Martin Dougiamas posted this : Using Moodle: Moodle 1.5 Beta later this week for sure
Attendance is not being maintained and has some big implementation problems - it’s only there in CVS due to inertia. I’d love someone to take on the idea of Attendance reports and rewrite it from scratch to work better in Moodle. Perhaps a block, even.
Attendance is not being maintained and has some big implementation problems - it’s only there in CVS due to inertia. I’d love someone to take on the idea of Attendance reports and rewrite it from scratch to work better in Moodle. Perhaps a block, even.
Maybe this is what I could get students into …
I am heartened to find that posting an entry visible to ‘everyone in the world’ actually works. Using the ‘permalink’ will bring up the blog entry even if you are not logged in. This is gratifying but I’m baffled as to how it worketh.
The Trackback feature — called ‘inform sites I have linked to that I have linked to them’ — also works.
However, there are still “issues” ….
Exceedingly annoying editing issue:
- Create blog entry : apply a course category and publish to this course only (popup link to screenshot)
- Use Markdown formatting — previews OK
- Goto View My Entries — markdown formatting has not been applied. So let’s change the formatting to html.
- Switch editing on and click on the cleverly concealed edit entry button
- Now we find that only non course specific categories are displayed and the ‘publish to’ options have lost ‘teachers of CS182’ and ‘users of CS182’ options.[screenshot]
Another symptom of problems with categories is the following:
If I click on ‘View Site Entries’ I would expect my blog entries under the category ‘General’ to be displayed but I would not expect entries made with course categories especially after I had specified Publish to : all users of CS-182. What this behaviour means is that the “Publish to: ” course options don’t seem to work. Screenshot of problem. Note also that it’s impossible to know that you are viewing site entries from any of the headings on this page (see also problems with blog views
In Testing Moodle Blog: Mark’s personal blog I talk about what I really want to be able to do with “blogging in the wilderness™”
What I really want to be able to do:
- post with a fully functional blog system (rather than stripped down email). It doesn’t neccessarily have to be online on the internet.
- incorporate photos. Edit and manipulate photos — preferably with Photoshop Elements (v3)
- incorporate podcasts. I’d likemto be able to record impressions in the field and add them to my blog entry for that day.
- incorporate video clips. Why not podcast containing short video clip such as what you can do with most of the new prosumer digital cameras?
Problems:
- hardware - weight and provision of power.
- software to do remote blogging and updating of home blog.
- Internet connection — WiFi, 3G, Euro standards etc
Yes, I’m still interested in “blogging in the wilderness”™. Ida Takes Tea makes some interesting comments in ‘Moblogging - barriers to adoption’.
Ida describes moblogging as being mainly, if not wholly, concerned with “users upload images by emailing their digital photos directly from their cameraphones/PDAs to their personalised moblog webpage.”, and the barrier to adoption is the way that Moblogging has been commercialised. However, I see ‘blogging in the wilderness’ as a wee bit more subtle than this. Here’s my fanstasy — I’m on expedition to Alaska say, or better still, Iceland (Bobby Fisher notwithstanding), and we’re hiking from the hot springs in Landmannalaugar to the golden waterfall of Gullfoss — at the end of each day I bring out my powerbook and type in my impressions of the day to a local blog. I’ve already taken a bunch of photos with my Nikon D-70 so I load those in, faff around with photoshop a wee bitty with them, create the day’s gallery page with photoshop and link the blog entry to it. This I do for 30 mins or so every day that we’re apart from civilization. Then when we return to Reykjavik I get decent wifi signal (or other high throughput internet connection), I make a connection back to my home blog and run a script which updates everything (using rdist or similar) on the home blog.
More thoughts on this in a later posting.
This link is an interesting article referenced from the Educause site: Course Management System Utilization and Implications for Practice: A National Survey of Department Chairpersons
This quote deserves some digestion and response:
“In that the majority of respondents indicated that departmental CMS utilization was directed primarily to support traditional face-to-face courses, there is a question of value-added educational gains. The cost per semester credit hour of content delivery undoubtedly increases as a function of the integration of CMS.
In that respondents indicated no or negligible perceived gains to student learning and quality of teaching (instruction), the primary purpose and/or advantage for continued CMS utilization is considered to be convenience to students. “
Yes, the configuration of blog blocks is really confusing me. Here’s the current situation as far as I can see:
| Blog Block display in sections of Moodle | ||
| Weekly Outline | Personal Blog entries | Course entries page |
|---|---|---|
| Displayed: | ||
| Blog Menu, Blog Categories, Blog News Feed Links | Blog Menu Blog Categories (hidden), Blog Recent Entries, Blog Entries Calendar, Blog News Feed Links, Blogs on theis Site (hidden) Mark’s Blog Feed, Blog Quick Navigation | Blog Menu, Blog Categories, Blog Recent Entries, Blog News Feed Links, Blog Entries Calendar |
| Available: | ||
| Blog News Feed Links, Blog Site Entries, Blogs On This Site | Blog Archives, Blog Entries Calendar, Blog News Feed Links, Blog Quick Navigation, Blog Site Entries, Blogs on this Site | Blog Archives, Blog Entries Calendar, Blog News Feed Links, Blog Quick Navigation, Blog Site Entries, Blogs on this Site |
 |  |  |
You can see why I’m confused:
- On the weekly outline, the prof cannot seem to have the Blog Entries Calendar displayed for all students. Similarly, the Quick Navigation and News Feed links are not available.
