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Widgets for TELeurope
From Stellar Deliverable 6.3
Contents |
1 Scenarios of the integration of WP6 widgets into TELeurope
The following page describes possible scenarios of how to integrate WP6 widgets into TELeurope. The widgets developed in WP6 could be seen as little windows to the TEL projects of Stellar. They point TEL stakeholders directly to valuable TEL related information and activities.
1.1 What are widgets
Widgets are little mini applications which can be easily integrated in several environments like Elgg or Moodle. The Elgg widget plugin developed for TELeurope let users choose from a variety of TEL related mini-applications. The following pictures exemplifies this:
1.2 Widgets we provide so far
So far we have 5 widgets running and 3 widgets in development (see an overview of widgets here: Stellar Widgets ). The widgets we have so far are:
- Stellar SOA (latest publications from the Open Archive)
- Stellar News (latest News from Stellar
- Graaasp (widget to collaborate on the graaasp platform; doctoral students)
- Stellar Deliverables (find all Stellar deliverables within one vclick)
- Stellar Podcasts (listen to the latest Stellar Podcasts)
Widgets that are under current development:
- Publication Feed Widget for elgg (Import publication feeds into elgg)
- Publication Feed Visualization Widget for elgg(Visualize publication feeds imported into elgg)
- Stellar Wiki activity visualization widget (shows the latest changes of the Stellar widgets in a timeline visualization)
All widgets can be tested on our elgg developer page http://universe.stellarnet.eu/. Login with stellar and ustellar. There we support by now two use cases:
- Get informed about TEL
- Collaborate within TEL
We created for each use case a bundle of widgets and arranged them on an Elgg dashboard with multiple dashboard support. See the following picture for the use case "get informed" and "collaborate":
1.3 Use cases
In the D6.3 deliverable we outlined a set of use cases [1]. The use case "get informed" could be seen as a combined use case of the use cases 5.1.1/5.1.2/5.10.
1.4 Implementation scenarios of widgets in TELeurope
Several ways of how to include the widgets are possible. I outline solutions which would work out-of-the-box thanks to the Elgg plugin system.
1.4.1 Default dashboard and profile widgets for new users
The default widget Elgg plugin [2] makes it possible for the Elgg admin to select a predefined set of widgets (WP6 widgets and other widgets) for all users. The benefit for users is that they have from the beginning a set of widgets, which will help them to make more use of the Elgg platform. With more experience with the platform they can later customize their dashboard and profile.
This mechanism could be used to include in the dashboard and profile page the default WP6 widget (see picture):
Users can then select from this default widget a widget of interest. For example the News widget:
The same could be applied to the profile page of each user. This example shows the Feed Widget:
By now it is not possible to add the WP6 widgets to the index or landing page of TELeurope. A Elgg plugin for this task is missing. We tested this using the "Custom Index Widget" [3].
1.4.2 Multiple Dashboards for TELEurope
The "Tabbed Dashboard and Profile" Elgg plugin [4] allows users to have one or more dashboards/profile pages. This is especially handy for users who want to use many widgets and thus need more space on the dashboard or profile.
Find a demo for this approach on our universe elgg developer platform (for login details see above; see also the picture above "Use case support with multiple dashboards").
1.5 Advertisement of the widgets on TELeurope
The integration of widgets will be supported by a number of TELeurope news. The first news will be about the benefits of widgets and how to use them. Follow up news will advertise each developed widget, its benefits and usage (I suggest a time interval of one/two week to measure the effects of each news entry). Here is a preliminary outline of each news entry:
- Starting widget news (right after the integration of WP6 widgets into TELeurope) (Thomas or Fridolin)
- Stellar Open Archive (Nicolas?)
- Publication feed widget (Peter?)
- Graaasp (Bram or Denis?)
- Stellar News (Chris/Thomas/Fridolin)
- Stellar Podcasts (Chris/Thomas/Fridolin)
- Stellar Deliverables (Chris/Thomas/Fridolin)
- Stellar Wiki Widget (Chris/Thomas/Fridolin)
1.6 User Monitoring and User evaluation
We will follow two strategies to evaluate the usage of the widgets: Analytics and user evaluation.
- To monitor the usage of the widgets we will use google analytics (Thomas). The analytics will be included into the wookie widgets, because the google analytics Elgg plugin [5] seems not sufficient enough to track how often a specific widget was used.
- Also a evaluation of users is planned to figure out how well the widgets support the use cases (Peter, Stefanie?).