Want to do an ECDL but don’t run MS Office? There is an alternative.

The INGOTS

QCA accredited in the UK, and coming to countries all over the world - the InterNational Grades in Office Technology is a platform-agnostic approach to computer education.

It’s projects like this which will help the widespread adoption of non-MS products in both Education and Public Sector institutions. Please take a look and consider mentioning the benefits to your friends/relatives/neighbours/milkman/strangers.

Great Work.

I’ve never written about what I do in the open source world, mainly because I’m still learning to program, and thus have been unable to contribute much in the way of direct code.  It is said (in The Dilbert Principle) by Scott Adams, that only the people of whom their skillset is not sufficiently developed to help a project become managers.  Currently, therefore, my prospects my lie in management.

That’s not entirely true.  Although I’m not a programmer (yet.. I hope to learn enough to earn the title) I do spend alot of time doing Linux sys administration.  If I were not working with other people, it would be a very difficult and time consuming task.  My role is to get things installed and configured, and any shell programs that need writing to automate the process I pass along to another programmer in the company with varied levels of instruction for what I want to be written.  It’s not the most exciting of work, but at least I’m doing some work that can be paid for by a client rather than taken out of the ‘development’ budget of our organisation.

Instead of harking back to how I got into open source in the first place, I’ll begin with how I got employment.  I had applied for a marketing internship at Bentley Motors, based in Crewe where I was at University.  Despite applying way back in October, and getting irrelgular emails saying (you’ve made it past the nth stage of selection) I managed to fail at what would probably be the least practical stage - two weeks before the internship started.  Having managed to get very excited at the opportunity, and after conning myself into thinking it was my right to get the internship, I was left in the lurch.  With only two weeks before any other internships started, the chances of me finding another were massively slim.  I though therefore, as I was not in dire need of the cash, that I’d spend the summer contributing to the marketing efforts of OpenOffice.org and promoting Open Source in general.

I also sent some emails out to the ODF (OpenDocumentFellowship) and OOo lists in order to see if anyone had need of some marketing help.  Unfortunately I had a few replies, but the people who were able to offer me employment were in impractical locations.

I set up the domain www.whatisfloss.co.uk and set about creating a one-stop-shop that people with little/no interest in open source could be sent to in order to get a general overview of the benefits of FLOSS.  My first draft of the site was content rich, but due to my ignorance I had created it using dreamweaver.  It’s nice to get flamed by people telling you how hypocritical you are for using proprietary software to create a FLOSS site.

Anyway, that was really an eye opener, and I tried quite a few FLOSS desktop applications to re-create the site.  It was only when I discovered the wonderful abbreviation ‘CMS’ that my love for all things open source was re-kindled.  I started with joomla, then progressed to drupal with a few others in between, and was suitably impressed.  This was all in the space of two weeks.

Approximately half was through the second week an email turned up in my inbox.  It was a simple email congratulating me for my work on www.whatisfloss.co.uk - saying that the essence of the site was exactly what this man’s company were trying to promote.  He also used the phrase ‘I hope that we can work together in the future to fulfill our mutual aims.’  Cor blimey gov - this was a fantastic email.  I did some research on the company and found it was based in Manchester, 30 miles from Crewe.  I decided to respond with a slightly cheeky email, along the lines of ‘you said you’d like to work with me in the future - is there any chance you’d like to work with me now and employ me as an intern?’

It was a bit of a gamble I felt, but a necessary one.  I met up with him, and a partner at a meeting room in Manchester, and discussed what it was to be an intern.  My take was the following:

“An internship is the chance for a person to gain experience in industry who has had little or no previous experience.  A reduction in the pay comparable to a person employed permanently in the same role may be implemented as a balance to the worth of the experience in the long term.”

I found this to be a very acceptable means of communicating what an internship was worth to me.  Although taken on to do the marketing, I worked two days a week on ‘linux admin’.  It was also the first time that I’d seen other computers running linux than my own - and was quite surreal the first time I saw it.  As the summer progressed the marketing work dried up and my linux admin work grew.  I was building an open source office server to compete with the MS Exchange server.  At the end of the internship there was a couple of weeks more work in order to get the prototype up and running for ourselves, but that was done (by me getting a part time contract through my final year at University) and the server was complete.  Fully documented instructions on our private wiki).  Despite doing two server installs, the company has thus far been too busy to automate the installation process, but once that is complete we should be able to release code.  (We’ve already contributed certain things back to the horde project - bug fixes as well as fresh code.)