- On the personal blog entries page (that is all blog entries you have made for all courses) [click on View my entries], The Blog entries calendar, News Feed links, & Quick Navigation are all displayed but then are duplicated in the available block list.
- On the Course blog entries page (student entries for the course) [click on View course entries — this link is only present in the Weekly Outline], blog blocks that I would expect to be persent are not, eg Blog News Feed links and Quick navigation.
Clearly there are some wierdnesses here which do need to be tidied up to avoid mass confusion.
Comments on the personal view of blog entries.
When I, as a teacher, click on ‘View my entries’ in the Blog Menu invariably I want to view my blog entries in the context of the course I have currently selected. Therefore this should be made explicit in the breadcrumb navigation.
At the moment, the breadcrumb navigation “demo >> Blogs >> Testing Moodle blog” leads me to a page with all the latest entries for the whole site. This is possibly the last page that I’d be interested in seeing. Moreover, since ‘Vew course entries’ is lacking in the Blog Menu there is no direct way to get there ; to the place where I most want to go next. Finally there are some rendering problems with the entry titles and the colour scheme I am using.
My suggestions on this screenshot are that the title of the course be displayed top left (not the name of the site), and the following:
- breadcrumb navigation:
[Site name] >> [course id] >> [course blog entries] >> [my blog title]. In this case it would then read demo >> CS-182 >> CS-182 blogs >> Mark’s personal blog - Add ‘View course entries’ to the Blog menu. I know this is duplication but it don’t hurt too much to have this in two places.
- I do like the Blog Quick Navigation block but this is most useful when blogs start to fill up; initially teachers will just use the breadcrumb navigation (or the ‘back’ button) that they have been used to.
So, then one would use ‘view site entries’ in the Blog Menu to get to a list of all the site entries.
Configuring blog blocks
In Moodle (at least up to v1.4) the teacher can modify the appearance of the site by moving the function blocks around, hiding and deleteing them or adding different ones. Changes made are reflected throughout the course. Not so with the blog blocks it seems. I spent ages faffing around with adding extra blocks and moving the Blog Entries Calendar up in the display only to find that the display was changed on my personal blog but not the class blogs. Add in to the mix that when in the class blog entry screen you don’t know that you’re there (see previous entry) there is scope for considerable frustration.
More insightful comments from jason’s blog at buberel.org: this time refuting the notion that file sharing is equivalent to communism.
jason’s blog at buberel.org: has got yet another insightful comment and useful links, this time at the dawn of the SS movement.
jason’s blog at buberel.org: has some important questions about the dark side of social software.
The crucial question : ‘Here is some content you are likely to disagree with. Would you read it?’ Or better, would you choose to seek it out?
These are interesting issues. Making money using computers has never been simple but business models nowadays are having to become more sophisticated because users are accustomed to ‘free’ services, for example, the internet itself (Q: what other things do we take for granted as being free that really do cost money). Subscription services, micropayments, donation ware are all examples.
BTW Dave Winer (Who Will Pay?) is wrong when he says ‘if you paid nothing for health care you’d likely die sooner’ — the UK National Health service is funded from general taxation so that the poorest who pay little or no taxes do get decent health care. That’s socialism for you!
I have come across a rather knotty problem with the user interface which involves a faculty viewing his blog entries from either course, site or personal perspective.
If we start out with the Weekly Outline we see 5 ‘blog blocks’ :
- Blog Menu
- Blog Categories
- Blog New Feed Links
- Blog Site entries
- Blogs On This Site
Now I want to discover what my students have been writing about and whether they have done the homework writing. So I click the Blog Menu : View Course Entries link (popup graphic illustrating interface problems).
- The page here has no title that tells you that you are looking at all the course entries. If it were me I’d insert a title something like “CS - 182 course blog entries” that would appear over the main list of entries.
- Moreover, the page title and header is grossly misleading.
- Currently the page title is “demo:Blogs” but the page really should be titled something like “demo : CS 182 : blogs” to show that it’s a view of blog entries for this course.
- Similarly, the page heading should read “Social Impact of Computer Technology” to show that we’re still looking at this course
- The breadcrumbs on this page are misleading too. Currently it shows “demo >> Blogs” but this blogs link takes you to the site blogs whereas really the user would probably want to return to a lost of course blogs. Thus “demo >> CS 182 blogs” might be a better breadcrumb here.
