Our faculty wants a "major assignments" master calendar, in order to identify days on which too many teachers have scheduled major assignments before they impact students. In Moodle, students automatically see all the assignments in their courses. I want a way for each teacher to see a summary of major assignments schoolwide as they schedule their own. To complicate matters further, it would be most helpful for a teacher to automatically see what major assignments their students (not all students) have on a given day.

I am thinking about how to implement such a feature in Moodle. (I am an average programmer). Since we want to track only major assignments, we need to find a way to distinguish major from regular assignments. We also need to write a function to count major assignments for the given day only for students enrolled in the class.

Ideally, this counting function would fire as the teacher selects the assignment date. That way, the teacher could easily move the assignment from one day to another and see the impact on students' workloads.

In our school, it would be less work to create a new assignment type called "major assignment" than it would be to add a "major" checkbox to each assignment type. In our school, major assignments are not likely to be submitted electronically, and keeping the function in a separate module would avoid making changes to Moodle core code.

I could use your advice and feedback on this idea. Is anyone else working on a similar idea? Is there a better way to approach this task? Am I missing an existing feature in Moodle that could help me achieve this end?

Many thanks.

Update

I also posted this to the Moodle forums. Here's an encouraging reply I received only seven minutes after submitting the question. Isn't that amazing?

Re: Idea for a "major assignments calendar"
by Gary Anderson - Sunday, 27 July 2008, 07:42 PM

Hi Richard:

We have implemented this at our school. We have teachers label assignments by putting them in bold (we have a patch that adds the tag to the title. We also have a simple block that looks for assignments that have this tag and counts the number of affected users. We have taken the extra step of having a user profile field that shows if they are in the class of 2007, etc.

It works nicely and has avoided many scheduling conflicts. While we are not prepared to put this in Contrib, hopefully the above ideas will get you started, and I can send you are code on an "as is" basis if you contact me.

--Gary

I also just figured out that Gary is from Seattle Academy of Arts and Science, which I hope to visit in October.

tags: moodle, homework

Facebook is apparently still learning how to handle married couples. Does that mean that I am too old/not in the right stage of life for it?



In related news, my friends from outside work are increasingly getting on Facebook. It's interesting to watch and participate.

tags: facebook, sns

A colleague asked about school intranets the other day. Here is my response.

What purpose does your intranet serve?

The insideCatlin web site provides tools and resources for those members of the Catlin Gabel community who come to school every day, students, teachers, staff, and parents.

What are you using your intranet for?

Course web sites, committee web sites, department web sites, publishing student work to the Catlin Gabel community, sharing photos from school events and trips, online discussions, parent-faculty association meeting recordings, library catalog, volunteer signups, carpool map, surveys, senior project reports, blogs, podcasts, wikis, videos, audio recordings, community service hours, bookstore point-of-sale, IT loaner tracking, online signups for special academic programs, teacher notes on students, curriculum map editing tool, teacher access to student schedules and information, school archives.

What format are you currently using? (ie. Drupal, Sharepoint)

Moodle, Drupal, Menalto Gallery, Follett Destiny, and custom Perl/PHP scripts. Most use a common graphic interface to provide visual consistency when moving from one tool to the next. They also share the same authentication databases (LDAP + mySQL), and two of the three have single sign-on. We provide database support in mySQL, and some scripts read data from Education Edge, our students information system.

How could we use the intranet to help the teachers/ staff/ students?

That’s a pretty big question. An intranet enables community members to continue to interact in rich ways when face-to-face interactions are not possible. So list the types of interactions or transactions you wish to amplify, and then consider whether they would work within an online interface. If yes, then build it, see how it flies, and then promote it heavily.

tags: intranet, moodle, drupal, webdesign

It's admirable that the Moodle development team wants to require a description for each assignment. The description field provides instructions to the student. It makes it easier to browse all the assignments for a course. However, I work with a lot of teachers who want to post as quickly as possible and who are not accustomed to a completely electronic, web-based course format. The solution? Make the description field optional, so that they are not required to enter something into this field for Moodle to accept the submission.

