Moodle has a cron.php script that takes care of routine tasks, such as unsubscribing inactive members from classes and sending out email messages. Unfortunately, there is no built-in way for this script to run every few minutes when the Moodle installation is inside a protected directory, such as a school Intranet. However, I figured out a workaround.

If you have directory security enabled on your IIS Moodle installation, don't use MoodleCron. Instead create a Windows Scheduled Task on your server. This passes credentials and executes the cron.php script from the command line, getting around nasty browser authentication issues.

1. Open Control Panel --> Scheduled Tasks on your server
2. Open Add Scheduled Task. Select Next.
3. When asked to select an application, Browse to your PHP installation and select PHP.exe. Select Next.
4. Create a name for the task (I called mine "Moodle cron")
5. Perform this task "daily." Select Next.
6. Perform this task "every day" (leave the other items on defaults). Select Next.
7. Enter the name and password of a user who has directory privileges on your /moodle/admin folder. Select Next.
8. Select "Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish." Select Finish.
9. Under the Task tab, append the location of cron.php to the Run field, e.g. c:\php\php.exe d:\webroot\moodle\admin\cron.php
10. Under the Schedule tab, click Advanced and then select Repeat Task in order to make the task run more often than once per day. I set mine to run every ten minutes. Select Apply.
11. Select OK. You're done! Check the Event log later to ensure that the script is not returning errors.

I am periodically publishing pre-blog journal entries about the UHS Forums

December 10, 2003

Unbelievably, the forums continue to explode. Last night at 9:00, there were 40 students logged in simultaneously. New topics were appearing left and right. Conversations ranged from the important to the trivial. In the Haiku forum, four students engaged in a playful but profane haiku contest, cutting on each other with vigorous swears, sometimes in French or Spanish. I deleted five posts, immediately regretted it, and then felt better when I saw that the offending students had left the forum for the night. The irony is that Sarah had just announced in the faculty meeting that afternoon that moderator interference had not been necessary. Perhaps also as a result of that meeting, Rob and Steve appeared in the forums and encouraged the kids to settle down and study for their finals.

I am currently developing an online application for our Admission office today. Last year, I wrote an online inquiry form for them, and it was so successful at reducing the number of phone inquiries that they are interested in going all the way this time. The new system has five pages of input forms, saving the contents of each page to a mySQL database as the user proceeds. The script itself is written in PERL, in which I do all of my custom development. Why PERL? I started scripting for the web before PHP took off, and I never found the advantages of PHP so compelling that it was worth the effort to switch.

Here is an overview of the site structure:

[lost in server crash]

The UHS forums (bulletin boards) have been the most used online tool besides email in the short history of our intranet. Within months of their introduction, nearly all students had contributed to thousands of messages in hundreds of topics, and the forums were the talk of the school. In December 2003, I started keeping notes on the history of their introduction, in the hope of learning lessons about the forums' successes and shortcomings. Here is part 1 of that story, with more to come later.

I finally got myself a RSS/Atom news aggregator. This was my first attempt at reviewing and selecting an aggregator, so I checked the Macintosh software ratings at Download.com and picked NetNewsWire. There are benefits to joining the revolution at version 2. To my surprise, the biggest benefit of having an aggregator was the list of hundreds of links that came bundled with the software. This included about 20 in an Educational Technology category, of which I now subscribe to about five.

One gem really stood out, Blog Juice for Educational Technology, itself an aggregator of a wide variety of ed tech sources compiled by a medical executive named Joe Schwoebel. I still haven't figured out why he is so interested in educational technology, so help me out if you know.

Other benefits of NetNewsWire are flexible integration with your default web browser, a vertical reading panel option, a New Items category option, integrated (optional) web browser, auto-download of podcasts into iTunes, and a "post to weblog" option. The only downside to this program is that they have borrowed a number of interface features from Apple Mail and Camino, both of which I run concurrently, so I sometimes forget which program I am currently viewing.

if you are reading blogs, I highly recommend trying an aggregator. NetNewsWire cost me $25, but there is a light version (that only reads RSS feeds) and plenty of other free options out there, such as Mozilla Thunderbird. Safari for Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) even has average news reading capabilities.

University High School is considering whether to adopt a 1:1 student laptop program in Fall 2006. While I was at the NECC Conference, I was reminded to consider Tablet PCs as an alternative to traditional laptop computers. They do everything a laptop can but add capabilities that are traditionally considered shortcomings of laptop computers. Tablets allow the user to quickly use a stylus to add a diagram, handwritten note, or annotation to a document, which makes notetaking possible for science and math classes, in which plenty of diagrams exist. Some users may actually prefer to take all of their notes in handwritten form, especially those who are poor typists. The devices weigh about the same as conventional laptop computers and many even boast a more impact-resistant case, always an asset in schools!

The main obstacle currently appears to be price. Tablet PCs still run about $300 more per unit than laptops. Multiply that by 400 students and you have a significant difference in the overall cost of a student laptop program. Another issue is that popular companies such as Dell (our current provider) do not make a tablet PC. Should we give up Dell's terrific warranty and service program for tablets? It will be something to consider this year.

I figured that there would exist a host of tools for tracking training mileage. Enter Cool Running Log. Not only does it provide a calendar and calculate mileage totals and graphs, but it also stores your favorite running routes, training shoes, and weather (if you think that matters!). There are some other running logs that even allow you to publish your log for others to view. I think I will share this with the cross-country runners for their summer training.

We recently received and imaged our new Dell Latitude 110L notebook computers for the M-13 and M-14 science labs. I am very pleased with the budget machines so far. Lightweight, their minimalist design reminds me of a black iBook. We bought 16 of them for about $1050 per unit (volume education pricing).

