Hack Night; What is on your list?

[scottdennis]

Hi All,

Once again Hack Night will be happening Wednesday night from 8 - 11 PM, this time in the Grand Ballroom.  As in years past we'll have plenty of tables for people to gather around to talk about whatever they want to work on with respect to Canvas.  If you haven't been before, these informal ad hoc conversations can be very techie, with people discussing integrations, app design and open source coding.  At other tables you will find people discussing good course design and maybe being introduced to a new teaching technique or even seeing Canvas live for the first time (it happens).  This year we, again will have a no host bar, engineers from Salt Lake onsite and also remoting in via dedicated workstations, our sponsor set up onsite (Unicon), and a healthy mix of Instructure employees and advocates on hand to help out.  As in the past we will also have some pre-printed table top signage to help people sort into like minded groups as well as blank signs for people to fill out as they may choose.  Do you have a particular topic or activity you are hoping to connect around with other people?  If so, please start the conversation here and give us ideas about what topics to print and bring with us.

[Bobby2]

What fun  @scottdennis . I can only imagine the buzz in the room when this takes place. 

[KristinL]

For Community Members who check in using the QR code printed on those nifty tabletop signs Scott mentioned, there is a special edition Community Badge and 50 points up for grabs!

See InstructureCon 2019 • Community Badges‌ for more details!! :smileygrin:

[James]

 @KristinL ,

Is there a "no purchase necessary" clause in there for those of us without the technological skills to use a QR code?

[Stef_retired]

 @James , we'll be there to work something out for you.

[mjennings]

Oh Hack Night! One of my favorite activities of #instcon‌!! Looking forward to another great time.

[kona]

Last year I ended up having some great Instructional Design conversations at Hack Night! I know it's not what you might think of as the normal "hack night" type thing, but it was really useful and a lot of fun! 🙂

Kona

[scottdennis]

Hey Kona,

Actually, I disagree - I think Instructional Design has become a very normal hack night topic in that it seems to be one of the larger interests.  One of my favorite aspects of Hack Night is that its for everybody - super techie through to people who just found out about Canvas a week before.  'Hack your course' seems to resonate with a lot of folks.  Anyway, I'm looking forward to hopefully another great year.  

Oh, and we will definitely work something out for any QR code-adverse husbands who decide to show up too.    

[James]

QR-adverse may be a misrepresentation of the issue.

I have the qrcode package installed for LaTeX and have printed QR codes that feedback from one assignment without divulging grades to other students. I was trying to match students together into balanced groups so I used the color of the QR code to let me know which group the students were in. We started with someone from the red group to be team leaders. Then they picked names from the green group. Then they picked people from the blue group. They didn't know what the colors represented, we were just demonstrating good simple random sampling of drawing names on slips of paper from the proverbial hat. After the names were picked and each person had their own lip of paper, they could scan the QR code and get the feedback on an assignment.

I've printed QR codes for students to go around and have people scan to take a survey. Many of the students had trouble using them as well and in many cases, my students handed their phone over to the person they were interviewing to complete the survey because they couldn't get the QR code to work. And yes, I followed all the rules regarding size and whitespace around it.

In theory, QR codes are a neat idea. In practice, there are issues.

My problem with QR codes centers around a lack of technology that can scan a QR code. My wife's issue, when there were QR codes at the tables that people were instructed to scan, was the inability to get connected amid the thousands of attendees at InstructureCon.

[scottdennis]

That does seem rather complicated, James.  It seems like most instructors I have known, as they move along in their careers move more and more towards simple lesson plans and teaching techniques that don't invite confusion and chaos.

[James]

Thankfully, few have ever accused me of being like others.

[kona]

Absolute truth! 

[robotcars]

Lots of potential for hack night, but many of them seem to large to chew in a single evening of socializing and tapping away...

then there are things that seem entirely possible with a handful of people and a few hours...

How about a mashup of module hacks?

Collapse & Expand Modules 

Module Filters 

Module Completion Tracker

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/14139-module-progress-bar-amended 

Module Activity Indicator 

Aside from that, I'll be bringing two new tools for pipe-lining Canvas Data and Live Events.

[mjennings]

I would sit and watch this like the Super Bowl!

[robotcars]

There's also a nearly completed Syllabus Assignments hack I was working on, that I never finished for various reasons.

1. it involves manipulating things by date and that worries me about students who travel

2. we had a child and that sabotaged my home tinkering (it's ok though, my worklife balance is better now)

code

Syllabus Links Options BETA... DO NOT PRODUCTION THIS · GitHub 

topic

Syllabus Without Assignments > #comment-117430 

[scottdennis]

Hey Robert,

I'll be printing some potential topics for people to choose for their table top signs (or they can write something else on blank cards).  Would you like me to print any of your specific topic ideas?

[robotcars]

Can we go generic?

JavaScript Hacks & Themes

Canvas Data & Live Events

InstructureUI for LTI

[scottdennis]

Yep, those are all great.  I hope people have other ideas as well.

[lfeng1]

Totally interested in seeing the tools you have for pipelining Canvas Data and Live Events!   I will be there as well!

[akinsey]

Hack Night is one of my two favorite parts of InstructureCon. I'll definitely be looking for the ID table and the Canvas Data table!

[millerjm]

I'd like to see Canvas Data and Live Events.  In past years, it's been really helpful to have several members of the data and live events team at hack night.  

[robotcars]

Of particular interest would be someone who is skilled at Lambda Architectures, combining batch and stream data.

