Mobile applications have taken off. This is largely due to the trailblazing work that Apple has done with the iPhone and the App Store. If you have been watching my Delicious feed, you will have noticed that I too have succumbed and will be part of the iPhone-toting crowd (I will write more about me losing my principles later).
Nearly every web service that I use has a mobile application. Examples are Last.fm, Flickr, WordPress, Dropbox, NY times, Paypal and more, the list is endless. Moodle, the web application that I use most often, does not have a mobile app yet. There have been a couple attempts at creating themes that display well on a mobile (such as here). These mobile themes usually try to deliver all of Moodle’s functionality, which often limits their phone specific interaction and their user friendliness. Other applications use JAVA applications that gives people access to specific Moodle functionality (examples here and here).

It would be great to have a true mobile Moodle application. Here are some initial thoughts for a design.

Audience
The audience for this Moodle application would mainly be students/participants. I want the functionality to focus on things that are easily delivered on a mobile platform. I don’t think grading and reporting interfaces lend themselves well to a smaller screen. The things that people like to do with a mobile device are usually: seeing what has happened/is happening, plan and communicate. This Moodle application will enable the users of a Moodle installation to do exactly those things.

Getting rid of the course paradigm
Moodle is extremely course centric. I have always thought that this has some great advantages, mainly that all the learning is very contextual. Students, however, often have to “multi-course” (doing multiple courses at the same time). A mobile application should make the most urgent or current events, actions and resources bubble to the top. This requires the application to get rid of the course paradigm and show a personal page per user.
People that have used Moodle for a while might know of the “My Moodle” page. This page also tried to pull up the most relevant information for a particular user, but would still display this information on a course by course basis.

This application will consist of four main screens. Each screen has its own icon at the bottom of the screen that stays available at all times. Each screen could of course lead to other screens that take you deeper into the Moodle installation.

1. Recent activity stream
Facebook and Twitter have really taught us the use of activity streams. These pages display short status messages about what is happening in reverse chronological order. Moodle has had an activity stream since its inception: the recent activity block. This block shows what has been happening in a particular course. Examples are forum posts, work being handed in or materials being added by the teacher.
This screen will work in a similar way, but will include all the courses a user is participating in. I would imagine that each update on the screen would include a date and a time, would link to an extended version of the update and would include a user image if the update concerns another user, or an activity icon if it concerns a particular activity. The newest updates would be at the top of the screen and the user would be able to scroll down to see older entries (very similar to Twitter). See below for an example:

Recent Activity

You would have to think about each Moodle module and decide what a status update would look like for that particular module. Some examples of events that could trigger a status update:

• A forum post is added to a course of which the user is a member.
• An activity becomes available (either because it was added or because it had certain time that it would become available, like the choice or assignment activity) or a deadline has passed.
• An entry is added to a database activity or a glossary that the user has access to.
• A topic or week has been made current by the teacher/facilitator.
• A message has been sent to the user.
• The user hands in work for an assignment, fills in a choice, starts a lesson, gets the results for a quiz or starts a SCORM object.
• A change is made to a wiki page that the user has access to.

These status updates could announce themselves on the home screen in a similar way to how the mobile platform shows that you have new email messages: by showing how many new updates are available.

2. Upcoming events
This screen is also an extension of existing Moodle functionality made course independent. Conceptually it is what you would see if you would scroll up on the recent activity screen. Upcoming events that can be displayed are:

• Anything that is in the user’s calendar.
• Activities that will become available or that have a deadline.
• Courses that will start and that the user is enrolled in.

This screen would look very similar to the “Recent Activity” screen as shown above.

3. Social: contacts, interests and messaging
A mobile device is used for communications and a mobile Moodle application should facilitate that. This screen is an alphabetical list of all the users that a student/participant shares a course with, combined with an alphabetical list of all the interests that a user has put in their profile and all the courses the user is enrolled in. See example:

Social

Selecting a user will take you their profile page. This page will focus on the ways that the user can be contacted. You can message the user from here, call (or Skype) them, send them an email and click on the links to their external websites (a blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.). See this example:

Profile page

Selecting an interest or a course will apply a filter to the alphabetical list. It will now only show users that share this interest or this course. It might allow the user to contact all these users in one go (if this role has been given the permission for this capability).

