Creating a Community QR Poster

Creating a Community QR Poster

One of the first community publishing projects we undertook in my learning strategies class, was to produce a large QR code that will eventually hyperlink to our class website.  Our poster will be 29 pixels square to match our master QR image. If your students use one inch pixels, the group will produce an image almost two and a half feet wide. (Our final poster will be a bit larger than that.)

Step 1: Create a QR code that links to a classroom web page.  I used MobileFish QR Code Creator because it allows the user to specify the size of the first printed image.

Step 2: Decide on a way to cut the code into pieces so that each student can take on a part of the project.  With 16 high needs students in my class, I began our project by breaking our code into 16 equally sized unique squares.

Step 3: Enlarge each students piece of the puzzle so that the individual pixels can easily be seen and organized.  I enlarged each of the pieces to fit on full sheet of letter-sized paper.

Step 4 (Option 1): Provide each student with a piece of the puzzle. You might elect to print a puzzle grid template on which each student might recreate his/her pixels.  Just make sure the grid is filled with enough fairly precise squares.

 

Step 4 (Option 2): As an alternative, you can simply have each student produce a set number of dark squares that can be added to a master grid by a select team of students.  So long as the black pixels are composed of images that appear dark when viewed from a distance, the code should work.

Step 4 (Option 3): Instead of puzzle pieces, cut your QR code into strips, providing each student with a binary strip composed of black and white squares.  This solution would work wonderfully for a class composed of 29 students!

Step 5: I asked each student to complete images that represented their favourite things, their talents, and their goals for this school year.  For some, it took a long time to develop a list of words or icons that could most apty represent each individuals uniqueness. (It took even longer for students to produce clean dark images with black Sharpie pens.)

Step 6: Put it all together.  With our QR puzzle being completed on a part time basis, we hope to have a final poster ready in a week or so.

Community projects like this one call for each student to demonstrate some commitment to the collective.  The resulting symbol demonstrates to others that the unified group is made up of many uniquely talented individuals.  While we used hand-drawn sketches, Im confident that a similar project that uses coloured squares of paper, photographs or images cut from magazines, can yield a similarly effective symbol of class unity.

{ Read More }

CPK Community Plugin Kickstarter Request For Comments

CPK Community Plugin Kickstarter Request For Comments

CPK

One more Ctool in the works. Once again Im calling out for comments, suggestions, whatever. Let me know what you thing and suggestions for improvements, or even if you think this makes no sense at all.

Motivation

Pentaho is very well known for being a very good Business Analytics software, but is in fact much more than that; Pentaho is a great platform to build on top of.
Using an easy analogy, I see Pentaho acting as an operating sytem where people can build Application on top of

Objective

The goal of CPK is to provide a simple and easy way to develop pentaho plugins that behave like packaged applications, simplifying its structure.
The UI is built using CDE, with a simple methodology to create new dashboards / pages and a sitemap that provides simple navigation and a default template
There are 3 options for doing server-side code:

1. Kettle transformations
2. Javascript server side code execution
3. Java classes

The first two are recommended, since its easier to register new endpoints just by dropping code in a directory and no compilation is necessary.
With this approach not only we expect to make it easier and faster to develop plugins, we also hope to lower down the specific technical requirements to build them. The end goal is that business consultants are able to build new plugins, not requiring specific java knowledge.

Structure

This is the resulting plugin structure. Ideally, no compilation is necessary, so everything except maybe the lib directory could be stored in a VCS system.
This is the proposed stub configuration
to be completed

CPK_Plugin
|-- conf
|-- dashboards
|-- endpoints
|-- lib
`-- plugin.xml

CPK administrative features

Besides providing the regular templating for creating new plugins, CPK can have an administrative UI with the following features:

• List existing plugins
• Detect if the plugins are up to date with the latest version of CPK
• Allow the creation of new plugins
• Allow to change plugin metadata
• List and register new endpoints (UI and code)

Heres a list of stretch goals / nice to have

• Import UI from existing dashboards in solution
• Allow editing dashboards from this UI
• Submit marketplace metadata to Pentaho
• Generate distribution zip package

Updates

As the CPK framework or any of its dependencies gets improved, the plugins themselves cant stay outdated. There will be a version information attached to the CPK plugin version so that its possible to upgrade to the latest version.

