twitter (shown below).

Using these tools is very easy and all you need to do is download the PowerPoint .ppt file with embedded tools and instructions from Timo’s site (unfortunately PowerPoint for Mac isn’t support yet).

The technology behind this solution is simple Adobe Flash which was developed using SAP BusinessObjects Dashboarding product, Xcelsius (don’t worry all you need to use this solution is PowerPoint and Adobe Flash Player). Initially the PowerPoint file didn’t work for me but thanks to a suggestion from Timo it was traced to a problem with my Flash Player installation. If you experience problems I would suggest following the uninstall/install instructions provided by Adobe.

When I presented my solution using twitter and yahoo pipes for voting last week  I would say most of the interest was in combining in-class and out-of-class activity. Timo’s solution potential fits in well with this giving an easy way to use voting as well as a the feedback wall which could be used at any point during a presentation to stimulate dialogue.

Yesterday I presented TwEVS to the e-Learning Alliance FE/HE SIG held at University of St. Andrews. My presentation (including audio) is below:

The day included presentations on remote teaching using video conferencing, electronic voting systems and an introduction to twitter, so finishing on TwEVS seemed to round the day off nicely.

When I get a chance I would like to post some reflections on the other presentations …

Originally uploaded by Dan's Photos

For the next post in my ALT-C series I’m going to highlight a session I didn’t actually attend but immediately regretted when comments started filtering in on twitter.

The session was based around the paper by Rodway-Dyer, Dunne and Newcombe from University of Exeter which summaries a study of audio and visual feedback used in two 1st year undergraduate classes. Click here for the paper and abstract.

Comments I picked up on this paper via twitter appeared to show audio feedback was not well received. Issues highlighted were:

• the finding that “76% of students wanted face-to-face from a tutor in addition to other forms of feedback” [@adamread, @JackieCarter]
• students found that receiving negative audio comments was harder than when written [@adamread, @ali818, @narcomarco]. Although this is still open to debate as @gillysalmon said that “duckling project at Leicester has found human voice easier to give negative feedback by audio than text”

Obviously there are issues with making assumptions based on a few 140 character tweets and it should be noted that the authors conclude that “overall, it seems that "there is considerable potential in using audio and screen visual feedback to support learning”, although students did express concerns in a number of areas.

Having had a chance to digest the paper the question I’m left with is how much of the negative experiences were a result of the wider assessment design rather than the use of audio feedback in itself. For example, reading the focus group discussions for audio feedback in geography I noted that:

• students were not notified that they would be receiving audio feedback;
• that despite the tutors best attempts students hadn’t engaged with assessment criteria; and
• that this was the first essay students submitted at university level and they were unclear of the expected standards.

Similar issues to these were addressed in the Re-Engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project, which produced an evolving set of assessment principles. Principles which could be successfully applied to the geography example might be:

Help clarify what good performance is – this could be achieved in a number of ways including creating an opportunity for the tutor to discuss criteria with students, or perhaps providing a exemplar of previous submissions with associated audio feedback.

Providing opportunities to act on feedback – as this was the students first submission providing feedback on a draft version of their essay not only allows students to act on feedback (it’s not surprising when students ignore feedback if they have no opportunity to use it).

Facilitates self-assessment and reflection – One of the redesigns piloted during REAP was the Foundation Pharmacy class, in which students submitted a draft using a pro-forma similar to that used by tutors to grade their final submission. Students were required to reflect on distinct sections of their essay, which again also allowed them to engage with the assessment criteria.

Encourage positive motivational beliefs – using the staged feedback described above would perhaps also address the issue of students becoming disillusioned.

Talking to a friend during the lunch break the research methodology used by the authors was also mentioned, in particular the use of ‘stimulated recall’. For this the authors played back examples of audio feedback to the tutor asking him to explain his thought processes and reflect on how his students would have responded to his comments. This methodology seems particularly appropriate to evaluate the use of audio feedback, and is something I want to take a closer look at.

A moment of serendipity

Whilst searching the twitter feed for comments on the session I noticed a tweet by @newmediac which was promoting a free webinar in which  “Phil Ice shares research on benefits of audio feedback” (here’s the full tweet). The session has already passed  but the recording for this event is here.

Moment of serendipity

The presenter, Phil Ice, has been working on audio feedback in the US for a number of years and has a number of interesting findings (and research methodologies) I haven’t seen in the UK.

