MUPPLE II

MUPPLE II is your learning companion in the web. It supports you in learning new best practices from all the others out there - new practices in how to use tools for learning effectively. More precisely, MUPPLE II helps you to trace and replay usage strategies on the web. As a learner, you learn how to work with all the cool new tools on the web - without loosing endless hours exploring their 'potential'. As a more knowledgeable other, you give your fellow peers a guide at hand that brings them up to speed - without you bothering to explain the thing over and over again. MUPPLE II is built as a Firefox Jetpack plugin. MUPPLE is short for 'mash-up personal learning environment'.

Record the web

The recording and replay cockpit of MUPPLE II is realized as a slidebar on the left side of the browser window. Click on the MUPPLE icon and the slidebar opens. The slidebar section is divided into two areas. The first area contains all recorded activities (see 'Open Workflows'). Click on one of the activities.

In the second area below, you will see all the action steps needed to fulfill your activity, guiding you through the web. Click on one of the actions and MUPPLE II will show you in the main browser window to the right what you need to do to get things done. Don't forget: MUPPLE II is not meant to automate things for you (you would use a script for that). MUPPLE II is designed to teach you usage strategies for those things that are too complex to get automated (such as writing a paper collaboratively).

To record an activity you create a new activity. Navigate in the main browser window to the url on which the new activity is supposed to start. MUPPLE will log this. To log further action steps while interacting with the page, you simply right click on the relevant item and add it to the actions via the context menu. The new action immediately appears in the slidebar. Step by step you log all the required actions (and maybe some optional ones).

In the next section, we will go a bit more into the details of recording the web with MUPPLE II. Further down the text you find a demo video of MUPPLE II showing all features in detail.

‘Please note that in the current prototype, the 'Open Workflows' and the 'steps list' are non-functional, that is that the prototype shows one single (default) workflow.' Also MUPPLE won't force you open new or switch tabs for now.

Recording in Detail

The following picture shows how you can record a link 'FM technologies'. It is one step of the activity 'collaborative paper writing', which we defined by clicking on 'new activity' in the slidebar. To record a link make a right click over the link (1) and select in the context menu the entry 'add link action'. The slidebar shows as action step of the activity the newly added link (3). With MUPPLE II you can define besides the 'add link action', 'add note action', and 'add form field action'. The link action records the selected link, while the note action adds selected text and the form filed action saves text fields, button clicks, and check-box and radio-box selections. These are the basic elements, you need, to record all actions of an activity.