For historic notes on the PREVIEW (pre-PIVOTE) development see [http://www.elu.sgul.ac.uk/preview/blog/]

16 Jul 09

trying to work out where the best place to post updates is - this "blog", the web site or the Google Group.

Anyway main point of the post is to flag an enhancement we've made in our internal version of PIVOTE and that we'll roll through into the OS release shortly:

1) Support for a tutor HUD, which lets the tutor start exercises and change exercise counters from HUD (so not viewable by the students), and receive status updates from the system (eg which node the student is on). This actually lets you then hide the whole PIVOTE controller from the student for some types of scenarios.

There's also some big PIVOTE news we should be able to announce next week. More to follow.

10 Mar 09

Thought I'd better post here as we formally went open source today. Franctic last 48 hours getting to code finished and tidied and loaded onto our live cloud server. Some of the things in the final release:

- ability to skip the options step and just touch one of the soft options buttons - finally got the flow view working - an admin app for the PIVOTE administrator

We'll tidy up the documentation over the next few days so its all up to date.

Apart from any bug fixes we now aim to move to more like a quarterly release cycle since this is now a community project rather than a funded project. We'll be using the issues log to capture ideas and then apply effort as its available (Daden will contribute a certain amount of "free" time). If you want to help out let us know (coding@pivote.info).We'll also do an audit of the PIVOTE player and PIVOTE manager againsst the full MVP spec, and certainly one of the areas of interest is getting to 100% coverage for both.

Well that's about it. It's been fun getting PIVOTE to this stage. Where it goes from here very much depends on you as users, and coders. Don't expect frequent updates to this blog from here on oin, we'll just post when we think we've done something very cool that's worth telling you about!

19 Feb 09

We've redesigned the web screens for the player, moving to a 3 column layout so the user sees the node feedback, counters and global nodes all in one go. One unexpected benefit of this was since we used our template approach to bring together each content element it meant we could rapidly create a template optimised for mobile phone browsers - so you can now play PIVOTE cases from your iPhone (amongst others). Just add &wl=mob to the parameter string when starting the player.

We've also now got the table view working in the editor. This is like the list view, but aligns AN/DAM/Asset nodes with the same ID - so you can see at a glance what is missing, and mirrors the paper design table that we recommend you use when planning PIVOTE cases.

May sneak a few more feature tweaks in before the weekend.

12 Feb 09

Just updated the documentation files, with a new Introduction to PIVOTE, a PIVOTE Editor User Guide, and a PIVOTE slideshow. At some point we'll probably move some of this across to the Wiki for community improvement.

6 Feb 09

We've been doing a lot of code over the last fortnight, and the system is now pretty much as we want it. Most changes from here on will be minor or cosmetic. The biggest changes are:

• the editor now has a tabbed layout, so you can switch between XML, list and tree views
• all standard functionality (inc counters and rules) can now be editted without using XML
• we have introduced 2 structure rule types from the MVP spec - activity level rules, global counter rules, our own DAM level rules (which we want in the spec)

The download zip file has the latest version, and its also live on the Daden hosted service. The hosted service has now also moved to the live daden2 server, so that we can eave the daden version for development.

We're also getting some simple demo exercises created, and we'll fully document and video those and make them available as downloads.

30 Jan 09

We did a good demo of PIVOTE at the SL EduFaire today - although we had to use 4 media relays since the auditorium was on the corner of 4 sims to allow lots to attend (we had about 30 - 40). Several follow-on demo requests as a result.

9 Jan 09

Another request came in for beta testing today.

We've now added the session log viewing to the system. This lets tutors see each students attempt at each case. The tutor can see what path they took through the problem, how long they dwelt on each node, and the final value of any system counters. I'm sure once we start using this in earnest we'll want to have all sorts of sorts and filters on this log, and the ability to export to other systems (eg a VLE).

7 Jan 09

Although the site has been quiet over the Christmas break we've passed out PIVOTE Beta access to three UK educational organisations so that we can get their feedback before we go live.

We've also been spending time trying to simplify the user interface to the edit. MVP is quite a hard concept to get across - even when using a 1:1:1 linkage between the tiers as we do in the current editor. So we've been playing around with CSS to try and use colour to divide the edit screens up, and we certainly think it makes the whole thing easier to follow. We're also thinking about a Wizard, but it may be that a good YouTube video will to the job now.

We've also started to get a logo sorted out - mainly since we need the logo colours in order to finalise the CSS!

A couple more sessions to give the editor a bit more flexibility next - hopefully enough to allow the editor to edit any existing MVP file in non-XML mode.

4 Dec 08

And there we'll take a break. Account/Security system in place (although not fully tested or featured but enough for the Beta) and all code uploaded and getting started guide written.

Another thing we need to fix is the terminology we use. MVP was a medical system so they talk about cases. We want to make PIVOTE more generic so I think we'll standardise on "exercises" - until the educators tell us otherwise.

Today's focus is on changing all references to mvpplayer and fixed Daden paths to pivoteplayer/pivotemgr and configurable paths. Thought we better sort this out before handing out to the beta testers! We've also got to:

• Incorporate all the Daden libraries into a single library for distribution with PIVOTE
• Resolve some internal inconsistencies between the player and manager (like what TRUE is!)

3 Dec 08

Until we move to a proper blog we'll keep development notes here. Last week and today we focussed on updating the SL Controller. This involved adding new features such as:

• filter exercise to only those with particular words
• lock a player to a single exercise, or a list of exercises
• ensure that all display pages are configurable
• ensure that all config items can be set from the notecard

We also introduced the notion of account IDs, so that we can support multiple users on individual PIVOTE servers. NOTE: In future all PIVOTE exercises MUST be associated with one or more account IDs, and will ONLY be accessible from a player which is has one of those account IDs. We are implementing Exercise/Account management so each exercise will have a Creater ID (which can always do anything and can delete the exercise), a list of Edit IDs (who can edit the exercise), and a list of Play IDs (who can play the exercise, being a wild card for anyone).