Archive for October 2007

Moodle wiki and div tags

Posted by: rkassissieh
October302007

Here's a good story about a tool being used with great success, and the collaborative efforts required to resolve a technical problem with the tool. Working with a teacher, I found a known bug in the Moodle wiki in which students' wiki pages became nearly unusable -- slow at first and ultimately inaccessible due to errors such as "30 seconds exceeded" and "script error." In each item I examined, Moodle created hundreds of <div style="margin-left:15px;" class="indent"> tags, reducing the ability of the browser to display the content.

The good news is that the content was recoverable in all cases I have examined so far. If the problem is mild, you can edit a wiki page, switch to code view, and remove the leading div tags. If the problem is more severe, then you need to edit the database content directly using a mySQL admin tool such as phpMyAdmin (table: wiki_pages). Others are experiencing the same problem.

The wiki work happening in this class is terrific -- more on that later. I am glad that we were able to find a solution to let this excellent work continue.

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A New Project: Open Source Library Systems

Posted by: rkassissieh
October282007

I am starting a new side project to take a close look at open source library systems. I dabbled in this area twice in the last two years, getting to know the landscape of Koha and Emilda with two schools that ultimately went for major commercial products. The area seems poised for growth. New players Evergreen and Scriblio arrived on the scene this year, and the latter meets the challenge of Web 2.0 in libraries by a fascinating new method. Although interest levels are extremely high, significant barriers to adoption exist, and implementation rates are very low. Developers and support providers dominate the literature on these tools. My goal is to have first-hand conversations with people who have considered or implemented open-source library system tools and get a better understanding of conditions that lead to successful implementation. Let me know if you share my interest in this topic.

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