{"id":1701,"date":"2008-04-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1970-01-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/?e=1701"},"modified":"2008-04-07T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1970-01-01T00:00:00","slug":"feedistan-non-programistan-exhibit-a-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/feedistan-non-programistan-exhibit-a-trail\/","title":{"rendered":"Feedistan – Non-Programistan- Exhibit: a trail"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Looking back on this post before I fire it off it seems even more of a mixed bag than usual. As usual fairly garbled, but the first half contains some wonderful links and the second what looks to me to be a great resource.<\/em><\/p>\n

I spent the first part of yesterday morning (and the last hour or so this morning) following a trail that either started in a tweet from cogdog<\/a> or a post<\/a> recent addition<\/a> to my feed reader.
Tony Hirst’s OUseful Info<\/a> is a great source of ‘mostly over my head’ mashup info and other stuff, eg: We Ignore RSS at OUr Peril<\/a> or « feedshow – A Feed Powered Web Page Presentation Tool<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

To Comrades in Non-Programistan – A Message from Feedistan<\/a> included a great youtube: DataPortability and Me (Get Your Data Out!)<\/a> and had me laughing. It also pointed to The Party Line<\/a> of The Peoples Republic of Non-Programistan<\/strong> which was created (as far as I can see) to support a presentation at the Symposium on Mashups<\/a>, you an watch the recording<\/a> of the Welcome to the People?s Republic of Non-Programistan<\/a> session which features laugh out loud fake Russian accents.<\/p>\n

The point of the Non-Programistana is to open up mashups to non-coders, although they will allow some html. They point to Exhibit<\/a> and give interesting examples: Industrial Warfare – Version 4<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This lead me to Exhibit<\/a> part of MITs SIMILE Project<\/a>:<\/p>\n

SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Exhibit<\/a> can be used to<\/p>\n

Create interactive data-rich web pages<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and there are some great examples that can be popped from the Exhibit<\/a> homepage.<\/p>\n

I have been talking to some Glasgow colleagues about filling the 5-14 database gap that has appeared when we got upgraded to windows xp. I had suggested a few online examples<\/a> that children could use for querying databases and Zoho Create<\/a> for creating databases. While the querying examples went down well, Zoho seemed too imageless for catching primary children’s imagination. It also look a little like a spreadsheet for some teachers. likewise lazybase<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Exhibit<\/a> looked like it might fill this gap, so I’ve spent the rest of yesterday morning playing with it. The Getting Started tutorial<\/a> is very straightforward and will allow you to work through an example<\/a> on your own desktop. I started with an idea from our own curriculum, information about the EU. The idea is that the children could research basic facts about the EU and add them to a google spreadsheet. With the number of countries in the EU a fair sized class could get one country each.
Exhibit allows you to build a simple html page which will read the spreadsheet webpage and create an interactive database. Amazingly it allows multiple views including a nice timeline and table views. One of the Exhibit examples incorporated famfamfam.com flag icons<\/a>, interestingly these are name with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes<\/a>, I could add a column to the spread sheet and include these, it was the easy to show the flag on the records:
<\/em>
I have been playing with<\/a> Google chart maps, which use the same iso code so it was simple enough to add these.
Anyway in a couple of hours i was able to put together a google spreadsheet<\/a> and a Exhibit Test<\/a>. The latter will need more work, but you can get the idea. I think this will work in class and hope to try it out next term. I need to know a bit more about logging on multiple uses with the same ip address to a spreadsheet, but I hope to quiz Tom Barrett<\/a> about that. I also need to find out a bit more about creating forms for google speadsheets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The workflow would go like this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I’d start a spreadsheet with the correct column headers <\/li>\n
  2. Put together a webpage to pull the data via exhibit.<\/li>\n
  3. The children would research the required info (wikipedia)<\/li>\n
  4. the children would add the info to the spreadsheet, directly or via a form<\/li>\n
  5. The children would query the webpage to compare EU countries.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    At the moment this would only work as a one off, a webpage would have to be created for each time the lesson was carried out for a class. A quick look at the Google Spreadsheets Data API<\/a> would suggest you could create a spreadsheet automatically, by uploading a blank this could then be loaded by a hph version of the Exhibit Test<\/a> page which would dynamically load different spreadsheets (with the same headers). Unfortunately this would violate the Party Line<\/a> of The Peoples Republic of Non-Programistan, and more realistically be beyond my limited skills.<\/p>\n

    As I just wrote at the start of this post, it is a bit of a rag bag, but it tells the tale of my Sunday morning’s fun, following a web of links and playing with a great tool. In the afternoon I went for a walk<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Looking back on this post before I fire it off it seems even more of a mixed bag than usual. As usual fairly garbled, but the first half contains some wonderful links and the second what looks to me to be a great resource. I spent the first part of yesterday morning (and the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mf2_syndication":[],"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"webmentions_disabled_pings":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[326,325,62,154,324,40,26,136],"post_format":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1701","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-wwwd","7":"tag-database","8":"tag-feedistan","9":"tag-google","10":"tag-mashup","11":"tag-non_programistan","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-twitter","14":"tag-web2","15":"kind-","16":"h-entry","17":"hentry"},"better_featured_image":null,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p57zFQ-rr","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1701"},{"taxonomy":"post_format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_format?post=1701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}