The Gnome Desktop is a Graphical Environment for the Linux operating system. It is the graphical layer of the operating system that is presented to the user on the screen. The imminent introduction of a new interface in the release of Windows Vista means that Interface Design is currently being heavily promoted and scrutinised. Since 2002, the Gnome Desktop Project have started two sub-projects concerned with usability and interface design. This essay will attempt to outline areas in which developers have utilised cognitive psychology theory, areas in which it could be developed, and areas in which it has been misappropriated.

Information Architects mostly come from backgrounds related to cognitive psychology. Their focus is on understanding the user’s interactions with the computer, from mental categorisation to actually learning how to utilise computer programs. Gould and Boies (1983) propose that the user interface should be designed by psychologists, however, due to their being few people with the necessary repertoire of skills, this is unlikely. There is a lack of studies into the decision-making processes in interface design, possibly due to the fact that system development is so confidential. The reason why an “Open Source” Desktop environment was chosen, was the benefit of transparency in development, as all development information is freely available from the GNOME Community.

Interface design is a multi-faceted discipline, with many different cognitive applications. As the desktop interface is a graphical environment, visual perception becomes an important factor in the design. In a graphical environment, it is often visual cues that lead the user through the interface. However, Card et al (1984) suggest there is very little systematic understanding of the interaction between the display and the user’s ability to perform cognitive tasks.

Card, Pavel and Farrel (1984) suggest that windowing (the interface employed by Microsoft Windows ©, and also the GNOME Desktop) is more conducive to assisting human performance, as it also accesses to multiple sources of information, whilst allowing these sources to be combined. Windows are also good as reminders, as they function as “breadcrumb trails” in the identification of their content. Recently there has been a new feature added to GNOME, to enable a 3D Desktop. The main feature is that four sides of a 3D cube are used as Desktops, and the user can rotate the cube in order to work on any desktop concurrently. The evolved cognitive abilities of being able to navigate positionally and geographically are now put to use, something that was previously unexploited by a windowed interface.

Gestalt theory espouses that proximity infers commonality. This application of cognitive theory is apparent throughout the interface, with tool bars and menus being placed in horizontal groups. The Gestalt law of similarity is also adhered to, with menus congruently animated, and icon sizes being consistent with the rest of the other icons in their group.

Askwall (1985) conducted a study to identify the ease of reading on a computer screen, in comparison to paper. He found that whilst the reading speed between the two media did not differ significantly, the ability to search through the document did, with many participants only being able to search through half as much material on screen as they did on paper. However, there have been many advances in screen technology since the study was conducted in 1985, with font rendering improving and the introduction of more colourful and dynamic displays.

Raskin (2000) argues that the purpose of an interface is to enable an automation of a task. The theoretical concept of neural pathways are echoed in the idea of “global functions.” Functions that are used in one interface should be consistent across the rest in order to not only save on learning time, but reduce conflict. If a particular function has one outcome in one program, and a different outcome in another, it will be easier to forget, or at worst misappropriate. Withrow (2003) postulates that this concept can be defined as transference; those functions that are congruent with past experiences. Positive transference when the function behaves as expected, and negative transference when there is a lack of congruence.

The execution of computer-based procedures changes systematically as learning progresses. A QWERTY keyboard may take many weeks to learn, yet someone with experience at using on may find it an intuitive interface for typing. Shiffrin and Dumais (1981) argue that most skilled activity is underlyed by automatic processing, highlighting that automation is no necessarily the skill itself, but a component of the skill, as skilled performance is more than the sum of its automated components (Logan, 1985).

Schneider and Fisk (1980) note that the automation of action is globally acquired, in that one learns how to catch an object, rather than learns how to catch a specific ball thrown at a certain trajectory. This has particular relevance to the GNOME Desktop environment, as many people using it have come from a Microsoft Environment. The main global functions are similar to those used in Microsoft Windows, however, there are also many differences. However, it has been noted that most functions one learns on a Microsoft Machine can be transferred across to the GNOME Linux Desktop.

The transition from declarative to procedural knowledge, or explicit to implicit knowledge is of major concern to user interface designers. Human Computer interaction is never going to be perfect, due to the “human factor.” However, consistency, such as knowing the exact behaviour of the delete key in any application can make such activities appear automated and skilful. The designers’ task is therefore to create an interface that is as automatic as possible, without becoming rigid and insensitive to unusual circumstance.

