Dave Tarrant is welcoming everyone and warning us that the award ceremony is going to be a little bit different this year… There’s applause for everyone who ran sessions and Ben and Chris who created the programme. There was a broad range of topics, from HTML5 and Python to linked data, search, geo and visualisation. Oooh, there’s some applause for the media team now! And even more applause for JISC, who made it all possible.

Time for the first award and it’s for Best Mentor. You’re all mentors to each other says Ben O’Steen. Your friends are the best way to find the solution, not Google. And it goes to…Jack Franklin! Well done Jack. He’s a bit knackered because of all the talks he clocked up yesterday but he’s made it up on stage and reveals that he’s been asked to come back and talk about CoffeeScript again (although he admits he’s a bit sick of it now). He demonstrates a script he made showing the sessions running. CoffeeScript is quick and easy and you should check it out. If you need any help, find Jack on Twitter or at jackfranklin.co.uk

Next up, Best Flasher. That’s best lightning talk, ok? It goes to Peter Anderson for Fast.Q. It’s a feedback and answer system technology. It means students in lectures can use their tech to ask questions, ask the lecturer to explain something. All the questions appear in a queue on the lecturers lecturn and he or she can decide answer them. Great for shy students! A novel system to get student interaction.

Now a short interlude for one of our sponsors – JISC – to say a few words. It’s Paul Bailey’s first visit to Dev8D and he’s found it very interesting. As someone who has worked at JISC for over 10 years, he can say that he really values the work that developers are doing int he sector. There will be another event at the end of May focusing on specific educational tools that have been developed. Hope to see some more of you at the end of May!

Now, Best social network. A previous recipient, Chris Gutteridge, will present the award. It goes to a group who stayed up all night to build a social network: Bilawal Hameed, Charlie Brensinger, Alejandro Sarcedo, Anton Smyrnor, Sari Ghamloush. There will be a link to their work on the wiki (though it will stop being editable in two weeks time so get a spank on).

Now, Patrick is going to tell us about his ‘sexism in video games’ talk which was very popular. He says, “I got into computing because I was interested in technical computer games and so many of those games are about male power fantasies and there’s a feedback loop where men become the target audience for these games. And so women are put off. As a community we should be doing more to address the problem that we’re not very gender baanced and we’ve cretaed an envirnment which isn’t very friendly for women. Go and look at Coding for Kids and see how we can get girls and women more involved and be a positive role model.” Well said.

Now, badges! These have been awesome. Some people have been badgering for badges all three days. So we have an award for Most Enthusiastic Badge Collector. It goes to someone who has just collected them by being awesome. And that’s Mark Johnson. And, what’s more, badges will now follow you around from conference to conference.

Next award is for Best newcomer. Presented by Julian Cheal, who was at the first Dev8D and the best newcomer then. This year it goes to…Emanuil Tolev. Oh, and there’s another! It’s Andrew Oakley. But he’s gone home so won’t be on stage. He was the first person to approach the Newbies Czar and say “er, I’m new…”

Time for another best talk. It’s Martin Hawksey on visualising OER, tools, tips and tricks.

The rest of the best social network team have woken up and appeared on stage for their photo.

Future Trends now and there are three nominations: Emanuil Tolev, Bharti Gupta, Andrew Laughland. Tom thanks everyone who contributed to the Observatory interviews.

Another best talk now and it’s Ravi on the brainband. A device you attach to your head and it gets brainwave data out. It does some processing and shows you frequency bands and attention (how hard you are concentrating) and  meditation (how chilled out you are) data. Possible also to get blink strength. It’s really easy to get data out of it. What can you do with it? Tried to demo moving the quadrocopters, controlling the height of them, through brainwaves. The next stage is looking at what we can experiment with doing – we’re looking for interesting ideas! We got these for undergraduates to try new things with.

Awards and best ofs concluded, there are now some thank yous – the venue has been brilliant so thanks ULU and its crew. A huge thank you to DevCSI who did pretty much everything to put it all together – Mahendra, Natasha and Michelle.

The committee need a big thank you – Anusha, Charlie, Richard, Bilal, Nick, Dave C, Julian, Graham, Dave T, Alex and Nick.

Thanks to the sponsors, Jorum, Mimas, Pearson and SchoolsICT. And, of course, JISC!

