A fantasy scenario I have for synergy between Internet Radio, podcasting and downloading tunes.

I’m listening to Radio Nigel on iTunes (or whatever) while working with Dreamweaver. Hmmm. Thinks, “catchy tune there by XTC — Making Plans for Nigel — good broadcast segment this. I’ll list the podcasts this station is playing today. Ahh there’s the current show. I’ll queue it up to download from NetPod.com and it’ll download in the background after the show has finished”. But I’m not sure how much download space I have left; I’ll nip over to Netpod.com and check on my current account. This place is brilliant — $10 subscription a month for 100Mb worth of podcasts. And 12c / Mb over my limit. I think I’ll up my download limit to 120Mb for $12 cos I’m using it more than I thought. And the selection — any internet radio station worth it’s salt is here — and it’s worldwide — I can listen to a podcast in Africaans or Welsh if I want to. Hey, I notice that my favourite blues joint, Red Key Indiana, has a podlisting of their upcoming bands. And there’s Joanna Conner — she was brilliant last time I saw her at Red Key — let’s download the podcast of her concert. Back to Radio Nigel — Martin Gore ‘Compulsion’ is playing — sounds funky, I’d like to have that tune. Ahh, it’s just appeared on the PodPlayList, let’s click on ‘get this tune from CDs.com’ to download in the background. Argg! I’m spending too much money. So let’s listen to one of my recent poddownloads — the latest broadcast of Little Britain from the BBC. Bloody brilliant — I’ll rate it 5 stars out of 5 and stick a comment in the ‘your comments’ box. Don’t forget to synchronise my ratings & comments with NetPod — that’ll push this podcast up the popularity list in the comedy section. Nice that links in comments are live so that other viewers can go to the Little Britain site I found.

Suggested Agenda for 1st Meeting

1. new version for implementation. 1.5 is almost ready (could we have a test version up perhaps?). 1.6 is slated to be available by August. This is important for me because it's the version that will have blogs in it.
2. Organising courses. Currently we have departmental categories. I would like to propose that we implement categories based on departments. How should we tackle interdepartmental courses? How should we handle courses that are now in the Moodle system – we need some way of making them accessible to faculty without confusing current usage. Also, how do manage copying resources and other stuff from old courses into new ones (backup/restore)?
3. A faculty has asked whether we could import student names and pictures from the EC Facebook.
4. Could we have all faculty and students pre-enrolled and courses presetup? Dusko?
5. Reporting procedures for bugs and issues. I'd like to have an easy to use procedure where students and faculty can record problems, issues and apparent bugs. Despite my best efforts (not good enough) I still end up getting news of problems by hearsay. Eg, Welling Hall asserted that a student assistant in one course had been able to see other student's grades in a different course; an assertion that I was unable to replicate.
6. backup / Restore files > 64Mb.

Improvements in v1.5

• The All-new assignment module
  View pop-up screenshot
• Blogging. I've been conversing with Daryl Hawes — see more moodleblog musings .In Blogging definitely in 1.6 Martin Dougiamas writes:

Moodle 1.6 will have a lot less stuff in it that 1.4 -> 1.5 has, and I fully expect it to be out by that date.
One thing it will DEFINITELY have in it is blogging … this feature has been delayed long enough and is much needed.

• There's a brand new wiki module proposed. Though it's not clear what Moodle version it'll see the light of day.View screenshot