A good example of correctly applied cognitive theory is that of a deletion message (Gardiner and Christie, 1987). Currently, when a user is about to delete an item, a message pops up saying “Are you sure?” advising the user to click yes or no. Due to the fact that the user has automated the process of clicking “Yes” to get through dialogue boxes, there is a high likelihood that the user will click “Yes” without reading the message. A better interface from a cognitive perspective would be to ask the user to press <x> to complete the command (where <x> is a random letter).

Cognitive studies into the acquisition, storage and retrieval of memory are plentiful, as memory is concept integral to cognitive psychology. There have been many applications of cognitive studies on memory in interface design. Some designers took the work done by Miller (1956) on the size of short term memory, and applied it, incorrectly, to the number of options that should be in a menu. However, because the menu is always on display, this research has more to do with the number of pages/links one can click through before forgetting where one started.

The way in which data entered into a computer is handled is not conducive to a good interface, according to Raskin, (2000). He argues that information entered into a computer should be treated as sacred, and should be fully recoverable, even after deletion. Whilst this has obvious implications from a physical storage perspective, it poses an interesting concept. Computers are one of few things that one can put something into, and it be lost completely.

Current computer design means that the user has to learn the interface. Whilst this may have been acceptable for the pioneering work done in information technology, Mahdi Abdulrazak (2004), a member of the Iraqi Linux Users Group, writes that perhaps the interface should learn the user. An example of this concept is a program written for disabled communication company, ACE. Once the user has selected a letter on the touch screen, the letters more commonly used next then appear bigger. This has major advantages from people with deficient motor reactions, as the interface also learns words that the user uses more often, making these sequences more prominent in selection.

The actual physical input of data into a computer is something that has been studied extensively. Card, Burr and English (1978) demonstrated the superiority of the mouse over the joystick, in the context of deriving models for the prediction of human performance, whilst Goodwin (1975) had demonstrated the efficiency of the light pen and gun over a badly designed keyboard. Haller, Mutscler and Voss (1984) concluded that it was the compatibility of the light pen, giving feedback is visual tactual and proprioceptive modes, that inferred its superiority. Finney (1997) conducted an experiment on the effect of Delayed Auditory Feedback on rhythm-tapping, and found that the delay causing maximum impairment, was not fixed, but was rate-dependent. This has consequences for Human Computer Interaction, indicating that consistency is more important than immediacy for data feedback.

There is a wide variety of cognitive theory being applied to information architecture. Rather than just creating an interface which interfaces the code with a graphical display, designers are being more directed to interfacing with a user (Nilsen, 1999), with many project now running with design consultancy from cognitive psychologists in order to understand the human computer interaction. Whilst there is still a lack of necessary skills in this regard, it is starting to be developed further, with the introduction of the 3D desktop, and new studies into input methods and user feedback. One of the biggest advantages of the GNOME Desktop is that of user feedback, in that users are directly contributing to the development of the interface. Whilst in isolation, this may prevent the introduction of true innovation, it serves as an empirical feedback mechanism for developers to further tailor their interfaces to the users, as recommended by cognitive psychologists.

References

I know that many people promote the benefits of open source software, and there are many.. but there is also a greater question of the benefits surrounding adapting an “open source” philosophy.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) began as the results of a computer company not opening its software up to an academic institution so that academics could analyse and learn from the source code. To me, this seems like a perfectly acceptable reason to reject software in an academic institution, and I admire them for doing so. However, academia has got increasingly lazy.

I recently created and ran a web-based experiment using a SSL apache webserver, and php-mysql for a cognitive psychology project at MMU Cheshire. It was extremely well-received by the academic staff, a couple of which urged that I write a report so that my web-based project could be published. I have yet to write the report, due to a lack of time, (I’m busy publishing blogs and writing dissertations,) and to do with the representation to the target audience.

It was my first real programming project. I have been playing with Linux for the past couple of years, and contributing the community in other ways, but this was my first software project. 32 hours later, and with the help of a trial edition flash movie maker (due to ease of use, rather than lack of technology on the part of OSS) I had created the site. I was really pleased with how the experiment went, and I managed to complete the experiment successfully.

My cousin got in touch with me yesterday as he wanted help with his web-site to publish his first-year industrial design portfolio. I set him up with a quite drupal site, and it looked professional and fulfilled the criteria within 10 minutes. However, he then told me the course had been on ‘dreamweaver’ and that he had to do it using that. I asked him if he had a coy, and he’s conveniently ‘downloaded a copy off limewire.’ Why are Universities promoting piracy, when the same project can be more conveniently done using FLOSS.