4. Browsing courses, activities and resources
I really like a side scrolling drill down navigation (examples are the way that email works on the iPhone or the “Slider view” on Grazr). A mobile Moodle application should allow the user to navigate to activities and resources in their course by constantly drilling down. This can be done it two ways: course centric or activity-type centric. The application should probably support both.
The first screen shows a list of all the courses the user is participating in and below that a list of all the activity types that exist in Moodle.
Clicking on a course will make the previous screen slide to the left and display a new screen. The first option on this screen will be called “Course overview”. If you click on this you will see all the section/topic summaries, all the activities and resources and all the labels in their correct order (blocks are completely ignored in this mobile application). Below the course overview are links to the overview pages of each activity type. Clicking these will display all the instances of a particular activity or resource.

If you click on an individual activity or resource you will be shown that activity (again by making the screen slide to the left). What is shown here and what interactions are possible is dependent on the activity module. The minimum it would show is the title and the description. This would probably be the case for SCORM modules for example or for “upload a file” assignments. You would not implement a mobile SCORM player, nor will people likely have files for upload on their phone. The one activity that would benefit from being a bit richer would be the forum activity. It should be possible to follow and contribute to a forum discussion from the mobile Moodle application.

Technical considerations
The (start of a) functional design that I describe above will certainly have technical consequences (not to write obstacles). Below some of my first thoughts:

• What platform? The nice thing about web applications is that you only have to develop them for one single platform: the platform that the server is using. Of course it would be possible to create a mobile version of a Moodle site, but this would negate some of the great things that a native application can do. We are now in the unfortunate situation that we have multiple mobile development platforms. The two obvious choices for mobile development would be an iPhone app and an app for Android. But what about people who use a Blackberry, or a Symbian or Maemo phone? I have no knowledge of how easy it is to port an Android app to the iPhone, but I do know that multiple platforms will be a reality in the next couple of years. You better write portable code!
• Where does the code live? It is easy for Facebook to create an iPhone application. They run a single installation and can have server-side code and client-side code to make it all work. Moodle’s install base is completely decentralised. That means that Moodle installations will have to get some code that will allow a client to talk to it. In the client you will then need to be able to say what Moodle installation you want to connect to. This poses a couple of questions. Will a mobile Moodle app require a special server module? Will Moodle 2.0 expose enough of itself to an external API to make a client like I describe above possible? Should one client be able to plug into multiple Moodle installations at the same time? I am not a software architect, so I would not have any answers to these questions, but they will need to be resolved.
• Performance? Moodle’s data structure is course-centric and not user-centric. Moodle currently does not have internal functions that deliver the data in a format that the Moodle client can use. I think that the query to deliver a recent activity feed that is cross-course and has the perspective of a single user is very complex and will create a huge performance hit on the server. Again, I am not an architect, but I would imagine that this requires a special solution. Maybe more push and less pull? More database tables? Server-side pre-caching? Who knows? I certainly don’t!
• Roles/permissions/capabilities? Any new Moodle client that uses existing Moodle data (as opposed to new modules) needs to be very aware of any existing capabilities. All of these need to be checked before information can be shown to the user. I am sure this has further performance implications.
• Online/offline? A lot of mobile applications cache their information so that a user can continue to use the application even if an Internet connection is not available (e.g. the New York Times app). Even though it might be useful for a Moodle application too, I wouldn’t put any initial effort into solving that problem. Smartphones that have decent application support function well in a context where there is persistent mobile broadband. It is therefore okay for the first version of mobile Moodle application to assume that it is online.

A note on prototyping/mockups
I used the excellent Balsamiq to create the mockups that go with this post. This easy tool delivers quick static results, although it lacks a bit of precision that I would like to have added. Moodle has Balsamiq integrated into the Moodle Tracker, making it trivial for anybody to add a user interface mockup to any issue. There are other tools that could be used to do iPhone prototyping. This blog post gives a good overview.