Dev8D 2012 is not over. The challenges are ongoing so please do them. There is the mailing list – developer-contact@googlegroups.com. Use the hashtag – #dev8d. Anything else? Talk to DevCSI.

DevEd will be 29,30 May, Birmingham. DevXS will be late oct / early Nov in Liverpool. And there may be smaller events – if you think you can run a whole day, talk to DevCSI.

The future…keep 26-28 February free for Dev8D 2013. Not in Valentine’s week next year!

That’s all folks…see you next year!

At first sight, the future of ICT in schools is grim. In January, the education secretary, Michael Gove, told the BETT conference that the ICT GCSE was “flawed” and “a mess” and will be discontinued, leaving the exam boards to decide what will happen next. Schools and teachers have been left in limbo, facing a bewildering choice of untried, untested syllabuses and disillusioned ICT teaching staff.

It’s a vacuum, a “big, big problem”, says Ben O’Steen. But does it, possibly, also offer an opportunity?

The old GCSE fell far short of what any developer would call credible. Pupils were required to design websites…in Powerpoint. A page layout per Powerpoint slide. According to Young Rewired State, when advanced kids tackled this part of their coursework by creating fully functional websites using HTML 5, they were failed. The system had no way of marking their work as it didn’t fall neatly into the right tick boxes.

The syllabus was irrelevant, boring and patronising. It also failed to engage girls, many of whom had already been lost to ICT by GCSE stage. “Year eight is too late” is the mantra of Coding for Kids, which has found that you need to talk to girls about computing in years five and six when they are really enthusiastic and less concerned about it being a “boy subject” (which in itself is a reasonably new concept – around 40 years ago there was no gender imbalance in computing and before then there were more female than male programmers).

“It’s important we get involved now,” argued Ben and he and others in the session offered some starting points, hints and tips.

Ways to help schools to inspire kids about computing

Sign up for the Coding for Kids mailing list (@codingforkids) and get involved with them as a mentor.

If you’re worried about being able to talk appropriately to a bunch of younger kids (simple language, no swears) then begin by trying to do something at a careers day to get into the flow and start to get involved with teachers.

If you sign up to an organisation such as STEMnet, they will do an enhanced CRB check on you.

Helping out at afterschool clubs such as science and maths clubs gets around the frustrations of trying to work within the metrics-driven school system.

Follow Hubmum (Emma Mulqueeny) on Twitter.

Check out the Guardian’s digital literacy campaign and especially the links in Emma Mulqueeny’s How to teach code article (and there are more in the comments).

Tools to try with kids

Scratch – great to get kids enthused about games and already has a lot of traction in schools which is reassuring for those that are not yet using it (bear in mind that you may need to contact the school at least two or three months before the event to get them to install it on the computers).

Code Academy (for secondary level).

Text adventure programming: programme in English using descriptions and you get a game (watch Ben’s Dev8D talk on text adventures). Yesterday Playfic released Inform 7 in the browser.

Storytelling Alice – good storytelling device way to learn coding.

Kodu – Coding programme for Xbox to build up games.

Lego Mindstorms – great but expensive.

Arduinos work really well in school workshops

In a very focused session, the sense of concentration in the room was palpable as attendees downloaded the software they needed from a memory stick and then got stuck into the ebook process from start to finish. Anthony ran through the various software options, from InDesign, Sigil and Calibre to iBooks Author (you can find more about these, and links for downloads on the workshop wiki entry), discussed styling for both ePub and Kindle and the issues between the two, and also covered metadata and covers. He recommended a book (an actual printed book!), Elizabeth Castro’s EPUB: Straight to the Point (Peachpit Press) for those who want to delve more deeply, and following the hashtag #eprdctn.

Hard at work making books: the ebook workshop

Read on for his thoughts on the session, and Dev8D more generally.

Anthony Levings

What’s brought you to Dev8D?

I think I saw it tweeted and thought wow that looks like a good opportunity to learn about these technologies. It’s my first time here – I’ve been dragged into tech from a publishing background! I think it’s what I expected, probably on the extreme end of people taking files round and installing databases etc on the fly. I wasn’t expecting quite so much hands-on coding. I’ve been here for the three days and I’ve tended to stick to the core sessions.