For example, Ice and his team report:

students used content for which audio feedback was received approximately 3 times more often than content for which text-based feedback [was] received”

and that

students were 5 to 6 times more likely to apply content for which audio feedback was received at the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy then content for which text-based feedback was received”.

These results were from a small scale study of approximately 30 students so aren’t conclusive. Ice has also conducted a larger studies with over 2,000 students which used the Community of Inquiry Framework Survey. Positive differences were found across a number of indicators including excessive use of audio to address feedback at lower levels is perceived as a barrier by students.

Ice has also conducted studies which breaks audio feedback into four types: global – overall quality; mid level – clarity of thought/argument; micro – word choice/grammar/punctuation; and other – scholarly advice. The study indicates that students prefer a combination of audio and text for global and mid-level comments.

Findings from Ice have been submitted for publication in the Journal of Educational Computing Research (which will soon feature a special issue on ‘Technology-Mediated Feedback for Teaching and Learning’).

Screenshot showing inline audio comments

Finally, I would like to mention the method Ice uses for audio feedback. He uses the audio comment tool within Acrobat Pro 8 to record comments ‘inline’. This appears to be particularly useful for students to relate comments to particular sections of their submitted work. Click here for a sample PDF document with audio feedback (this isn’t compatible with all PDF readers – I’ve tested on Acrobat Reader and Foxit Reader).

Hopefully this post has not only stimulated some ideas in the use of audio feedback, but also highlight a range of methodologies to effectively evaluate it.

Abstract-Waves Blue
Originally uploaded by fabioperez

Just back from ALT-C 2009 having been asked to present a session with colleagues on EduApps (this resulted from JISC RSC UK’s donation of an EduApps stick to all conference delegates and ALT members). Over the next couple of days I’ll be making a series of posts to highlight some of the best bits.

For my first post in this series I’m going to highlight some of the ideas presented by my colleague Adam Blackwood at RSC South East. Adam, amongst other things, is a mobile guru and in his session he highlighted some interesting tools [Click here for a copy of Adam’s slides and his Mobile Technology Summary Sheet].

Proximity push using TextBlue

First there is TextBlue.This company specialises in ‘proximity marketing’, using Bluetooth to push information primarily to mobile devices. This company has a range of products from plugin dongles for your laptop to ‘broadcasters’ which can push content out for up to 1000 meters.

Adam demonstrated how this technology could be used to push learning content to student owned phones (or any Bluetooth enabled device). The only restriction you have on the file types you can use is what is viewable on the student’s device. You probably also want to keep file sizes down because of the transfer time so the 30 minute podcast might be out of the question, but this technology could be ideal for distributing quizzes etc (something you could easily create with Mobile Study, which is free).

There is nothing stopping you transfer files via bluetooth without TextBlue. Doing it this way is very cumbersome and the TextBlue software turns it into a one click solution. A demo version of TextBlue software is available on request – Contact TextBlue. 

SMS polling/voting

I’ve been aware of SMS polling/voting services for sometime. All the examples I’ve previously looked at use the model where the hosting/collation of votes has been handled by a 3rd party site. Adam highlighted a new model which puts the editing/collation software on your own phone, students responding to your mobile number, not one provided by a 3rd party.

The software to do this currently only seems to be available for Android mobile devices. There are a couple of software applications that can do this but Adam was highlighting ‘Polls’ by Pollimath:

The concept is simple; draft the opinion poll on your phone, add your voters and open your poll. Your list of voters would receive an SMS and/or E-Mail notification. They vote via the Web or SMS Reply as per the options selected by the pollster. The pollster can see the poll statistics and the voting details (who voted for what choice).  

Pollimath Concept Diagram

There is a free ‘Lite’ version of Pollimath which is limited to 10 voters per poll, but at $3.95 the full version is very reasonably priced. Pollimath has some nice features like being able to send vote invitations via email as well as SMS, allowing you to use multiple input methods, and being able to view the results online. This is a relatively new application and some more work needs to be done to graphically represent poll results as well as an easier way to distribute polls links but so far it looks very promising.

An alternative to Pollimath is ‘Handy Poll’s’ by Marc Tan. This has a better graphical results view, but doesn’t have as many of the features of Pollimath.