Open mod/assignment/mod_form.php
Comment out line 41, as follows:
// $mform->addRule('description', get_string('required'), 'required', null, 'client');

I assume you can modify other assignments in a similar manner.

We run Moodle 1.9.1

On a related note, I have heard of a school that has written their own Moodle modules. I am currently wondering how to blend teachers' requests for a school-wide major assignments calendar with Moodle's default categories of personal, course, and global events. Creating a new assignment or calendar type called "major assignment," or adding such a flag to the relevant assignment types, may be the way to do it.

tags: moodle, opensource

Open-source web applications continue to mature. This week, I successfully updated Moodle to version 1.9.1, Drupal to 5.7, and Gallery to 2.2.5. The process went very smoothly, except for one hiccup. The Moodle updater stopped partway through, somehow causing an runaway loop that caused the sessions2 table to balloon by gigabytes. Notwithstanding the fact that this brought the web server to a halt, the installer ran fine once I emptied the sessions2 table and ran it a second time. We discovered that we stored the database on the system volume, so now we will move it to the data volume.



I appreciate that all three applications ask that you install a completely fresh codebase. Old code and modifications go away, giving the application a clean start. In the case of Moodle, we had only tried two modules, iPodcast and Speex. Both were not successful and are now gone (except for some traces in the database). Drupal is modular by design, but it took less time than I had anticipated to install the 20 additional modules we currently use. Settings were already present in the database, so Drupal only needed the new code.

Gallery-Drupal integration required some additional work. It didn't work at all at first, when I had not yet updated Gallery to the latest version. Unlike with Moodle in the past, Drupal developers are keeping Drupal-Gallery integration 100% up-to-date. Just use the latest Gallery with the Drupal integration module. Following suggestions, I also moved Gallery to within the Drupal directory -- that only required one setting change.

I am also taking some time to clean up both installations, responding to user requests and making them easier to use. I modified all occurrences of Moodle's use of "enrol" in the English language pack, since I still have no figured out how to force U.S. English language use on existing courses. I trust that new courses will inherit the U.S. setting. For the most part, people don't notice the language difference, the notable exception being the use of "enrol!" I also simplified the default blocks layout for new courses to make the page less busy.

Finally, I succeeded in the installation of NanoGong. I have wanted in-browser audio recording for some time, especially for language classes. It looks like the good people at the Gong Project have really come through with a solution nicely customized for Moodle but able to run anywhere.

In Drupal, I configured Video to play movies within the node, eliminating the need for an additional click.

tags: moodle, drupal, gallery, opensource, web20

This year, we have made two survey systems available to our users, Zoomerang and an internally-developed tool. Yesterday, I got a call from a user who was experiencing page load wait times of up to two minutes. We weren't experiencing similar issues with other web sites.



She called Zoomerang, who promptly blamed us for the issue. Not helpful! Unable to produce the survey using Zoomerang, the user turned to our internal tool and had the entire survey up within minutes.



Although I have abused Zoomerang before, I will acknowledge that it is a perfectly fine survey tool. I am just surprised that a successful company would not provide better customer service. Whether or not the problem resided at their end was not really the issue. A "valued customer" with the "pro" membership was experiencing a problem isolated to their tool.

Today, Zoomerang is running normally. Go figure.



tags: survey, zoomerang

Check out PayPal Storefront, a little Flash widget that you configure on PayPal's site and then embed on your web site. It's very elegant and quick. I am using it to sell a benefit recording of the Maru-a-Pula Marimba Band. The widget even allows any user to copy the widget code for their own site, making possible the viral distribution of a mini-store!



tags: ecommerce, marimba

This week, I learned the next step: embedding a Google map with our data on our own (password protected) site. Twice in the past two years, I have created maps of students and employees in schools using BatchGeocode and Google Earth.

Given the flexibility of Google Earth, online resources cover a wide variety of ways to use the Google Maps API. Drupal's GMap module is best suited for user submission of locations as separate nodes or a RSS feed. BatchGeocode provides locations in a single KML file, which I learned is XML for maps. The Google Maps API can index a KML file directly, but I didn't want to submit our KML file to Google to index, and my tests of the strategy didn't work anyway. GMapEZ is a special set of scripts using the Maps API but requires you to format your placemarks as conventional HTML links. Ultimately, this article at XML.com provided the most successful strategy for me: embedding points directly into the page and then adding listeners to create the popup information boxes. Embedding all the points keeps the data within our password-protected space, too.

