I arrived at the JISC Repositories and Preservation programme meeting to find out that FeedForward had been voted 2nd in a competition for the title of “Most Innovative Project”. Nice!
Anyway, I had to improvise a “poster” and demo in the corridor by the coffee machine. Thankfully Dave Flanders was on hand with a room full of big pens and flipchart paper for me to borrow:
FeedForward posters
Wow, its been a long time since I last posted. Well, we haven’t been completely idle, and we’ll be presenting the latest build of FeedForward at the Museum of Science and Industry on the 19th of March as part of the RSP Repository Software Day.
So come along and heckle!
Yesterday I was at the IMS summit in Birmingham, and we had a 15 minute slot to show off how SWORD works using FeedForward and Intralibrary. I’m glad to report it all went very smoothly. I demoed creating a new conduit using the SWORD wizard, and then dragging over a context with some posts in it, entering a comment and tags, and then off it went. Sarah Currier of Intrallect then showed how the posts had been published in Intralibrary as an IMS Content Package.
The nice thing about this demo is that concepts like “SWORD” and “IMS Content Packaging” are completely invisible to the user.
(Image by Mudeth, CC-BY)
Sarah Currier of Intrallect very bravely made a demo of FeedForward’s rather weakly tested Windows XP build to demonstrate interoperability using SWORD. You can find the details over on Neil’s blog.
Choice quote:
FeedForward and the SWORD desktop client were demoed at the recent MDR SIG meeting (see report here), and their benefits were/are obvious.
I’m glad it went well, although I wasn’t there in person, just crossing my fingers and helping Sarah deal with last minute issues. Turns out there were a few bugs and gotchas with Windows XP… and some different bugs and gotchas with Windows Vista. So much for cross-platform coding!
(image by Zana Stardust, CC-BY)
Yesterday I went to the MDR SIG meeting at Birkbeck College, London, and gave a demo of FeedForward. In particular I was showing off how to make a quick reading list from resources that had been aggregated from journal RSS feeds, blog feeds, and so on, and then share this as both Del.icio.us bookmarks, a blog post on WordPress, and also as a learning object on IntraLibrary. In each case the FeedForward services component works behind the scenes to generate the relevant API requests, in the last instance by dynamically constructing an IMS Content Package with Learning Object Metadata that gets deposited using SWORD. Despite the best efforts of the bizarre Birkbeck Wi-Fi security the demo worked fine!
One interesting coincidence is a post by Stephen Downes today called Finely Tuned Antennae; this is the slide I lead with, and comes from a discussion with Paul Walk on the topic of information usage flows, one that is very closely aligned with FeedForward’s design, which (to complete the circle) was also inspired by RSSWritr, a prototype developed by Stephen Downes.
EDIT: Catherine Howell was there too, yesterday, and you can read her blog post about it here.