What’s your workshop about?

It’s an overview of the technologies available for the creation of eBooks in EPUB and Kindle formats.

What do you hope people will have taken away from it?

I hope they will have taken a willingness to start working with the technology and, given the tone of the conference, that they will want to do creative things with getting things into these formats to use and coming up with ways of repurposing it and have found that it’s not such a big effort to commit to learning the tech. I didn’t know what to expect! I just hoped that people would come along… I wasn’t planning to present but then Mahendra sent round an email beforehand asking for more sessions and I replied and said that I could present on this if needed. I’m pleased that I did, it’s nice to have done it.

What have you taken away from your workshop in particular and Dev8D in general?

From Dev8d in general I’ve taken away the awareness that there’s a lot of interest in getting data in and out of people’s systems, like Pearson with their API, and lots of very API-based interest in how to get and share and format data. My workshop was more about packaging data and selling it in a packaged form but it’s given me an awareness of what I need to think about for future needs.

From this workshop I was expecting people to ask about pricing and about ebooks. I was expecting more animosity than I received about those elements because Dev8D has been so much about the freeflow of information and with the tech community there is such an open source ethic whereas my talk was about packaging and production values and making things that people want to read and feel comfortable reading which probably matter more in arts and humanities, which is my background, then in technology.

“Remember: it’s three days of total informal unconference. And then you rock!”

Bharti Gupta is an applications developer at Mimas, University of Manchester. At her first Dev8D last year she was a challenge winner and she’s come back this year to give talks and organise her own challenge. Here’s her inspiring story, and top tips for being a Dev8D success

“I’ve been working at Manchester for the last four years as a developer with many services such as UK PubMed Central, Landmap, JLeRN. I also have experience of working for commercial organisations in India. When I came over here I feared that the education sector would not be so exciting but I was mistaken because there are so many opportunities to meet and learn from other people at conferences.

I heard from colleagues that Dev8D was an exciting event, full of other higher education developers, so I came along for the first time last year and I was surprised to see the number of people here. And that it was 99% male!

I was encouraged to take on some challenges so I started working on the Elseveier Sciverse developer challenge, based on javascript. I attended the sessions and got all the help and won the second prize!

There were only three females here at that time so I decided to put some more effort in and so I attended a workshop and did the metadata challenge, developed an idea and that also won second prize. I also gave a lightning talk about Landmap work and got third prize for best newcomer and I was overwhelmed! I was so pleased with the reaction when I was back in my workplace and more people were interested in coming to Dev8D this year.

So this year I came back full of enthusiasm and I was made an organiser of a challenge with responsibility for organising and holding a session on working with JLeRN. I feel more mature and ready for it this year, after the success of last year. I have just run a 50 minute-long open session on the work I learnt last year (about linked data for the Landmaps service) and which I then presented and won JISC funding. Oh, and I’m winning badges!

Bharti’s top tips for a successful Dev8

• Try to not be nervous
• Treat everyone as your friends
• Be informal
• Come in your t shirt and jeans
• Reach out to anyone without any anxiety – no one will think your question is stupid
• Everyone is here to help – this place is to help developers learn and share
• Don’t worry about whether you will win the challenge or not – it’s about what you learn
• It is always good to share your knowledge, whatever work you have been doing and whatever new technology you have been learning and spreading the word

Remember: it’s three days of total informal unconference. And then you rock!

Patrick McSweeney opened the discussion with a statistic: at his university, Southampton, the 38,000-strong student body is slightly skewed towards females – they make up 53%. But of the 125 undergraduate computer science students, just 20 are women.

Patrick argued that there are many reasons for this but the one he favours is that what gets children and young people interested in computers and computing is computer games. Men overwhelmingly create these games and they make them according to male power desires and aesthetics. This attracts male players who then become the target audience which in turn creates a feedback loop with more of these kinds of games, featuring powerful men and scantily clad women, created to feed the target market. If this is the arena in which girls are brought up, is it any wonder they do not go into computer science?

From that starting point the discussion ranged widely. The notion that men may be more physiologically inclined to be developers was swiftly quashed. The majority of programmers in the 1950s were female. This gender imbalance does not exist in maths, arguably the closest subject to computer science.

