Tag: debian-en

Handling video files produced for a MOOC on Windows with git and git-annex

This post is intended to document some elements of workflow that I’ve setup to manage videos produced for a MOOC, where different colleagues work collaboratively on a set of video sequences, in a remote way.

We are a team of several schools working on the same course, and we have an incremental process, so we need some collaboration over a quite long period of many remote authors, over a set of video sequences.

We’re probably going to review some of the videos and make changes, so we need to monitor changes, and submit versions to colleagues on remote sites so they can criticize and get later edits. We may have more that one site doing video production. Thus we need to share videos along the flow of production, editing and revision of the course contents, in a way that is manageable by power users (we’re all computer scientists, used to SVN or Git).

I’ve decided to start an experiment with Git and Git-Annex to try and manage the videos like we use to do for slides sources in LaTeX. Obviously the main issue is that videos are big files, demanding in storage space and bandwidth for transfers.

Continue reading “Handling video files produced for a MOOC on Windows with git and git-annex”

A howto record a screencast on Linux and tablet

I’ve documented the process of how I’m trying to perform DIY screencast recording, for the needs of a MOOC.

I’m working on my Debian or Ubuntu desktop, using an external graphic tablet with integrated display for annotating slides.

The main software used for the process are xournal for annotating PDFs and vokoscreen for the screen and video recording.

Here is the documentation : http://www-public.telecom-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/screencast-linux.html

And here’s the companion video : https://youtu.be/YxcUNqXPYZE

I hope this is useful to some.

How to publish an HTML5+RDFa Web site from org-mode

I’m a big fan of org-mode (see previous posts), and I’ve started maintaining (sic) my professional webpage(s) with it.

But I’ve also recently tried and publish some more Semantic/Linked Data aware documents too (again, previous posts).

Ideally, I think my preferred workflow for publishing articles or documents of some importance, would be to author them in org-mode, and then publish them as HTML5 including RDFa meta-data and annotations. Instead, I’ve more frequently been doing conversions of org-mode to LaTeX, in order to submit a printable version, and later-on decided to convert the LaTeX to HTML5+RDFa…

But one of the issues is how to properly embed the RDF meta-data inside the org-mode documents, so that the syntax is both compact and expressive enough.

I doubt there’s a universal solution, given that RDF tends to be complex, and graphs may not project easilly along a mainly linear structure of an org-mode document, but anyway, there seems to be possible middle grounds that are practically good enough.

I’ve tried and implement a solution, which reuses the principles set by John Kitchin in Extending the org-mode link syntax with attributes, i.e. implementing an HTML exporter for a particular custom link type, which will convert the plist-like syntax to some RDFa constructs.

Here’s a description of the whole solution : http://www-public.telecom-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/test-org-publishing-rdfa.html

The nice thing about org-mode, and its litterate programming babel environment, is that it allows to embed the code of the links exporter inside the org document, avoiding to dissociate the converter from the document’s source, making it auto-complete.

Next step will probably be to author a paper (or convert back a “preprint” of mines) with org-mode, in order to provide Linked Research meta-data.

Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime, I welcome any improvement to the org/babel/elisp setup.

Edit: I’ve recorded a webcast to provide a bit more details, available on YouTube : https://youtu.be/OyI3DVqllx4

Publishing my papers as Linked Research

I intend to make the extra effort of republishing my own research papers as Linked Research, i.e. in a form readable by humans (HTML5), but also embedding meta-data (as RDF) for machine processing.

I’ve started with Authoritative Linked Data descriptions of Debian source packages using ADMS.SW (a good candidate, as it deals with Linked Data ;).

You’ll notice the menu which helps select different style sheets for preparing clean printable versions, not far from the LaTeX output usually converted to PDF.

I hope this will pave the way to more Linked Research, and less opaque publications.

The only hassle at the moment is the conversion from LaTeX to HTML5 which I’m doing manually, in Emacs + nxml-mode.

Update: Check the preprint links in my publications page, for more papers.

New short paper : “Designing a virtual laboratory for a relational database MOOC” with Vagrant, Debian, etc.

Here’s a short preview of our latest accepted paper (to appear at CSEDU 2015), about the construction of VMs for the Relational Database MOOC using Vagrant, Debian, PostgreSQL (previous post), etc. :

Designing a virtual laboratory for a relational database MOOC

Olivier Berger, J Paul Gibson, Claire Lecocq and Christian Bac

Keywords: Remote Learning, Virtualization, Open Education Resources, MOOC, Vagrant

Abstract: Technical advances in machine and system virtualization are creating opportunities for remote learning to provide significantly better support for active education approaches. Students now, in general, have personal computers that are powerful enough to support virtualization of operating systems and networks. As a conse- quence, it is now possible to provide remote learners with a common, standard, virtual laboratory and learning environment, independent of the different types of physical machines on which they work. This greatly enhances the opportunity for producing re-usable teaching materials that are actually re-used. However, configuring and installing such virtual laboratories is technically challenging for teachers and students. We report on our experience of building a virtual machine (VM) laboratory for a MOOC on relational databases. The architecture of our virtual machine is described in detail, and we evaluate the benefits of using the Vagrant tool for building and delivering the VM.

TOC :

  • Introduction
    • A brief history of distance learning
    • Virtualization : the challenges
    • The design problem
  • The virtualization requirements
    • Scenario-based requirements
    • Related work on requirements
    • Scalability of existing approaches
  • The MOOC laboratory
    • Exercises and lab tools
    • From requirements to design
  • Making the VM as a Vagrant box
    • Portability issues
    • Delivery through Internet
    • Security
    • Availability of the box sources
  • Validation
    • Reliability Issues with VirtualBox
    • Student feedback and evaluation
  • Future work
    • Laboratory monitoring
    • More modular VMs
  • Conclusions

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