Status Report - December 16, 2006

From ComPADRE Wiki

Contents 1 Marketing 1.1 Bookmarks & Brochures 1.2 Booth Discussions 1.3 Shodor 2 Collaborations 2.1 AAPT/APS 2.2 ADS/ABS 2.3 NSBP 2.4 SERC 3 Collections 3.1 ComPADRE Wide 3.2 Adopt a Physicist 3.3 Astronomy Center 3.4 Nucleus 3.5 PER-Central 3.6 Physics to Go 3.7 Physics Front 3.8 PSRC 3.9 PTEC 4 Bugs 4.1 Resolved 4.2 New 4.3 Outstanding 5 Experimentations 5.1 Outstanding Experimentations We Didn't Work On

Marketing

Bookmarks & Brochures

• Caroline and Susana are working on brochures and other hand-out marketing materials.
• Bookmarks are being printed for the Seattle meeting, including new ones for PER and PTEC.
• "Vignettes", short questions and requirements that outline the functionality of the collections were written for the booklet.

Booth Discussions

• Wiki used to discuss plans for the AAPT-AAS Winter Meeting and Scavenger Hunt Questionnaire for Seattle
• Extended work on the graphics and words for the Booth Slide Show

Shodor

• Shodor rep is awaiting completed brochures and bookmarks.

Collaborations

AAPT/APS

• Talent Search - This is not a comPADRE project, but we've been helping the AAPT with it. This has fallen by the wayside in recent weeks as Adopt-a-Physicist and meeting preparations have become the priority. We have received the previous database, and will return to it in January.

ADS/ABS

• Additional work on the interface that will be used to link up the ADS-ABS abstract and bibliographic service with comPADRE. Having this ready and working on PER-Central and Astronomy Central is a goal for Seattle.
• Created the preliminary work for the ADS/ABS to be a federate partner.

NSBP

• Continued communication with the NSBP Technical side regarding transparent login between the NSBP and comPADRE. This will be the technical model we use for integration with the AAPT (and AAS) as well.

SERC

• Created backend and frontend for manual entry of SERCIDs on ComPADRE - rolled to production
• Created an automatic way for SERC to tell ComPADRE when a material has been added if they have the ComPADRE Resource ID. This has not been implemented on the SERC side.
• Requested help from editors to create more ComPADRE-related examples for SERC. The goal is to have one or two dozen examples in interactive lecture/demos, Just-in-time-teaching, and Peer Instruction are wanted. A professor at a school in Oklahoma will also be working on this.

Collections

ComPADRE Wide

• Image Captions for features went from 100 characters to 500
• Changed breadcrumbs in the repository for improved usability and rolled out the repository redesign.
  • Example
• Reworked the advanced tagging assignment page to allow assignment editing. Linked to it from the List Items page.
• Added a way to redirect users to a specific page after login.
• Added a way to redirect users to a specific page after registration.
• The ProfileEdit page's state works differently so that the Other field only appears if an 'Other' state is defined
• Made minor changes to Survey displays based on suggestions gathered from Adopt-a-Physicist
• Added a confirm to the Subscribe/Unsubscribe links in the forums

Adopt a Physicist

• Created links between the classes and teachers on their profile pages
• Following an issue with edited posts, changed it so that classes may only edit posts within an hour of their initial posting
• The forums were closed for posting to students and teachers on Friday, December 15th.
• As of now Lbarbato 18:40, 16 December 2006 (EST), there are 3419 posts (98 were auto-generated Monday morning, the others are from the users)
• Evaluation of the program and surveys are now being issued
• Following the ending of student and teacher postings, changed edit behavior back to the default

Astronomy Center

• Danny has been working on a help file that is centered on the Astronomy Center. This file is currently being sliced, diced, htmlized, cssified, and semantified so that we can have an appropriate help file for each section of the site. These help files will also be generalized for use on any collection.

Nucleus

• Gary sent out another email for the REU positions. 100+ positions have been created.

PER-Central

• The Journal of Research in Science Teaching came online in September. We have a tagger going through the related items (130+ in PER-Central) to link to the online articles. Previously they were listed as non-digital.
• Vince choose primaries for the 100+ items that were imported a few weeks ago.

Physics to Go

• Developed the custom data miner for Physics To Go items http://www.physicstogo.org/search/searchE.cfm

Physics Front

• Development on the units interface
  • New header text
  • Added a way to change the header text
  • Removed the 'Unit Remove' when a unit has materials defined
  • Rolled this out
• Development on a new front interface

PSRC

• Modified the DEEL pages slightly to correspond with the new SERC pages
• Implemented redirects from the Physics Olympiad/Bowl staic pages to their new dynamic ones.

PTEC

• Developed a registration page for the 2007 PTEC conference

Bugs

Resolved

• Cathy is having trouble logging into the Wiki on her computer. This is difficult to diagnose without access to her computer and since the Wiki software is a black box. We will have a phone call early next week to discuss it. - The login name being used was incorrect. We provided the correct login name. Resolved
• Fixed a long-standing issue with the MERLOT federated search. Results should now be returned properly. Resolved

New

• The redirection script for deleted posts was not working properly. - Lyle: This is probably not something that a user ever experienced, but I ran across it when testing something for Adopt. Resolved
• The limit for image captions was still 100 characters rather than the new 500 limit. - Lyle: I missed changing the new limit in the insert stored procedure. Resolved
• Found a bug with the way groups open to all collections are handled. As the only group that currently fits this description is the Administrators group which has special status anyway, no one should have come across this before. This issue has been resolved on staging, and rollout of the fix should occur during the next 2 weeks. Resolved

Outstanding

1. Caroline has had a problem cloning 2 items. I need to find which of the 200 fields that are copied in cloning caused the issue.

Experimentations

• On staging, search results now have preview snapshots. We'll discuss this at the meeting. Test it here: http://staging.compadre.org/psrc/search/search.cfm?q=test Roll over the word 'Preview' next to the details link for each result.
• Redesign of Posting Page including potential WYSIWYG functionality - Further discussed purchasing the ZipEnable module with Erwin. This module should also improve initial load times of some compadre pages substantially.

Outstanding Experimentations We Didn't Work On

• Google Analytics
• The new tagging interface - (login required to view the preliminary new interface )
• A script for making posts that have links without anchors auto-create the appropriate html.