June 4 - June 8
Because my work this summer is the start of my master's thesis work, I will be performing a user study with wiEGO in September on Annoki and EGO. My subjects will be students and teachers from the Elk Island school district who are participating in a one-to-one mobile computing project designed by the government of Alberta. I will be deploying my work to the school in September / October and administer an online user survey (probably though Moodle) to determine the base line skill levels of the students and teachers. Throughout the year, the students will use my software and I will go to the school to conduct user interviews, extra online surveys and collect the day to day data that is generated. A large portion of my work this summer will be setting up Annoki to fulfill their needs, as well as setting up the proper elements for the user study (online questionnaire, porting Annoki to their system). This week I refined my project and my project plan, brainstorming different use cases for wiEGO. I determined that there were three possible use cases that would be implemented/further implemented this summer: understanding, creation, and project management. I put these into the project plan (had to scale it down because it was getting to long) and I did some minor wiki work as well (researched skin possibilities, looked at the mySQL table structure and the current wiki file structure).

June 11 - June 15
This week was very chaotic. On Monday, it was my graduation from the UofA, which given the logistic planning, took all day (gown pick up at 10, ceremony at 3), so I didn’t get a chance to work on Monday. From Tuesday through Friday I spent most of my time learning about Mediawiki and installing/modifying new extensions that will meet some of the new criteria that Professor Stroulia has set out for me in the use cases of our project for Elk Island Schools. I incorporated new JavaScript toolbars onto the wiki edit pages so I can have a specific mark up for the wiEGO pages. I then took these different markup elements and implemented GeSHi, which is typically a programming code syntax highlighter. I modified GeSHi to work with my wiki, Annoki, and change the color/background of the markup elements so they appear distinct to the students. These elements are needed so that Annoki can properly output the xml representation of the electronic graphic organizer so that wiEGO can read in the xml file and render the graphic organizer appropriately. I also developed a new skin for Annoki, called wiEGO that is very colorful and fits well with the student demographic that my project is geared towards. I also modified the XML outputting file (which parses the information on the wiki page, and using the markups present on the page, outputs the pre-xml information) to work with the new wiEGO syntax I have created, so it now parses all of the JavaScript buttons, instead of the few that it worked with before. In the previous version of wiEGO, I made all of the initializations require configure files (such as domain types) and I realized that given the current specifications of the new project direction, this would need to come out, so I refactored my code to remove these unneeded elements.

June 18 - June 22
This week I met with my clients from elk island school and realized that all of my work will need to be incorporated into the Moodle (version 1.8) they will be deploying in September. Because Mediawiki is not directly supported in Moodle, I will need to find a way to either incorporate an instance of Mediawiki (Annoki) into Moodle or rewrite the wiki (nwiki) in Moodle so it meets the needs of my clients. I was also told that my clients wanted me to focus on the third use case I presented to them in my project plan (project management and group collaboration). I need to create Mediawiki (or nwiki) extensions that will auto generate the necessary pages for group projects, as well as modifying EGO to handle drag and drop graphic organizer creation. This week I read a large number of papers about k-12 curriculum as well as group project ideas and milestones so I can appropriately design the auto generated pages. Lastly, I continued to tweak the new Annoki skins for wiEGO because some elements are a bit touchy and only work in certain situations (such as searching the wiki).

June 25 - June 29
After realizing that porting the Mediawiki into the Moodle would require some mySQL database work, I had to review my database knowledge, because I was a bit rusty, while also continuing to improve my php and java scripting skills. After doing lots of reading about Mediawiki, Moodle and mySQL capabilities, I realized that I have to redirect the database calls to respond to the Mediawiki, (which I have to make as a new module in the Moodle) instead of the nwiki that is present in the Moodle, and possibly change the database tables that are present in the database currently. I have a lot of research to do on databases and servers to determine if this can be done, and how it should be done, as I don’t want to completely rewrite the wiki or do the Mediawiki porting incorrectly. I also added a bunch of new extensions to the Mediawiki that will allow a student to have spellchecking, syntax highlighting, page by page individual (or group) access, task lists and many other goodies that students and teachers alike will find useful. I am also in the process of creating the aforementioned group module extension and am trying to determine how I can synchronize my Mediawiki and wiEGO programs to respond to changes in each other (this is proving to be quite a challenge and I am doing lots of reading and consulting to find the most efficient way to do this). Because my interns are coming next week, I also had to do a lot of research about what a Moodle is, what different types of things can be done, and create a couple of Moodle courses for them to be enrolled in so that they can use the Moodle to report on their summer research, while also allowing me to collect data regarding users usability of the Moodle and wiki for my thesis work.