“We can’t start society again, it’s got to be a gradual change process and it’s going to be difficult”

What can be done to positively address the gender imbalance in computing? The consensus that action needs to start early. The findings from Coding for Kids suggest that year eight is too late to change the perceptions of young girls about what computer science is, and to challenge the whole notion of ‘boy-friendly’ or ‘girl-friendly’ subjects.

“I think if girls can only experience computing through schools and that’s crap and boys have something else – computer games – then that’s going to have an effect. But if there is something exciting in the classroom for both boys and girls then the driver of computer games for boys would go”

Looking further along the school system, to GCSE, it was agreed that there is a massive image problem with GCSE computer science and how it is taught in the UK. “Patronising” was the verdict from one female developer, who pointed out while she was following the “formulaic” GCSE syllabus, she was also earning money building databases for a local company.

However, it seems that she is was lucky to even have a syllabus to follow – the education secretary, Michael Gove, has discontinued the GCSE in ICT and the subject is now in a limbo period with exam boards still deciding what they are going to require and teachers at a loss to know what they are expected to teach. In 2010 just three teachers out of the 26,000 that got accreditation chose ICT as main subject.

“We want the best people in our industry as we have some big problems to be solved. We are missing out by not having the missing 50% of the population”

Does it matter if women aren’t represented in computer science? On a practical level, if software development teams do not reflect their user base, then they are likely to create products that fail to meet the needs of all their users in some way. They might also be missing a trick. How many apps that would appeal to women never get made because of the dearth of female developers able to go from idea to prototyping stage? A women’s clothing size app hit the headlines to much acclaim yesterday – how many other similarly brilliant ideas never get made because they never cross the minds of the all-male developer teams that dominate computer science?

“I have female friends who are addicted to Skyrim even though it’s advertised in male magazines and context. Games shouldn’t just be a ‘boy thing’”

What brought you to Dev8D?

It’s my third time at Dev8D, it’s my favourite conference of the year and I enjoy the practical focus of the event and also the collaborative skill-sharing aspect. And the informality. A lot of conferences are show and tell – you go and deliver a paper about a project and that’s that. You don’t tend to get that at Dev8D, you get people sitting down to solve practical problems.

What was your panel session about?

It was about sector-wide work or initiatives around publishing open data from different universities, mainly with a focus on institutional data rather than research data – data about buildings, about local amenities, about energy use. The stuff that institutions produce as part of their function rather than research activity itself.

Did anything from the session surprise you?

The lack of examples from the audience. Unless people were keeping quiet about their work, we seemed to have a panel that represented much of the activity. I know there were people from York and the OU that could not be here but I was hoping to find more pockets of activity. I think the data.ac.uk discussion we had is key to drawing out the work that is ongoing around producing open data in different institutions. A panel discussion is not representative of all the work that is happening. The best thing that could happen is a follow-on event or day-long meeting around data.ac.uk which will give everyone’s projects a presence.

What do you hope people took away from the session?

I hope they took away examples of what is happening and they would have heard about the technology that is being used and the licenses. But most of all, raising the profile of whether an aggregator discovery hub like data.ac.uk is worthwhile.

What do you think you have taken away from it?

I’m going to try to get this meeting for data.ac.uk set up. Chris Gutteridge has been the voice and done a lot of the groundwork and I think he needs support in terms of setting up an event. I think I will go away and put energy into that.

THE PANEL DISCUSSION

On the panel were:
Alex Dutton, University of Oxford
Chris Gutteridge, University of Southampton
Wilbert Kraan, University of Bolton
Damien Steer, University of Bristol
Adrian Stevenson, University of Manchester
Jo Walsh, University of Edinburgh

Chris: we have a strong commitment to publishing open data about the organisation. Because we’re not a project it doesn’t run out but it makes getting certain costs covered more difficult. There is a clear divide between research data and data about our organisation. Need to be discussed as separate things. Both important but need to be managed separately. Some things we do are not exclusive to universities, they can be picked up elsewhere eg our buildings app is being used by a university in China.

Adrian: we’ve been putting out linked data for archives and two services, Mimas and Copac. The data in there is about what data universities have.

Wilbert: we’ve only just started work on this and we’re looking purely at executional data and it is mainly closed. It’s mostly about data integration within the institution itself, trying to remove silos through linked data. The institution is the primary consumer. It might be useful for business intelligence purposes such as looking at retention, and we would never publish that. Also looking at the various different dimensions of a course – who is teaching it, in which rooms etc.