Continuing the dialogue
I would really like an application like this (or something similar) to come into existence. I look forward to working with other people with a similar interest (bored developers? Google Summer of Code students?). Let’s make this happen! Any and all comments are welcome…

… aww so cute…  get your own moodleBear  at http://www.cafepress.com/moodle/

We’re now running moodle version 1.9.6! Do we look any different?  Probably not LOL but there are some subtle changes.

If you’re interested in reading about the new version check out http://docs.moodle.org/en/Moodle_1.9.6_release_notes.
I just want to know when we’ll see version 2!

Our Moodle demonstration site is now using Moodle 1.9.7 (thanks to Moodle HQ sys admin Jordan for upgrading) and has demo account passwords FunMood1ing! which fulfil the default password policy i.e. at least 8 characters and including at least one number, one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter and one non-alphanumeric character.

The security overview report (in Site Administration > Reports > Security overview) includes a report of any roles, permissions overrides and users who are allowed to backup user data. It is recommended that the capability to backup user data is only allowed for people who really need it, and their accounts should be protected by strong passwords. Note that glossary and database activity entries can easily be moved to a different course using the export and import entries feature without needing to backup user data.

The security overview report also reports that a password salt has been set.

Of course these demo site security improvements aren’t strictly necessary, since the database and files are erased and restored to a clean state every hour, however hopefully they serve to set a good example.

Some things are happening out there with open source software.

Over Thanksgiving I pumped my technology friends for information.  One was touting Web 3.0 and what it is offering, so next we have to have a class on this new Web.

I was told Sesame Street uses open source software when at all possible.

A headmaster that also teaches some classes uses Moodle to create a discussion board for his high school students.

At least I knew what they were talking about and felt like I was somewhat in the loop. I must keep learning.

The glossary activity is quite an interesting activity within Moodle.  It is one of these activities that was designed for one specific purpose but turns out to be very applicable to many others with a bit of tweaking.  Especially when combined with the Random Glossary Entry Block.  Let’s have a look at some of these.

We’re going to consider two similar ways we can use the glossary in conjunction with the Random entry block to get the students involved and interested.  The students will generate the material and largely be responsible for it’s direction.  The first is to use the glossary for revision notes and the second is to use it for interesting points.

Revision

The basic premise is that students will create entries with pieces of information that are relevant for revision.  Allow discussions of these by the students and allow ratings but only by teachers (this is for the purpose of the teacher indicating which ones are more important for students than others).  Depending on how much material there is to cover,  set a limit on the minimum entries that students must create.  All entries must be in their own words (apart from quotes, formulas etc) and duplicates are allowed but must be written in a different enough way.  If the students have to write it in their own words they have to understand it better.  If duplicates are allowed and must be different then students will see the same pieces of information in several different ways and this will help enforce it in their memory.

Interest

People learn and retain information best when they are interested in the subject.  So if we can increase the students interest in the subject,  we can increase their potential to learn.  So let’s get the students to go out and find interesting aspects of the subject and then share them with the others.  The idea is that each student must find an interesting aspect of the suject (a fact,  theory or such) and enter it as an entry.  This allows them the freedom to explore but also fuel each others exploration.  As they get to see the points of interest that others have found it provides the opportunity to stimulate further exploration in ways they may not have found otherwise.  All this extra reading and interest will help to reinforce the main content.

Both of these activities benefit greatly from the use of the Random Entry block which allows students to see these useful pieces of information as they are going about doing their normal work.  The benefits are indirect and serve to support your normal activities.

Új Moodle layout van  kilalakulóban, ami most érkezett el kb. a “preview’” módba. Sok lépcső van még hátra, hogy az összes használni kívánt allap idomuljon az eddigiekhez, de folyamatban a dolog. Ettől függetlenül azt gondolom a moodle egy behemót cucc, ami általában “ágyúval verébre” kategória a legtöbb intézménynek, és sok-sok “felesleges” munka van így vele, hogy letisztult, átlátható lépéseket tudjon adni a benne tanuló ember számára.