You can accomplish this basically in a one-liner per placemark:

var marker220 = new GMarker(new GLatLng(45.51584,-122.702752)); map.addOverlay(marker220); GEvent.addListener(marker220, "mouseover", function() {marker220.openInfoWindow("Richard Kassissieh");})

A student included me in this project to create a carpool site for the Catlin Gabel community. Families find each other using the map and then post offers and requests for rides.



tags: googlemaps, gmapapi

Today, I launch a new site, 3D Cell Explorer, a teaching tool for cell biology using visual representation. It provides 40 animations of cellular structures and processes, accompanied by audio narration. Anyone may comment on a page or copy the embed code to display animations on one's own web site.

Many students learn best from what they can see -- visual learners often struggle in science classes in which the vast majority of instruction is text-based. This site complements the textual materials an individual may already have. Text is kept to a minimum, so as to not distract from one's attention to the visual model. Three of the animations provide a simple level of interactivity.

The site is pretty much Web 1.0 -- lots of good content ready for consumption. The learning theory is primarily cognitivist. I want to help students of cell biology better comprehend basic cellular processes. Still, I did throw in a little Web 2.0 goodness. Comments are enabled on all pages, making it possible for visitors to start a dialogue about the animations. Providing the embed code allows teachers (or students) to integrate the animations into their own teaching materials, for example on a Moodle site or other CMS.



In 1994, I began to create simple 3D animations to help explain biological and chemical processes to my students. Over the following three years, I created dozens, especially on the topic of cell biology. A colleague and I decided to package the cell biology animations on a CD-ROM, but by 1997, CD-ROMs were no longer so popular. Although I did ultimately release the package, it never caught on, as teachers moved toward web-based instructional content.

In our enthusiasm to embrace Web 2.0 tools, we have left behind some of the strengths of the CD-ROM era: visual richness, simulations, interaction with content, and vast, visual libraries. I of course love the ease of distribution and social qualities of Web 2.0, but we must not discard the successful educational innovations of the past in our rush toward the future.

After a ten-year hiatus, I am pleased to re-introduce 3D Cell Explorer. Please do let me know what works and what doesn't, and do spread the word to potentially interested teachers.

Here are some brief technical notes.

I created the original animations using Strata StudioPro and Adobe (Macromedia) Director. The project was saved by the continued support for Director by Macromedia and then Adobe. Director was the standard for authoring interactive media, but like CD-ROMs, it quietly disappeared as Flash produced smaller, faster-loading web files. I don't know whether the new Strata3D can read my old StudioPro files. It would be good to preserve the time and effort I put into those models and animations.

To make the project more web-friendly, I exported all of the old Director files to QuickTime and then used VisualHub to make them into Flash Video (FLV) files. I kept the three interactive animations in Director format using the built-in Shockwave converter. I installed Drupal 6 for the content management platform and then built out a page for each animation. The Amadou theme gave the site a clean, modern look -- I changed the background to black in order to match the animation backgrounds. I used JW FLV Media Player to deliver the Flash video files.

Ten years ago, I was amazed that an ordinary classroom teacher could access great-quality 3D animation tools. Still, it took three years of evening and weekends to produce these 40 animations. Today, I find it incredible that I could convert the entire thing to a web-based format in about two days' time. Experiences like this provide a visceral reminder of the exponential increases in computing power over time.

Update March 31, 2008

I came across this very modern cell visualization from Harvard -- quite interesting that it's set to music.

tags: cell, biology, cellbiology, animation, visualization, drupal, moodle, flv

I received a pleasantly unexpected call from Stephen in Botswana yesterday to discuss Maru-a-Pula IT matters. Throughout the call, I could hear what sounded very much like a cricket chirping. Was it an artifact of the Skype transmission? No, it really was a cricket that had snuck into Stephen's office! Good think he wasn't calling from home. They are a challenge to find and catch.

