ENSEMBLE

The two linked ESRC students have begun work on the Ensemble Project. Their projects will complement and extend the work of the main project.

Nicola Beddall joins the project from Heythrop College London and will be based at City University, London, working on her project ‘Information visualisations as boundary objects? An actor-network theory approach to understanding HCI design’ under the supervision of Jonathan Raper, Uma Patel and Frank Webster.

Sanna Rimpilainen who has been working on the Applied Education Research Scheme at Strathclyde University will be based at the University of Stirling and working, under the supervision of Richard Edwards and Patrick Carmichael, on her project: ‘Fluid objects? An actor-network theory approach to studying cases and contexts in higher education’.

The first major public output of the Ensemble pilot projects (coinciding with the official launch of the main project on 1st October) is the Plant Evolution Timeline.  This was developed as part of the pilot work of the project by Ben Roberts and Nicola Peart at CARET with support and feedback from members of the University of Cambridge Department of Plant Sciences.

This tool is designed primarily to aid Plant Scientists studying at the University of Cambridge with their learning of plant evolution. The tool is used to provide an overview of course content and major themes for 1^st and 3^rd year students during the first few lectures of their courses, and will also be suitable for use within small group supervisions and for revision purposes. The public version of the timeline offers all of the interactive features but does not link to the specific lecture content of the Cambridge courses.

Nicola Peart, one of the team responsible for the development of the Timeline, describes how:”[the timeline] is useful for helping students assemble a large range of data sources at a range of scales and relevance. It is also useful for teachers illustrating links between data that are difficult to visualise without a tool like this. It is also [helps] researchers to see how different people might draw connections between data, or to inspire further research into variables that may or may not correlate.”

The timeline itself is produced using a modified version of the Timeplot tool developed as part of the SIMILE project at MIT, together with some site-specific Javascript and PHP scripting to handle authentication.  There are instructions and links to other related resources.

The Plant Evolution Timeline

The Ensemble Project welcomes its researchers, as the main funded phase of the project’s work begins.

Dr. Fran Tracy from joins the project from CARET in Cambridge and Dr. Michael Tscholl comes from the Computer Science Department at University College London. With their wide range of experience and their complementary interests and disciplinary perspectives, they add to the interdisciplinary character of the project. Both Fran and Michael will be working in research settings at Cambridge and City University London.

Katy Jordan joins the project as a Research Administrator and will be based in CARET. She will also be working on the University of Cambridge’s ‘Transferable Skills’ project. Amongst her responsibilities will be the development of a communications infrastructure to support the work of the project; as an established user of semantic technologies, she will be looking at ways to use these in ‘technology enhanced research’ activities of the project.