These machines replace a set of bulky Latitude c840's that I bought almost immediately after joining UHS three years ago. The great advantage of the c840s was that they had a P4 processor, not common in midpriced laptops at the time. In the lab, however, they caused a great tangle opf ethernet cables, security cables, and power adapters. This time, we are going to keep everything in an Anthro laptop storage cart and pull only the laptops out when needed. Add a couple of wireless access points, and we should have a more reliable, flexible solution computing than in the past.

The catch with laptops is that you don't really know how good a model is until two years have elapsed. A good model will still run reliably in its third year, whereas a poor model will start falling apart (sometimes literally).

What powers this blog? Nucleus CMS does. I do not know a lot about different blogging tools, but Nucleus seems like a high quality package with a good range of features and strong extensibility. I am especially unfamiliar with hosted blogging services, which tend to provide a full set of features and either cost money or include advertisements on your blog. If you have your own web host and the access permissions to install software, you may select from a wide range of of free and inexpensive, open-source blogging tools (see Hotscripts and search for "blog" for examples).

The Nucleus architecture provides for web-based administration, multiple blogs, templates, skins, and includes, giving one virtually unlimited power to personalize and modify the site. (For example, the UHS e-Sportsline runs off the same Nucleus installation as this blog.) And if you don't like a feature, you may delve into the PHP code yourself, completely open and well-organized for your access.

We need more software that is well-written, organized, and easy to use. The only other blogging tool I have installed is Greymatter, and that was a royal pain compared to Nucleus.

What sort of blog capability should we provide our students? A school community is different from the public-at-large that has spawned a blogging craze. All of the students share some perspectives by participating in the same educational community every day and living in the same geographic region. If we rolled out a single blogging tool for the whole school community, everyone would be on the same tool, learning how to use it together and sharing advanced linking features. At the same time, technical inclinations vary widely. All of our students are capable of maintaing a blog, but only some would put the time in to learn how to do it and actually post on a regular basis.

Plone is a content management system that may be used in a variety of ways. Originally devised as replacement for a static web site, one may now also think of it as a blog alternative. I came across the article Plone as Blog, which nicley articulates the potential for Plone to assist people with the posting of content in a more powerful, accommodating way than a blog. In a nutshell, Plone automatically provides structure for differentiating types of content, such as documents, news, images, and files, whereas blogs are exclusively organized around hypertext. Plone allows one to organize content by time, category, file type, or a method of your own choosing, whereas blogs are organized first by time and second by category. Plone provides many of the same features as blogs, such as RSS feeds, commenting, and automatic linking, with the additional benefit that one can control access permissions of members and groups to content. One may create an online space that has equal parts web site, blog, wiki, and private space if one likes.

I am thinking of actively pushing Plone this year and holding off on introducing a ubiquitous blogging tool for the moment. I would love to know what people think of this proposed step.

NECC 2005: Moodle is officially mainstream. I counted at least a half-dozen Moodle sessions at NECC last week, and all of the ones I saw were oversubscribed. One session held in the Marriott ballroom was closed to late arrivals due to a lack of space inside. At another session, a Blackboard representative was spotted attending the session. Do you think they are getting nervous about a free, open-source alternative to their product? Heard many times around the conference was the idea that Moodle is free and does everything that Blackboard and WebCT do. That is irresistable to most people, especially given these companies' inflated pricing structures.

University High School dropped WebCT when they changed their price structure three years ago. Faced with the choice between developing our own course web site strategy or paying twice as much ($10,000/year) to WebCT, we chose the former. We didn't know about Moodle at the time, but now the choice is even more obvious than it was then. Now, half of our teachers post web content using Dreamweaver, but a handful have developed successful course web sites in Moodle.

Tertiary education institutions are also headed away from Blackboard and WebCT. Many are creating their own open-source, Java-based course portals from scratch (e.g., Stanford Coursework, part of the Sakai Project. These products require enough knowledge to compile a complex Java application and require more server resources, such as an Oracle database, than most high schools can handle.

By next year, we should be able to hear a lot more about people's experiences with Moodle: installation, course creation, and support. This will be an excellent test of whether open-source solutions can fly in schools where the comfort level with web scripting may not be quite as strong.

Update 7/13/05: Is this a little over the top?
Humboldt State University Students resolve to switch to Moodle

Why Blog?
Why have I decided to finally jump on the blog bandwagon? NECC 2005 helped me move beyond the hysteria of blog as world panacea to a more honest assessment of the relationship between blogger and blog. Blogs always felt self-serving to me, and it was refreshing to hear people acknowledge that perspective and incorporate it into a strategy for web publishing.

I am presently planning to publish the following types of content in this blog:

1. A short profile on each open source web application I use and each custom script that I write for school. These are items for which I do feel expert.
2. Exploratory ideas for which I do not feel expert but would like feedback from others.
3. A personal online knowledgebase. Even if no one else were to ever read this blog, it will serve as a repository for ideas and projects that I may search later.


Blogging gives one an air of authority on a topic. The author is a noted expert on topic ABC and pontificates on how the world should be. I have grown more comfortable with the idea of blog as experimental idea space, becomes less afraid to air thoughts that are not fully developed or in areas in which I am a total beginner. If someone finds my posts useful, then I will have helped someone. I will do my best to avoid the tone of voice of presumed authority where none necessarily exists.

Blog as personal knowledgebase has the potential to be a more effective notetaking mechanism than the haphazard creation of files on my local hard drive. The blog's potential external audience (even if imaginary) can be a powerful motivating factor to keep one writing. It also helps to keep one's personal knowledgebase in one location that you may access from anywhere.