Botswana cricket via Skype (mp3)

tags: skype, globaled

I am listening to our middle school students podcasting from Costa Rica. What a treat! Listen in below. David is trying this for the second year in a row. This year's posts are more detailed, articulate, and to the point. I will try at some point to find out how David prepped the students for their posts.



Sending periodic updates back home adds a new dimension to international travel. Parents and other interested community members can follow the trip progress from home. Students can share their reflections on the trip as it is happening, which adds a new twist to the task of reporting back. The conversation is one way, so that no replies from listeners intrude on the students' foreign experience. The collection of all of the recordings will capture a record of the trip that others will be able to use afterward. Podcasting by phone requires very little production time on the parts of the trip participants and no special equipment. GCast doesn't even charge for the service!

At the same time, trip leader Spencer has brought along a set of digital audio recorders, so that students may each record daily audio journal entries and reflect on them upon return. I will be interested to see how they will compare the educative value of these two very different methods of capturing thoughts in audio format during the trip.



tags: globaled, audio, podcast

A year and a half after my first attempt, I took another look at the accessibility of news web sites for the vision-impaired. My blind colleague reported that the Yahoo! mobile site I had provided had stopped working for him. Sure enough, the link had moved without any redirection, so I had to find the new link and bookmark it for him a second time. Also, Yahoo! changed their mobile site to use brackets >> instead of numbers to delimit each news item and removed the keyboard shortcuts that used to exist, making it more difficult to select a news item. Also, his screen reader reads the brackets as "right angle bracket, right angle bracket," downright confusing to hear just before the news headline. However, Yahoo! Mobile is at the moment the best option I can provide for George.

The New York times has remained an extremely difficult site to use if you can't see it. They neglect to include keyboard shortcuts that would enable one to jump past the dozens of menu items to the lead articles. Worst of all, if you visit their mobile site in a computer web browser, it automatically redirects you to the regular web page! We want to view the mobile site, which includes a minimum of graphics and links, and allows George to jump directly to a list of top headlines. It doesn't seem possible on the New York Times site.

Have you found an accessible news site for the vision-impaired? What strategies do you use to provide access to such users?

tags: accessibility, visionimpaired

I am using EventBrite for the first time to organize online ticket sales for an African AIDS orphan fundraiser in New York. The event features the Maru-a-Pula Marimba Band, a world-class African marimba group. If you're interested in attending the April 14 event, buy tickets here!

I appreciate that EventBrite provides a prominent location for an event logo and keep their own advertising to a minimum. They also place ticket selection and event description on a single page, reducing the number of clicks to make a purchase.



It's interesting that EventBrite specializes just in ticket purchase -- they link to PayPal instead of providing an integrated payment gateway. The time-consuming part of the process has been to register a new account for our organization on PayPal. I was impressed to find out how much PayPal has changed over the years. They present a much more professional image than before and provide a full range of payment services. I am in the process of configuring automatic transfers to our organization's bank account. Eventually, I should be able to use PayPal as a payment gateway without sending users to the PayPal site. I plan to use this feature to move online giving from Network for Good (where it is currently broken) to our site.

If I were already running the organization's web site in Drupal, I would have tried the Event and e-Commerce modules. However, this is still an old, static site, which I will find time to upgrade one day.

Riffly allows users to post browser-based video and audio comments on your blog. I was so excited about this new company that I immediately installed the Drupal version of the plug-in on our intranet. Today, Riffly went down, and with it our site! Fortunately, it was easy to disable in order to bring our site back up.



The advent of built-in video cameras eliminated the need to obtain, set up, use, and transfer from a video camera. Browser-based video recording eliminates the need run a video capture application such as iMovie, export the video to a different format, and upload the resulting file to a web site. With browser-based video upload, students may post video comments within seconds from school or home. This is a big deal for language classes and international exchanges! Teachers are extremely sensitive to the length of time technology adds to a student activity. When the time drops dramatically, teachers use the tool more frequently (or at all).

While I'm not thrilled about the idea of relying on an external site to host videos, this is far better to linking to YouTube, because the user never sees Riffly, and we don't have to provide the bandwidth. Of course, we will be putting our eggs in Riffly's basket, hoping that they will thrive and not change their revenue model. It may be a safe bet, considering that we should see competitors to Riffly appear over time.