Augmented reality

The final thing Adam showed us was some ‘augmented reality’. With this the camera on your phone is combined with your location and direction information so that additional information can be overlaid. One of the most popular working examples is Layar for Android, but the video below shows where the next generation of augmented reality is going:

TwEVS (Original image 'disk bird' by r8r)
Originally uploaded by m.hawksey

Last week I posted a method for combining twitter and Yahoo Pipes to allow electronic voting (EVS) style interaction within lectures, TwEVS [see Twitter + voting/polling + Yahoo Pipes = TwEVS (The Making Of)]. At the time I was only interested in documenting the development of this ‘mashup’ but felt a follow up post would be useful to highlight: how to use TwEVS; advantages of using twitter for student response; and areas for future development / discussion.

How to use TwEVS

Before using TwEVS there is some preparatory work in terms of getting students to register an account with twitter and possibly establishing some house rules (usage policy, appropriate use). You should also have an idea of the questions you would like to ask, which may sound simple but to fully engage and enhance learning isn’t (the most common mistake I see is setting trivial questions, which are suitable while you find your feet, but if continued will the students cue to disengage).

Another thing to consider is the format of the hashtags you want to use. Hashtags are a simple way to add metadata to a variety of information making it easier to search and filter. TwEVS requires a unique hashtag for each question you ask so if you are planning to uses this over a semester your might use a combination of an abbreviated course code and date (e.g. #code-year-weekNumber = #CS101-09-wk1)

Pedagogically and technically there are a number of ways you can integrate TwEVS. For more on the pedagogy visit Steve Draper’s ILIG site.  My suggestion for technical integration would be to have a slide with the question/options and instructions on how to respond e.g. tweet ‘#CS101-09-wk1 A’ etc. After students had time to respond you could then either open the TwEVS Pipe in a browser, enter the hashtag where prompted then click ‘Run Pipe’ (you can also limit the number of response options, which might help filter out malicious tweets or mistypes). Clicking the ‘TwEVS Result for …’ link opens the graph. If you wanted to streamline this a little you can use the free LiveWeb PowerPoint plugin which allows you to embed live webpages.

Alternativly you could prepare a custom link for each question  within your PowerPoint (like this example). As Yahoo Pipes uses information in the url these could be created beforehand.

Below is an example url for the poll #twevspoll limited to 2 responses:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=40e4326b88a69c2d6287ae124314fd7c&_render=rss&limit=2&q=%23twevspoll&vm=r

[Edit: Tony Hirst has pointed out that this url can also be written as http://pipes.yahoo.com/mashe/twevs?&_render=rss&limit=2&q=%23twevspoll&vm=r]

[Another Edit: if yo are wondering why the links above don't return graphs it is because the twitter search by default only pulls tweets from the last 10 days]

The first part of this url will always remain the same allowing you to change the range of response by adjusting the limit (e.g. to limit to 5 would be limit=5) and the hashtag for each question, by changing the text after ‘q=’ (the ‘#’ is replaced by the more url friendly ‘%23’).

Example chart produced by TwEVS

Its worth noting that Yahoo stores a copy of each pipe run so when a pipe is run again before an allotted amount of time has passed it just pulls results from memory and doesn’t necessarily check twitter for the latest tweets. So if you are creating urls to use in class I would advise not accessing them until you need them. Alternatively you can also trick Yahoo into getting the latest data by modifying the url slightly, the easiest way is changing the limit number.

Advantages of using twitter (or other status update sites) for EVS style interaction

Zero cost – the biggest advantage perhaps for the majority of people is cost. There are no handsets or specialist software to buy. You don’t need to worry about replacement batteries. You don’t need to worry about lost of stolen handsets.

Multi-device – you can update your twitter status from a wide range of devices phones to laptops and everything in between (and using SMS updates means even the most basic phone could be used). Its also very apparent that manufactures are currently falling over themselves to get twitter (and other social networking software) built into their devices (my TV even has a twitter client).

EVS^PLUS – using twitter as a EVS allows a natural extension to existing pedagogies. For example, the TwEVS mashup is programmed only to aggregate responses after the hashtag. This means that as well as asking students to indicate a response (A, B, C, D etc.), the tutor could ask students to prefix their response with why they believe the answer is correct. Using twitter to collect responses also opens up a huge degree of flexibility in terms of asking questions on-the-fly, removing some of the restrictions imposed by bespoke EVS software (and you are obviously not limited to A, B, C results).

Example of an individual TwEVS tweet

Future development/discussion

So far I’ve painted a rosy picture of twitter/EVS integration but there are some obvious issues. One of the biggest is there aren’t that many twitter users and even less under the age of 24. So to use this model would require proactive encouragement from tutors for students to create accounts. There is also issue around the personal/work divide. Will students be happy to include responses in their public timeline?