Alex: we are also using it for data within the university so there is a course data project and data looking at research facilities.

Jo: our effort has stalled after a good start next summer. It was mostly from the outside in, using scraping. We had positive feedback from estates and building who were interested in it for energy data, occupancy etc and keen on open licensing as a way to cut through territorial disputes. But we havehad some blockages around the open licenses.

Joss: at Lincoln we have a range of open data. We have hardly touched on producing RDF linked data. We call it open data because it is available through APIs. Slowly converting as RDF linked data.

Paul Walk: I was involved in something similar to Wilbert’s experience years ago – it was not open and not RDF – and it reached the point where we did business intelligence-type functions on it and could correlate movements of students through security systems and attendance at lectures and drop out rates. We found we could correlate lack of attendance of lecturers with drop out rates. This kind of work has ethical dimensions.

What about a single data.ac.uk?

Chris: the real question is, if we have a hub site for data projects around the country in academia, how much it should and shouldn’t do. My personal take is that, in the short term, it should be a discovery mechanism for the top level sources of data in an organisation. These should then allow discovery of other sources of information. You don’t want to aggregate every bit of data and metadata. Without a lot of funding I wouldn’t want to take on more that that. Publishing a list of data everyday with a pretty interface on top is something we could do now eg of university buildings and transport. Or research data.

Paul Walk: what’s the driver for any of this to happen? To compare it to open government, there were drivers there around transparency etc. The equivalent in HE is probably going to come from key information sets. Will that really drive it?

Chris: it is not about not discovering datasets but more about how to discover them. Initially it’s just a mechanism for discovering.

Wilfred: could we do it iteratively and try with datahub.org – if you want to open it up, that might be a good place to park it anyway. If that doesn’t meet needs could try something else. Other thing to bear in mind with institutional data in particular is that the whole area of the HE information landscape is fraught and there’s a land grab going on at the moment. Have to be sensitive about who wants what data.

Paul Walk: the success as such will come from there being a clear mandate

Chris: need to look at return on investment. Web pages are used and really useful but not many people are using the data because the number of people who have the skills is small. But if you can create an app that works across different institutions then it’s worth them publishing their data like this because they can then use the app. There are a lot of areas where we benefit from opening our data

Damian: Wikipedia is going to have data components where institutions can feed in data, there are search engine implications. It’s like back when we started creating webpages for universities and there was a lack of understanding about why it was needed but now they are essential.

Paul Walk: yes, I can see the harried head of a university might see the marketing implications

Chris: need to look at benefits – to our members without restriction but also may be of benefit to others outside the university

Paul Walk: we need one or two examples of success that show the return on a few investments (does not need to be all of them). Our institutions are going to forced to compete more and more and some of the information will be deemed to be commercially sensitive. We might see the closing up of some of this data so we need to be able to make a good arguments if we’re to see a flourishing data.ac.uk ecosystem

What do you do?

I’m working towards and MSc interdisciplinary creative practices at University of Edinburgh. I’m doing stuff to do with fiction and narrative and web technologies, combining two of my interests. I’m building an engine such that the narrative responds depending on where you are – it’s a Location Aware Interactive Fiction Engine, mapping virtual worlds on to a real world.

Why are you are Dev8D?

Went to DevXS in Lincoln and there I heard about this and it sounded fun. By the end I’m hoping to have written some Python to parse the YouTube datafeeds and turn it into RDF.

What are you looking forward to?

I’m looking forward to all the people talking about linked data and all the experts in that area who would be able to help me and have been doing so.

What have you found interesting?

Everything. There’s a really good mix of people. The linked data guys from Southampton have been great and I’ve talked to them a lot.

What will you take back to Edinburgh?

More RDF and Python knowledge and some useful new contacts, which is always a goal of attending these things

It’s your first time here, did anything surprise you?

Not really, it’s like a conference / hack – equal measure of talks and sitting around talking to people and networking

Dev8D has more female developers attending than ever before, but is there more it could do to encourage women to attend?

It’s not a case of encouraging more female developers but encouraging more people who are good at what they do. That’s my view on anything relating to positive discrimination. But perhaps it could advertise more to students? There are lots of people here who could help students a lot, getting them aware of scripts and things.

