Monthly Archive for August, 2005

http://mantis.york.ac.uk/moodle/course/view.php?id=14

You know there has to be something to this because a) it hasn’t been widely hyped, as far as I know b) they actually seem to be shipping code and working specifications. What a nice contrast. A high level description of this web services protocol to provide remote processing of assessment items on behalf of assessment systems, independant of specific CMS, can be found in this PDF file. Apparently Moodle is already supporting this, and it is on the radar for the people working on the Tools Interoperability Profile. - SWL

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/moodle/

As if more proof was needed that Moodle has “crossed the chasm,” along comes this new publication from O’Reilly written by Jason Cole. The majority of the content you could likely glean yourself from Moodle’s various online communities, help docs and demo courses, but if for instance you have an administration that remains skeptical about the widespread nature of Moodle adoption, maybe this might help convince them. - SWL

http://eduforge.org/docman/view.php/20/243/
eXe_report_sbritain.pdf

This report by Sandy Britain was commissioned by the University of Auckland and released back in April, but I only just stumbled upon it. I’ve been arguing for at least a year now that one of the next places we need to focus our attention on is better tools for authoring, especially for authoring XML-based, standards compliant elearning content. XML is not a fringe technology, and it’s far past the time when we should be requiring content in higher ed to be well structured and easily re-published in other formats, something I take it that these editors can help with and that continuing with outmoded HTML editors doesn’t. Britain acknowledges that there are potentially far more tools to examine than the 4 he compares eXe with (Burrokeet, Lectora, SoftChalk Lesson Builder, and Lersus); I would have liked to see at least ThinkingCap Studio and the ICE System in there as well, and to this end am hoping we at Edutools can get a comparative analysis project going to look at these and more. [If you have a pot of money lying around and would like to see such a comparison happen, please feel free to contact me.] Still, a good overview and introduction to the issue. - SWL

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27338

One of the things I love about the Moodle community is that, far more than almost any of the other open source CMS, they seem to have really rich discussions about the pedagogical uses of the tools they are building, not just their functionality utility or technical challenges (AND, you can even view them as a Guest if you are adverse to new accounts). And this particular one is no different - starting with a post from Moodle’s founder, Martin Dougiamas, this thread (55 posts long in 2 weeks!) discusses some of the ins and outs of blogs versus discussion forums, and starts to tackle the issue in light of the secured environment that CMS like Moodle provide, and that in many contexts (read K-12) likely cannot be dispensed with. The Blog feature itself is promised in an upcoming (1.6) release, but a demo can already be seen. - SWL