Issues in Combined Static and Dynamic Data Management » λ lambda-architecture.net 

[millerjm]

carroll-ccsd,

I don't know what that means!  LOL.  Maybe someone can explain it to me during hack night.

Joni

[robotcars]

Yea me either. But in trying to consolidate, join and otherwise integrate batch and stream data Canvas has provided  with Canvas Data and Live Events, I found it had a name, found it was an architecture popular about 8 years ago before products like Apache Spark, Flink, Hadoop were all designed to sync, store, and distribute these data types into a more congruous data sets.

I highly doubt 90% of anyone around here are interested in getting that far with Apache products yet...

what are some of the best ways to handle this with simple SQL?

Ideally, I need to create tables that can be populated from Canvas Data that can be merged with Live Events, leaving me with a combination of real time and batch data for our users. You talk about using Live Events to update your submissions.... great use case, but what if we go further. What if my application is attendance, and I also need to merge in Enrollments and Users.

How long should we keep the data? Currently I have to manually delete live events for each event table, but I also have a live_stream table, consisting of all common fields to 1 table for all events, which kind of does better than the requests table for things I want with less noise. So I can truncate all the individual tables (where there's a comparable canvas data table) each night after a successful canvas data import...

now, should I do a query on the last date time from the CD table, or just truncate down to midnight the previous day, have some overlap, but resolve that in my queries...

Lot's a possibilities here, they expand the more use cases you have for adding more live events... what are the best practices.

Consider submissions

submission_dim

submission_created (created, submitted)

submission_updated (updated events, LTI event post backs from vendor)

Live Events submission_create|updated, basically holds each submission and attempt, while submission_dim holds the last submitted_at and a rollup of attempts.

If I was doing this, what's best?

Write a program that UPSERTS submission_dim or

Partitions, Orders, and Selects the last submitted_at from LE and appends to submission_dim via UNION?

I have a dashboard with real time active users chart... to produce this, I have to use Live Events user_created, along with user_dim and pseudonym_dim, so I group by SIS group (employee, student, parent). I can extend this into the attendance application with enrollments and teachers can see new enrollments, both in Canvas People, and our LTI.

Maybe this is really easy for some DBAs... for some of us application developers, we're used to making our own data and having direct access to records being created and stored.

There's a few ways to do it, what experiences have people had, tried, what's easier to maintain?

[millerjm]

Robert, I'm presenting on how to use live events with canvas data for submissions. 

[robotcars]

I know! I'm excited! :smileygrin:

Earlier that day I'll be presenting on ways to consume and ingest Canvas Data and Live Events quickly enough to use in daily reporting, services, and LTIs, and sharing ideas for how we use it and plan to use it. :smileygrin:

[James]

Thanks for the description -- we were going through  @mjennings ‌ printable schedule this morning during the drive to Minneapolis and didn't see the speaker's name. 

[mjennings]

You know  @James ‌, that is something I always struggle with when I put those together. Ultimately, I decided that I like seeing the sessions with out the speaker listed because I want to decide which session to attend based off of the topic and not on who is presenting. It's my issue, as I know that I tend to gravitate to the people I know, even if there are sessions that would be more beneficial for me to attend. Plus it make for a happy surprise when I hit a session and there is someone I know presenting. Travel safe!!

[James]

That wasn't intended to be a slam, it was just giving a shout out to how helpful the printed version was.

[mjennings]

No "slam " taken. Just thought I should clarify my thought process.

Shout out accepted.

[robotcars]

Wasn't quite the description, but the title is Big Data Ideas & Usage for Tiny Budgets & Small Teams

[lfeng1]

Yes - the @unicon team have done this on several projects.  Would love to talk more at Hack Night - thanks, Linda

[wdransfield]

Hey all! I’m presenting a session this year titled “The Canvas Developement Platform” covering some of the new integration elements we’ve been building into Canvas (Shameless plug: it’s Wed Jul 10 at 2:30 PM if you are interested).

Some of the topics I’ll be covering might make great topics for hack night as well. I wanted to share a brief synopsis now and would love to chat more about questions/integrations ideas you have at hack night: Canvas Developement Platform Topics.

[hinal_pandya]

Hi  @wdransfield ‌, your presentation was really helpful. If possible, would you mind posting the presentation here as resource for new graphQL queries?

Thanks.

[wdransfield]

 @hinal_pandya  Glad you found it helpful! Here is a link: Developer Session - Google Slides  I've also shared a link in the main thread of this discussion so others can find it a bit easier.

[James]

 @wdransfield ,

Thanks for posting that. This was the session I got locked out of because the room was full faster than I could walk from the keynote.

[wdransfield]

No problem! I'll also be under the lifeguard tower most of the day if you want to chat about what I presented.

[akinsey]

Will anyone from Quizzes.Next be at Hack Night? Definitely building up some questions as we move into using it more.

[lfeng1]

Hi everyone!!  Unicon is super excited to be sponsoring Hack Night this year! 

I'll be there and looking forward to talking to folks about all things Canvas - especially the following areas:

• LTI in all forms
• SIS integrations
• Canvas Data and Live Events
• Analytics

(Not necessarily in that order - trying not to play favorites!  🙂 )

Hit me up here or on email if you want to talk!

 Linda Feng (lfeng@unicon.net)

[wdransfield]

I promised a few folks at hack night that I'd share the slides from my presentation here. Here is a link: Developer Session - Google Slides  It was great to meet you all!