Another drawback is voting isn’t entirely anonymous and students would even have the ability to check other student responses before replying (which is event easier if students follow their friends). The proposed system is also open to malicious attack. As everything after the hashtag is collected as a response students could get up to all sorts of hijinx to ruin your lovely chart.

Finally something not to be overlooked is the possible distraction element of actively opening back channel communication, although I’m sure there will be situations where this could enhance learning, and giving students an excuse to get lost in their mobile phone.

Putting all these issues aside for one moment, the model of using twitter as a EVS offers a lot of flexibility. As twitter’s search results can be pulled as RSS XML their is endless scope to harvest results and reuse them in a number of ways using either via in-house systems or existing web services. For example it would be very easy to develop a system which removed the dependency on Yahoo Pipes altogether, storing results in a separate local database which could be linked to a student management system or even a custom portal which allowed the continuation of discussion and learning outside the classroom. You also don’t need to only support just one platform, combining results from various status update sites like FriendFeed would be very easy to integrate.

In summary, I hope I’ve stimulated the grey cells and demonstrated one way in which twitter could be used to enhance teaching and learning as a EVS alternative. TwEVS should should be seen as a working prototype and there is no doubt a lot more research to be done in this area. I’m sure with the hype associated with twitter it would be relatively easy to get some project funding to develop some of the ideas outlined above further.

TwEVS (Original image 'disk bird' by r8r)
Originally uploaded by m.hawksey

Recently David Muir of EdCompBlog was looking for a way to use Twitter as a personal response systems (also known as audience response systems, electronic voting systems, clickers …). I’ve previously covered this technology in DIY: A wi-fi student response system, where I propose a solution for creating a voting system which uses wireless enabled devices, so my ears immediately pricked up when I read David’s problem.

At the time David explored a number of solutions, including both free and fee paying, but was left scratching his head. Reading his post I immediately thought of Tony Hirst’s ‘Who’s Tweeting Our Hashtag?’ mashup where he uses Yahoo Pipes to find who’s been tweeting with a particular hashtag. This pipe calculates how many times an author tweets using a particular tag. Tony does an excellent job of explaining how the pipe is designed and modifying it for David required the smallest modification (changing the unique filter from item.author.uri to item.title).

My modified pipe is here. To use it the presenter would pose their question then ask students to tweet a specific hashtag followed by their response (e.g. #comp101 A). Once the responses are in running the pipe entering the hashtag gives a summary of responses (shown).

This pipe has the basic functionality of aggregating responses but having worked with voting systems for a number of years I know the best way to summaries the data so that the information can be conveyed and interpreted quickly is by graphing it.

Having previously used the Google Chart API I wanted to use this to create a graph of the data within the pipe. I found a couple of examples of existing pipes which already did this (including one by Tony Hirst), but couldn’t find a way to build the url required for Google Chart within the pipe. Knowing Tony had a lot more experience of pipes I chanced my luck and dropped him an email. Tony got back to me with some key suggestions. Firstly, I should consider processing  the data outside the pipe, and secondly it would be easier to rename some of the items to make them easier to grab.

To process the data outside the pipe I had to use the ‘Web Service’ module. This is designed to push out the data in a JSON format so that it can be processed by an external website and passed back into the pipe, basically a black box.

Collecting the data and processing it was straight forward enough. I had lots of problems passing the data back to the pipe and my first attempts to re-encode the result as JSON failed (I think because of illegal characters in the Google Chart url). On the advice of Tony I tried passing it back as a RSS XML item which worked better. Pipes still had problems parsing the data, which I was able to definitely  trace to the Google Chart url. This was easily solved by automatically converting the chart url into a tinyurl.

The code for my little black box is here (I’m not a professional programmer so I’m sure there is a lot of tiding up which can be done). Basically all it does is collect the data from pipes, creates a Google Chart url and then uses this to create a RSS item which is passed back to the pipe.

The final TwEVS Yahoo Pipe is here and I’ve also embedded a poll result below. So if you like TwEVS tweet ‘#twevspoll yes’ or if not ‘#twevspoll no’.

There are numerous ways you could pedagogically and technically use this pipe which are worth a separate post in their own right (something for next week). In the meantime I welcome any suggestions for improvements or any other general feedback (just use the comments link/box below).

BTW David ended up having a number of suggestions which he has followed up in Vote with Twitter. My thanks also go to Tony Hirst for his advice.