At the moment, I'm waiting for a solution (or some time to investigate myself) to make the Riffly Drupal plugin actually insert the necessary code into the comment field. Get over that small hurdle, and we will be off and running! On recommendation, I disabled TinyMCE for the Drupal comment field, and then code insertion worked again! Unfortunately, now Riffly is experiencing a problem themselves, and Riffly is broken everywhere. We wait once more. I hope they will do whatever they can to ramp up again. They have a terrific product that could really take off.


tags: riffly, video, drupal

Too sad. Yahoo! Picks is closing its doors after 12 years. Nearly ten years ago, I mined the site for fresh graphic designs as I was just getting started in the field. More recently, as the web flooded with copycat sites, Yahoo! Picks has proven its staying power by reliably coming up with inspired, authentic, and funny sites. Luckily, we still have the archive.

Drupal's founder and lead, Dries Buytaert, has formed a company to provide Drupal services and raised $7m for the effort! In addition to the usual consulting and support services, he plans to develop pay versions of Drupal. Read his announcement and Acquia FAQ for more information. On the one hand, this makes me nervous. Dries' hopes for Acquia to become the "next Red Hat" is not necessarily great for those of us who anticipate using the free version indefinitely. On the other hand, it may be wonderful to see Drupal develop into a more robust, mature system with greater adoption and known legitimacy. We could definitely ride that wave.

Also of interest: Buytaert's site of Drupal sites -- some big names here.

Teacher 1: I believe your children know most of the words of their song materials; however, several asked for copies of the words. Please distribute these to your children in hard copy or by e-mail. I am all about saving paper.

Teacher 2: The children are doing well on the language songs and are reminded every time we meet them to check Moodle for the French , Spanish, and Chinese songs and Drupal for the Japanese songs to practice at home.

This exchange was a pleasant surprise to read. Our intranet has only existed for a year, yet all four lower school language teachers, including a full range of technology profiency, are posting text, audio, and video online. They saw a great fit between the technology and their teaching and learning objectives and jumped all over it. Good work!

I am building a list of school "front-door" web sites running on Drupal. We know that Drupal is practically indispensable for student and teacher publishing within school, but what about the school's public web presence?

Here's my short list of school main, public web sites running Drupal:

Lincoln High School, Portland, OR

Newberg Public Schools, Oregon

Lewis Elementary, Portland, Oregon

University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Communication and Information

Peralta Elementary School, Oakland, CA

Yale School of Architecture

UC Berkeley School of Information

University of Calgary

Harvard Science

University of Minnesota

Arizona State

Ohio State

Washington University (St. Louis)

Hamline Law School

Slane College, Bradley University

Bainbridge Island School District

Note to self: find . -name ._*.doc -exec rm {} \;

Does anyone have a better way to prevent the upload of hidden Mac files to a Linux server? I was uploading a directory of files from my Mac to Moodle and ended up with a hidden (resource?) file for each document uploaded.

Also: Renamer4Mac, a nifty file renaming tool, essential in this case to replace spaces with underscores for batch upload to Moodle.

A number of posts have commented on the mysterious attraction of Twitter. Big-name bloggers love to Twitter but don't articulate what exactly they love. Today, the New York Times published an article on the topic, calling Twitter a "social safety net." Though the article directly concerns a suicidal Twitterer who discovers the power of his social network, it speaks to the general purpose of the tool. I have tried Twitter and then let it go. Does this mean that I already have a solid social safety net, or am I just introverted?

Over the past year, I have guided a number of different people in my school through the process of evaluating open-source software. Often, we need to compare both open-source and commercial software applications against one another, not an easy task when the development and distribution environments are so different from each other.

With commercial software, the decision-maker usually must evaluate the potential utility of a piece of software without actually being able to use the full version. We are overly reliant on the salesperson, an individual with a vested interest in completing the sale and often incomplete knowledge of the product's reliability and reputation.

With open-source, there is no salesperson, no automatic advocate for the software. However, one can install and evaluate the actual working software, with some effort. If a test goes very well, you may have already completed much of your implementation process!