It’s not really teaching anymore though is it. I mean, I am currently studying Business and Psychology at MMU Cheshire, and as part of our course we were ‘trained’ to use SPSS, a proprietary statistical software package, to analyze our data. I used to be good at Maths at school, but being limited to learning how to use the software to do it, instead of learning the mathematical formulae has put a ceiling on what I am capable of doing. Unless I’m prepared to join the majority and fork out a handsome sum on SPSS, the ’statistical psychology’ module is a complete waste of time.

I really hope we correct this massive error before it goes to far. There are far too many universities in England as it is. Many of them are ‘training’ rather than ‘teaching.’ Open Source software is not in this case an answer, but it can offer a route out in many cases. I’d love to hear other peoples opinions on this, so please either blog about it or leave me a comment on the blog.

So, I’m entering into the final few weeks of University. The next few weeks are going to be a defining moment in my life, or so I am constantly reminded. I will be disappointed with anything less than a 2:1, but I am no way guaranteed such a grade.

I am not claiming to be superior to the people around me, but I do feel frustrated in my current position. In psychology I have been given assignments which have stretched me academically, that have caused me to think outside the box, and challenged the way in which I currently think. I like psychology, but there are only a few areas within it that interest me. Business, on the other hand, has been pretty much the opposite. Instead of being given stimulation in lectures, I have been forced to sit through dull and repetitive lectures. Now, business is not the most exciting subject, but I strongly believe that lectures should be a one-way diffusion of information, and seminars for discussion. Lectures at Uni here have been “activity based” - and with the massive range of abilities present, half of the class are sitting around with nothing to do whilst the lower end of the range are being hand-held by the lecturer through their tasks.

Now, many people have said to be “Come on Andrew, dig in, you’ve only got a few weeks left until the end.” Sure, I know that this degree is going to be very important, it is very important to me. However, should I ever have to turn up to an interview and rely on this degree to get me a job ahead of another graduate, or ahead of anyone, I don’t think I can sit their and hold this degree up as being worth of the paper its written on.

This may not be the case for a number of people for whom the degree has taken three years of hard work, but the sad fact that I face is that the majority of people who are doing ok this year, have been doing ‘ok’ for the last three years. They’ve not particularly raised their game, and have been helped through it constantly by their lecturers. Other people I know, who are capable of getting great grades have become de-motivated by the sheer volume of work; work which lacks any quality or depth.

Warning bells first sounded for me in the first year, when I was in a group with 4 foreign students to do a presentation. They’d asked me to join their group as they were having trouble with English, so I duly obliged. Having written most of the presentation myself (albeit in their presence) the day came round to present it. Whilst we got through the presentation unscathed (they were reading the slides,) when it came to question and answers, their lack of understanding of both English and the subject meant the group was terrible. I had to step in to answer all of the questions put to us, and felt embarrassed on the part of the girls given their obvious inadequacies. The big surprise for me was that we were able to come out of that presentation with a 2:1 - whereas a group made up of 5 of my English friends only just scraped a 2:2.

I don’t want to assume from this that there is prejudice in the University system, but the marks for the presentations weren’t awarded in conjunction with the marking scheme. The same was true of a third year finance project. We were all encouraged to get our data off the FAME site, and to keep data consistent by only getting data off the one site, as ratio and formulae calculations differed between sites. Despite the fact I had completed the project, one of the comments on my paper was “Why does your data only go up to 2005?” The data on the FAME site only went up to 2005, and was not changed until past when I received the assignment back.

Simple misunderstandings have disillusioned me with the university’s system. Business Lecturers are simple affairs, with lecturers spending time with individuals and helping them with simple skills (such as maths in finance) in order to complete activities. However, the assignments are mammoth tasks - involving hours and hours of menial work in order to answer simple speculative questions that often have no sound basis on market conditions (as few people are capable of understanding market growth/dynamics).

It’s incredibly disheartening to be told that the degree is worthless, and I blocked it out before. However, nearing completion of my degree, I am beginning to realise its worthlessness runs deeper than the institution than will grant it. Studying at the institution for the last three years has made me realise just what standard the University abides by. I could not sit down next to a student from another University and be confident that I was better qualified, even if I had a first and they had a pass. What a frame of mind to be in before my final push for my final classification.