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The all-new SimbaDVTVXL2
Moodle 1.6 finally offers blogs My favorite LMS put out a new version last week, including blogs. The developers previously had a bias against them, but I think there must have been just too many requests. Message boards still rule as the discussion milieu, but it will be nice for teachers to have the blog option as practice spaces for writing students, for example. I haven't been keeping up with Moodle progress in detail like I did 2-3 years ago when my work tended more to elearning, but I still have an affection for it and the way the open source project is run. The move to unicode is good but I am dreading converting my existing course sites. Maybe I just won't until somebody complains. Or I'll just leave them running on the old version as the dreaded silo. Also nice to see in this version: IMS package support (SCORM came along a year ago or so), and the database module. Moodle is a LAMP app, so of course it stores its data and templates and options and scads of stuff in MySQL, but the database module will allow instructors to create dBs for use by students directly. Portable elearning package based on Citizen Journalism session at BloggerCon When I was listening to Jay Rosen's excellent session earlier this week, I was thinking the ideas ought to get some distribution beyond bloggers and techies. The session was so well organized that it would be a relative piece of cake to package up the audio and docnography notes, with pictures and exhibits, and release it as free modular online course content for journalism classes. I'm tempted to do it, but I'm just so booked up. I found myself reluctantly postponing even thinking about another idea that got me all jazzed just yesterday. I put a note in my calendar giving myself permission to think about it in September. I almost hate to mention it I'm really glad Dave is spending some time on performance issues with the server that delivers OPML blogs, but honestly? I haven't seen the improvement. The recent big problems started for me, maybe a week or 10 days ago, when I wasn't able to get to my blog or the changes page (usually one or the other, but sometimes both) maybe half the number of times I'd try to throughout the day. It's either document has no data, or more often the pages loads so slowly that it never gets there, minutes later. Also TCP/IP connection timeouts and "can't write stream" errors within the Editor. Yesterday and so far this morning, I'm afraid to me it seems about the same. I don't pretend to know that much about these things but I always think of IIS as a dumb lazy employee -- happier when it can play Johnny onenote, one box per tool, and even then it likes a nice daily reboot, unlike Unix web servers that seem to be able keep running all the way to China and then the moon, without sleep or a drink of water. Later: I understand it's nothing to do with IIS. And even so It's true. The OPML beta community does love the editor to pieces. It's magic. It puts brain cells in your fingers to help your thoughts get from electrochemical ooze to language. |
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