Commercial software is normally a finished product that remains static for long periods of time. Open-source is often a work in progress that changes considerably over time. The decision-makers in your organization must understand this difference in order to appreciate the rough edges that often exist with open-source software.

Most free and open-source library systems are extensible and modifiable. During the evaluation process, I often try to excite the review team by making small, easy changes when requested. Change the color scheme. Re-order the elements of an item display. Integrate your organization's logo into the page template. Display the list of modules available from the developer community. Demonstrate the ability to install one. Demonstrate the interoperability between the FOSS system and other information sources. Draw on the strengths of the open-source model. Demonstrate the vast well of technical support available from the online user community.

Depending on the application, there may exist a recognizable brand name and known reputation. Although open-source library systems have existed for some time, they have not yet achieved the level of brand-name recognition as the better funded open-source successes such as Firefox or Moodle. A brand name can provide a significant amount of comfort to your review team. In fact, some people may have a hard time distinguishing open-source from commercial when the brand is sufficiently well established (see Firefox vs. Internet Explorer).

How long should one evaluate open-source software? Since control over the evaluation process is one advantage of open-source over commercial software, I have sometimes evaluated an open-source solution for up to a year. That is certainly much longer than what you will get with a commercial application! I have also set up multiple FOSS systems simultaneously, which is incredibly handy for the purposes of comparison and evaluation among different open-source options. Sometimes, I have taken the testing process incrementally, dropping some of the contenders when the first tests did not go well and investing further resources into the one or two leading test application. That way, the leading application presents as well as possible, comparing as favorably as possible to the commercial alternatives.

I hope that this provides some useful tips for guiding an open-source evaluation software evaluation process.

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.

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.

Update: Implemented Dylan's solution, ported to Dreamhost.

Spoiled by the high quality of spam filtering at my workplace, I now want the same level of service on my personal mail. Dreamhost's filters (using SpamAssassin) are not even coming close. Not willing to farm my email life out to Google or Yahoo!, I want to retain my owned domain email addresses yet have the spam removed before I download my mail. I found a review of personal spam filtering solutions at PCWorld and even signed up for a trial of OnlyMyEmail.com (only $4 a month!) but was disappointed to find that this particular service does not support downloading mail via IMAP. I want to be able to synchronize message status between at least two computers, so POP won't do it for me.

Have you found an affordable, effective, personal spam filtering solution for owned domains?

We are released our new intranet Drupal site for Catlin Gabel community members. Protected by login, it provides blog, podcast, social bookmark, knowledgebase, photo gallery, and e-portfolio services to students, teachers, staff, and parents. Drupal will serve as a user-centric complement to our group-centric Moodle course and planning group sites.

Drupal continues to amaze. Today, I found the solution to a classic problem of login-protected intranets. When the user accesses the site with a web-browser, we want to present a web-based login form. However, what about subscribing to RSS feeds? Protecting a site with form-based login breaks other applications such as iTunes and feed readers.

Fortunately, Drupal developers anticipated this problem and created two modules that address the problem: HTTP Auth and SecureSite. I tried both this evening, but at first they completely broke the site for LDAP users. Then, another great Drupal moment: the Drupal forums indicated that others had run into the same problem just this past July, and developers patched the LDAP Integration module. Now, LDAP and HTTP Auth play well together, and the tool works brilliantly in iTunes!



I don't know whether the patch also fixes securesite, and it appears that the module has a history of security vulnerabilities.

I am getting mixed results with blog feed readers. NetNewsWire, for example, shows the authentication window but does not display any content. More investigation to do here ...

For me, college and the few years thereafter were my prime years of exploring new music. In the college dorms, we spent hours in each others' dorm rooms poring over music collections and making "discoveries" like Pink Floyd and R.E.M.'s early works. We developed our own local network of listeners helping each other expand our libraries and our tastes.

Last spring, I noticed that many students had Last.fm installed on their computers. This is the modern version of my college listening experience, an online social network that connects listeners based on their musical tastes. Unlike Limewire and its file sharing peers, Last.fm focuses on the exchange of playlists and not on the transfer of the files themselves. Another reason to like Last.fm is that the installation and upload of my iTunes listening history was completely seamless. Finally, the source code is open, which lends credibility to their claim of being spyware free.