What brought you to Dev8D?

I attended the DevXS event hosted at Lincoln and found out about Dev8D and devcsi there. So it’s my first time at Dev8D. I expected a bigger version of DevXS but it’s not as good. DevXS seemed more upbeat, with a lot more stuff going on, a lot more stuff hacking away. Here it seems more… mundane.

DevXS was in one room so everyone was together and there was a great atmosphere from that whereas here it is spread across two floors and so you can’t seen everything that’s going on. I thought Dev8D would be more educationally focused but have not found that. There is more data sharing sort of stuff but it is very different from what thought it was going to be like.

What have you found interesting?

I heard an interesting talk about the gender imbalance in video games – good to hear peoples thoughts on that, it’s a hot topic. There are some demos – the 3D printer stuff – that are fantastic. Really interesting and really good. For me it’s more the hands-on type stuff I’ve found really interesting.

What might you take back to Lincoln?

Contacts, people that I’ve met that I can now put a face to a name. I know what people are doing and their projects so we can share ideas.

How could Dev8D change?

It needs more single track things going on – more with everyone in the same room trying to achieve the same goal, with the same focus. Having lightning talks over lunchtime didn’t work for me. I would like to see a bigger room, more people all together all at once so that they can walk around and talk to each other and see what’s going on.

Mark was leading a workshop on Hacking the Scholarly Method, which turned into a lively roundtable discussion of all the elements involved in scholarly publishing, from peer review to archiving data.

Key points covered included:

• Peer review could be as simple as commenting on a blog post – but it needs to be anonymised
• Open scholarship is sharing right from the beginning – ‘publishing’ is misleading as it seems to suggest that it all happens at the end
• Would-be open researchers face the issue of convincing institutions and, sometimes, supervisors, that they want to share research openly, not just on a university wiki
• Technology could be used to create a platform where peers could comment on different versions of research
• System could alert you when things have been changed, if graphs need updating etc
• If you’re commenting on data then that data should be available openly – need to consider the need for anonymity and privacy around certain kinds of data
• Technology is not the issue – we need to know who are the people doing it and what issues are they facing?

Read Mark’s summary of the workkshop

Mark MacGillivray

What brought you to Dev8D?

I originally came two years ago and had worked in universities and research groups for years and had heard about Dev8D and for the first time found myself in a room with hundreds of other people interested in the same things and doing the same things – for me it’s always been more about the tech than the science or research itself, it’s about making the tools people use to do research. It’s always been a problem that it’s hard for us to communicate with each other as we are not the core focus of those research groups, we are just the assistants. Dev8D is the perfect example of what happens when we have the ability to talk to each other and have our own network. That kind of community ties up completely with the open source software movement I’ve been working in. If I get stuck on something I look online and inevitably somebody else has had the same problem and has shared their solution. There are already so many answers online and we just need to share it. Dev8d does that in real life. I’ve come along every year since that first time and now I’m on the organising team.

What was your workshop about?

The purpose of the workshop was to imagine what we could do in the context of scholarship if we were unrestricted in terms of our access or politics or environment but still had all of the resources we currently have. Three hundred years ago two brilliant scientists tried to communicate and it took them six weeks. If we did that now with none of the constraints then how long would that take? Getting data, sharing data, feedback and iteration of that process – how would that work in an ideal environment? I think the useful outcome was the continuous integration for scholarship idea – everything that you do is immediately available all the time, taking on all the comments and changes as you go along and always having the most up to date version available to see.

What do you hope people got out of your workshop?

I’m really obsessively into doing things rather than pontificating. What I wanted to get out of it was that the people in the room had to start thinking about something and if they were interested they would go away and do something about it. I didn’t want to just lead people through something. I wanted to seed something, present and idea and see if others want to take it up.

What do you hope to take back to Edinburgh?

In general, I will have learnt more about tools and software that I don’t know so much about. Being able to take that back means that I will be able to do things quicker when I get home. Coming to Dev8D is never a waste of time because it makes things so much quicker later on.

From my workshop I’ll take back the connections, the people that I met and continue those discussions. If I can find other people who also want to change things for the good, well, you couldn’t get more benefit than that.