Dependencies

CPK will have as little code as possible, making it as simple as possible to develop plugins. However, it will need a few dependencies:

• Pentaho
• CPF - Community Plugin Framework, with the common set of code for the plugins
• CDE - Community Dashboard Editor
• CDF - Community Dashboard Framework
• CDA - Community Data Access

Link with Pentaho Marketplace

Once a plugin is developed, and the authors think its in a state that can be shared, CPK will be able to generate a packaged plugin and metadata information so it can be integrated into Pentahos marketplace.
Pentaho will then be able to categorize / approve the plugin so that it becomes available to other users through the marketplace

License

This project uses MPLv2

{ Read More }

Creating a dashboard with Pentaho Community Edition

Creating a dashboard with Pentaho Community Edition

As the information sources for business executives is increasing, taking decisions is becoming harder. It is for this reason, Executive dashboards are becoming more and more important. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are trying to see how to create Executive dashboards that provide actionable insights to their executives. In the government space, this is even more complex, as many departments and organizations have overlapping mandates that may also be contradictory at times. Executive dashboards provide a way to organize information within the enterprise to focus on actionable information. Open source BI platforms such as Pentaho, offer a compelling option to organizations, who would like to test their ideas before investing thousands in main stream BI platforms.

In this post, we will start the process to create a BI dashboard using Pentaho tools for a multi-perspective multi-organization dashboard. This exercise will go through several steps that involve  multiple technologies. To start off, I will start with creating a customized dashboard look and feel that will house the different KPIs. This I will do in the current post.

Now, in a separate blog post (http://syntharch.blogspot.com/2013/01/quality-of-life-kpis-measuring-human.html), I have started listing Social KPIs and Measures that could be used for measuring a range of social development outcomes. We will build the dashboard using these social measures within the series.

Starting Pentaho BI Server

In previous posts, we discussed installing Pentaho BI Server Community Edition, as well as Community Dashboard Tools on top of it. Let us navigate to the place our Pentaho BI Server is installed and start the Tomcat instance that ships with it.

On my machine, it as follows

> cd Work/Servers/Pentaho/biserver-ce

> ./start-pentaho.sh

Now, once the Tomcat instance has started, we can access the browser to launch the application. For me the URL is http://ub1204.arthgallo.com:8082/pentaho

Logging in the instance with the default username and password, we are shown the familar screen containing the home page. Upon logging in, navigate to the browse panel on the left, right click and select option to create a new folder.

In my case, I am going to call the new folder nydash.

Once created, I want to add a new dashboard page.

Now that the page is created, click on the Save option on the dashboard page. I am going to call it nygov scorecard and save it under the nydash folder.

Now that the dashboard is created, we need to create the bullet graphs that we need. The state government may want to track itself along multiple dimensions, say operational, policy and strategic.

On the Layout section, select the option to Apply a template. We need to click the icon on the Layout Structure to achieve this as shown below.

On the dialog box that pops up, choose the 3 column template.

Clicking on Ok, will give you the following screen.

Clicking on Preview gives us the following display.

We can close the preview. First thing we need to do is to fix some of the UI elements.

For this navigate to the Layout section, and expand the first row and column. Navigate to the background colour property and change it to #003366. Also change corners to Simple.

Next navigate to the nested html element. Clicking on the html element shows the html in an editable colour. Make the following changes

Text: New York State Performance Dashboard

Color: FFEFFF

Save and preview the changes.

Next navigate to Row 3. It will have 3 columns, each of which we will modify as follows.

Color: #EAEAEA

Corner: Simple

Next we update the first column of the last footer row to change the text as follows in the html element.

We also change the settings for the column as follows.

Span Size: 12

Text Align: Left

For the next row, we change it to

Span Size: 10

Height: 40

Text Align: Right

We also update the html to replace the default text with an image from NY gov site.

Lets preview what our template looks like

At this point, we are ready to add some components. We will do this in the next post. In my next post, we will add a bullet graph to the dashboard and customize the look and feel.

{ Read More }