I have only explored a few of Last.fm's features so far. The application picks up the tune I am currently playing in iTunes and displays album cover art and a short artist bio, which could be useful to learn more about what I actually have in my collection. I have been aware of artist bios on the web for years, but immediate access means that I am much more likely to read them. Last.fm listed a handful of other users with similar listening tastes, and I played a few of their tunes. How does Last.fm handle royalties? Do they pay the record labels per listen, as a radio station does? Didn't those rates recently increase substantially, threatening the viability of online radio stations?

On the one hand, my use of Last.fm is a throwback to my earlier years of musical exploration. Perhaps I can yet expand my tastes! On the other hand, it's great to get to know another online social service of high quality and further familiarize myself with this new world and its implications for teaching and learning in our schools.

I have stopped my Twitter experiment. It was fun while it lasted. I followed a dozen people and got to find out when they went to the airport, played with their kids, and published new blog posts. I posted many of the little tasks I performed each day as I switched from project to project. I was hoping to get more information about other people's tech work lives -- what technologies they were playing with (besides the iPhone), breakthroughs, obstacles, and so on. Every so often, I read something really interesting, but the noise-to-signal ratio was too high. Most of the gems got repeated in people's blog posts, anyway. It's possible that I was reading the tweets of too many consultants and not enough school tech directors.

I will hold on to Twitter in order to drop in on conferences in progress if I can make myself available at the right times. It appears that people are also using Skype to conduct a backchannel chat during sessions. Two two applications could enhance a long-distance session experience, as long as I am reading the posts of at least one attendee!

This tool allows you to install a bookmark in your web browser that looks up a book from Amazon in your local library, so that you may get it there instead! John Udell, master of moving information among sites, created this tool five years ago. I would like to try this with Portland-area libraries that our students use.

LibraryLookup

Working with a teacher today, I came across the following Moodle features, some of which are probably new to version 1.7 or 1.8 and some of which were probably there all along, and I just didn't notice them!

Complete activity reports

Click on any student icon -> Activity Report -> Complete Report, and you can actually see all of the individual pieces of work a student has submitted. This satisfies a request that two teachers specifically brought to my attention and probably many more have wanted for some time.



Media filters

I turned on media filters just for fun while attempting to implement Speex, and presto, Moodle automatically inserts a Flash player when I upload a MP3 file! This will make audio work so much easier, especially in language classes.



Assignment type: upload multiple files

English teachers invariably follow a writing process model, which requires submission and review of multiple drafts of each written work. Moodle now provides an assignment type that permits both the student and the teacher to upload multiple files. In this way, they may exchange multiple revisions and commented versions until the paper is complete.



Inline assignment commenting

I had known about this before, but it dovetails nicely with the previous feature. If students are comfortable writing directly into Moodle (tough for three-page essays), then the teacher may insert comments in a different color directly into the text. Sure, it's not "track changes," but most teachers want to provide advice rather than directly edit the student's text.

Bravo, Moodle! You have developed a strong capacity to provide features that teachers rely on and respond to their continued needs.

Since we upgraded Moodle to 1.8, I have been bothered by how the web and file resources displayed after the conversion. A new, intermediate screen appeared asking the user to click to open the requested resource, a bother if you were used to clicking on the link and seeing the page immediately open.



I discovered today that Moodle 1.8 (or was it 1.7?) eliminated the "display in a frame" option for resources, which had been the default option in 1.6. We were getting this new screen for any resource that had the frame option selected. I'm not sure whether this was an intentional omission from the Moodle upgrade scripts or not. It's worth mentioning that all other aspects of the Moodle upgrade went extremely smoothly!

How could we update all of the resources with this problem at once? I looked into the database and developed the following query to do the trick.

update `resource` set `options`='' where `options`='frame';

This changes all resources that used to open within a frame so that they will open in the same window.

Please note that tinkering directly with the database of any application is only recommended if you have first thoroughly tested the change and have a solid backup of your data! One way to test is to run the query on individual records within a test course before applying it to real courses. I certainly feel a lot better about making global changes in this manner during the summer when the site is inactive.