Harvest Project
Harvest project aims to make learning visible to educators and decision makers. Within the context of the Sugar Learning Platform, this can be achieved by collecting reliable metadata from the Journal. This project proposes a simple and continuous mechanism to obtain metadata from Journal entries, incrementally over time. Metadata can stored in a central repository for further statistical analysis.
What it is collecting?
Harvest collects most of the non-sensible journal entry metadata, but also collects anonymous information about the user.
Concepts
- Activities refers to the sugar applications that are being used.
- Learners refers to the sugar users.
- Instances refers to the different sessions an particular activity.
- Launches refers to the different times the same session is started.
Meta-data
| Data | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Concept | Attribute | Description | Type | |
| Learners | serial_number | Laptop identifier | String | |
| birthdate | Aproximate birthdate of the user | Unix time | ||
| gender | Gender of the user | String | ||
| Activities | bundle_id | Activity identifier | String | |
| Instances | object_id | Entry identifier | String | |
| filesize | Size in bytes of the content associated to the entry | Integer | ||
| creation_time | Entry creation time | Unix time | ||
| timestamp | Entry last modification time | Unix time | ||
| buddies | Number of user's associated to the entry | Integer | ||
| spent_time | Just a place holder for now. Still not supported in Sugar | Integer | ||
| shared_scope | If entry was exposed through the collaboration service | Boolean | ||
| title_set_by_user | If user has set a custom message to the entry | Boolean | ||
| keep | If the entry has been explicitly kept in the journal | Boolean | ||
| mime_type | Media type associated to the activity instance | String | ||
| Launches | timestamp | Launch time for an particular entry | Unix time | |
| object_id | Entry identifier | String | ||
Observation: All the meta-data names, matches the original names of the journal meta-data.
How does it work?
The project comprises two pieces of software: a harvest server that can be localed anywhere in the cloud, and a harvest client that runs in the learners machine. The harvest server exposes a service, accessible from the Internet, for metadata storage. The harvest clients collect metadata from the Journal and sends it to server.
When does it collect?
- Data is collected when Sugar starts and when Sugar successfully connects to a network.
- Once it has successfully collected data, it won't sent another report until the next collecting period, weekly or monthly.
- In order to avoid service peaks, Harvest applies a random (1/7) chance for executing the collection process.
What are the advantages?
- Doesn't require OS customizations, it based on Sugar's web service framework.
- Doesn't depend on school server presence, either on backup files.
What is implemented so far?
Harvest server
- Back-end service for storage.
- SSL data encryption.
- API Key authorization.
- Control scripts based on systemd.
- RPM packaging.
Harvest client
- Journal entries collection.
- Web service extension.
- Extension controls from the web service control panel.
- Random selection.
- Exclusive log for debugging.
- RPM packages.
Code
TODO
- Server-side data visualization
- Client-side (Sugar) modifications to collect run-times and other desired data