Finally, I am intruiged by the URL that’s generated:
“http://learn2.lincoln.ac.nz/moodleblog/blog/ index_more.php?&m=&d=&y=&limit=&formstart=&courseid=2 &blogid=0&categoryid=&groupid=”
‘User Access’ refers to which users have access to which categories. This is controlled in the Categories block when you create a new category. The flexibility means that for teaching faculty you can have cross-conversations with other faculty located in the same blog as notes to yourself about how the course is going and blog entries visible to students on the course and outside folks.
Again, this is from the help file:
When creating or modifying a blog category using the categories block you may have the option to choose from different user access settings. You will be presented with this option when you are either a site administrator or the teacher of a course. The options you may be presented with and their explanations follow:
- Yourself only
A category is made available for use only by its creator. No other users will see a see the category listed as available when creating a new blog entry. - All members of this site
Any user logged into this site will be able to see and add to this category when adding a blog entry. Guest users will not have access. - Course members only
Any user who is a member of the specified course will be able to see and add to this category when adding a blog entry. Guest users will not have access. The course must be specified in the Course Access menu.
This is where Moodle and WordPress really show some synergy to enable functionality which neither can do on their own.
Each blog entry that a student makes can have one of 5 different ‘publish states’. From the help file:
- Draft
A draft entry is available for view only by its owner. No other users will see a draft entry listed as available or be able to view its contents. - Members of this site can view
Any user logged into this site will be able to view the entry. Guest users will not have access. - Anyone can view
This is a fully public entry. It can be viewed by anyone regardless of their login status on this site. - Teachers can view
If you are creating an entry associated with a course this option is available. Only users who are assigned as teachers of the course that this entry is associated with will be able to view the entry. - Fellow students and teachers can view
If you are creating an entry associated with a course this option is available. Users who are assigned as teachers of the course or are enrolled as members of the course that this entry is associated with will be able to view the entry.
This is incredibly flexible. I can have students write stuff just for me, they can write stuff for fellow course members to comment on, and then they can write stuff that’s open to the world so that my alumni commentators can put their oar in.
Dan Marsden , the Educational Web Developer at Lincoln University in New Zealand (home of the All Blacks) kindly created an account for me on his moodleblog server where he is developing the blog module for Moodle. [I understand that it's based on WordPress 1.5 which is brill from my point of view. Also, I believe that it's slated for the Moodle 1.6 version which should appear before August.]
The next couple of entries will be comments on this beta install.
- Making blog entries. I like the way that the blog is presented independent of other Moodle activities. That is how it should be and it reinforces use over the whole course time period.
[I'm beginning to see how students could have a blog outside one particular class and how it could be accessible to the outside. This confirms my suspicion that some care needs to be taken over naming the blog in the first place. 'my blog' won't work, 'markp's blog' is better though folks outside will wonder who 'markp' is, and 'Mark Pearson's blog' is probably the best.] - I like the way that the categories can be personal or course based and I like the way that you just pull down a menu to select.
- Body excerpt is a great idea (Moveable Type shoves this at the bottom); presumably this is what is displayed in the RSS feed. [Actually, the 'excerpt' here is equivalent to the Entry Body in M.T ]
- Personally I'm not a fan of writing html into blog entries, but this is done well. I hope that some of the flakiness of HTMLArea present in Moodle v 1.4 has been address (eg handling graphic images is atriociously flakey). Thus far I have found that postings in Markdown format preview correctly but do not render correctly in the final published entry.
- Publish to:. The options on here are, as my dear daughter would say, frickin marvellous! This means I can tell students to write an entry that only I can see as the teacher, to write an entry that other members of the class can comment on, and to write an entry that my Alumni commentators can make comments on.
- Advanced.
I do like the description of 'pingback' as 'Inform sites I have linked to that I have linked to them.
The 'trackback' option is used if this post is a comment on another post.
The problem with the Add Entry / Edit Entry page is it's horizontal width. Most students will be using a monitor of pixel dimensions 1024x768 and the default layout as I had it set, with blocks on both sides of the window was too wide (see popup graphic). I managed to move all the blocks over to the right and now its OK see here Jimmy! !
Bug Alert
Editing seems to switch itself off when you move from the Weekly Outline into the blogging part. Thus the button will display 'Turn editing off' when in weekly outline but after you click on a blogging function link it gets reset to 'Turn editing on'. Not a major gripe but a minor buggette.
From conversations about Pedagogy Information in the SakaiPedia site:
Ben Brophy: “to be able to provide a platform for profs who want to develop tools. Today it would be very difficult for a clever grad student to author a tool that plugs into Sakai - there’s too much arcane JSF and legacy point that creative and talented faculty and their teams will be able to contribute, without going through the select cadre of trained Sakai developers.”
Interesting conversation among programmers — I wonder how many of them have ever actually taught in the classroom - probably some. I think that Ben’s comment is right on the money — profs / amateur programmers need to be able to develop custom application/module that fits just them. Then if it really works it’ll get developed further. The ‘workshop’ module of Moodle is a good case in point. It’s clunky and idiosyncratic but it fulfils a unique niche and there’s nothing else like it.