EDULEARN12

So FAST.Q has gone to EDULEARN12, the conference ran on the 2nd and 3rd July at the Hotel Princesa Sofia, Barcelona (Spain).

EDULEARN12 had participants from over 80 different countries which all provide diverse views in the field of education and e-learning. With over 70 different session there was plenty of talks to attend.

The FAST.Q talk took place during the second day (3rd July) at 12:30. This talk was presented by myself (Peter Anderson) with assistance from Dr. John Murray when it came to some of the questions. The aim of this talk was to introduce FAST.Q to other academics over a huge variety of institutions from all over the world.

The presentation went very well, the FAST.Q system generated a lot of interest among the other academics. The talk lasted for 10 minutes followed up with about 5 minutes of questions. The 15 minutes allocated for the talk/questions did not seem to be enough to answer all questions since their were more after.

For me EDULEARN12 was a great chance to gain some experience in giving presentations. During the presentation itself I felt pretty nervous, and I feel that I spoke a little to fast and maybe a few to many ‘err’ and ‘ums’, something to work on in the future.

Over all the conference was a huge success with many academics showing great interest, enthusiasm and even generating possible ideas on future development within the FAST.Q system.

I would like to take this chance to thank JISC, Student as Producer and LNCD for funding and supporting FAST.Q.

FAST.Q Meets Dev8D

So FAST.Q recently took a trip to London for the Dev8D conference. With Dev8D being focused on HE it was a perfect place to get feedback about FAST.Q from other developers.

Along with DIVERSE, we took a trip down to the University of London Union. During the 3 day conference we managed to do lots of networking and give a ‘lightning talk’.

The lightning talk gave us the chance to tell other developers what FAST.Q was all about. Within the 5 minute talk we managed to explain all we wanted to about the FAST.Q project with a lengthy discussion after. From this we managed to get a few new ideas and some great feedback on current ideas.

With everything we managed to get done during the 3 days, FAST.Q also managed to win the ‘Best Flasher’ award.

What is CWD and why are we using it on the Fast.Q project?

Greetings,

It has been a while since we last blogged about the progress of the Fast.Q (full development update to follow shortly) and I would just like this chance to explain one of the tools that we are using to construct the visual aspect of our system, the Common Web Design (CWD) which has been developed here at the University of Lincoln.

This is an HTML5/CSS3 framework which is currently powering many of the projects here at the university, and it aims to enable us as web developers to rapidly develop attractive, cross browser/platform compliant and valid interfaces. In doing so it also creates a sense of unity in look and feel across all university projects.

We have decided to use the CWD as it saves a lot of time implementing our front-end which means we can focus more on the clever stuff that happen behind the scenes.  It also sets to promote the thriving developer community here at the university and communities such as LNCD. There is a real sense of students being at the centre of the university research projects, and using technologies such as the CWD means that we have the support needed to let us engage further with the higher education experience (which we love here on the Fast.Q project).

The most attractive part of the CWD is that we do not have to worry about creating a beautiful interface and then spend an eternity ironing out CSS bugs for older browsers.That is all taken care of by the CWD, we just build our interface and away we go (it also supports mobile device rendering which is a mega bonus).

We will be using v3.0 (Edradour) however speaking to Alex Bilbie (a fellow student and developer of CWD) the new release is imminent which will be interesting to see which new features we could implement for the Fast.Q project.

Stay tuned for updates on the progression of the Fast.Q project

Boaz

Week 2- Development Update

Week 2 began with a meeting to discuss the requirements of the system and to begin designing the elements which would form the main backbone.

The mockup design sketches that were featured in the previous post were just prototypes of the system to try and allow us to visualise how we would deliver the core question and answer service. This week we have taken those designs and improved them to create what will be the first prototype system.

Fast.Q system mockup
"Demonstrating the layout of the basic fast.q system"

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Week 1 – Some Design Work

So today we started off by just writing down a few ideas for what the interface might look like and how it might function. We split this up into two sections, Student and Lecturer.

Once we got an idea of what we wanted the interface to be able to do we got started on some simple designs on of what we wanted the interface to look like. Boaz recommended that we use a tool called Mockups for some of the design. The use of this tool made it so much easier to put together designs using their drag and drop system. I didn’t have to spend time drawing all the different types of images/boxes since they already had most of them pre-made and ready for use.

Here are a few of the designs we came up with the use of this tool.

Lecture interface designs

Student interface Designs