Itt a videó a jelenlegi állapotról:

Ein Nachbar (IT-Fachlehrer an einer Berufsschule) hat mir gezeigt, wie Sie mit Moodle den Online-Unterricht proben. Sehr spannend. Dort auch der Link zu einem Moodle-Selbstlernkurs.

Ein weitere Tipp von ihm: Ein Präsentationsmodul jenseits und frischer als Power-Point -> Prezi (scheint eine ungarische Entwicklung zu sein, dort wo auch Yonderboi herkommt).

Bei der e-Learning-Conference 2009 an der FH Eisenstadt rundeten interessante Plenumsvorträge die Ergebnisse in den verschiedenen Arbeitsgruppen ab. Zu den Themen “edu.card”, “Moodle”, “Open Source Software”, “Linux im Schuleinsatz”, u.a. stellten Lehrpersonen aus allen Bundesländern aktuelle Entwicklungen vor.

FH Eisenstadt | Konferenz-Webseite | einige Fotos

The Moodle HQ team in Perth is increasing in size and now includes six developers. The latest addition is Andrew Davis, who has been helping out with QA and small bug fixes since he began a fortnight ago.

Meanwhile, European HQ members are looking forward to the upcoming Moodle hackfest in the Czech Republic in a week’s time, where no doubt Moodle 2.0 will be the hot topic of conversation. Also on the agenda for discussion is Moodle 3.0!

Si participaste en el congreso de Educared y asististe a mi intervención sobre Literatura Universal con Moodle, puedes hacer los comentarios o plantear las cuestiones que desees desde esta entrada del blog. Al curso se accede, como invitado, desde EDUCARED.

I thought to produce a simple list with all the problem that we found in our upgrade:

• Users don’t move across properly
• Problem with some image references (localhost reference)
• MediaCenter files don’t move across
• Eaccelerator doesn’t work
• Change on dll to enable mssql queries

I hope that this will be helpful for next upgrades

Aqui aprenderemos paso a paso la instalacion de Ubunto, asi como la configuracion e instalación de Apache, MySQL y PHP que son los elementos principales para la instalacion y funcionamiento de MOODLE

moodle

Video Moodle

Video Instalación UBUNTU 9.04

Today is the first day that we had Moodle 1.9 running and I thought to share some of the problems/difficulties that we had. The main is the eaccelerator library that we were using, by default Moodle uses eaccelerator but we had some problems about not picking up the right css files and not updating files that we were modifying, so the one that we had installed was apc.

Everything was fine during the testing process but today, once is live, I had seen some problems trying to fetch documents because  files were not locating the config.php. I have been like 2 hours trying to figure out why was this problem happening and when I have disabled the apc dll the problem has disappeared. Now what I have got set up is an internal chache method that you can find on Server->Maintenance with this method we can go a bit faster but my main goal now is to use eaccelerator.

About the updgrade just two things: We have moved all users first doing a backup of this table, this was done because if you move the courses with the backup the users are not properly stored and you end up with teachers and students that don’t correspond. The other bit is doing the backup of all your courses and then restoring the courses in the new server. Doing that you will just move the information that you need to the new server and won’t fill the database with unnecesary data.

Actividad con eXe Learning

One of my dreams, right from the start of my journey with technology, is that one day I could eliminate paper entirely from my job. Pipedream….perhaps, and up to now I’d never quite cracked a method that would allow the dream to become reality.

Recently, I was helping out at a Moodle workshop and I was shown a method that may head me closer toward the paperless classroom. It includes using Moodle, a photocopier that can scan documents into PDF format, and Microsoft OneNote. It’s funny how all these conditions suddenly coalesced one day, not only in my thinking, but also in reality.

One of the biggest spends at my school is the printing of coursework booklets for students. Just about every faculty prints booklets that contain “learning” activities. I could spend a whole blog post discussing the merits (or otherwise) of these booklets, but that’s for another day. A guestimate from my boss was that we spend $20K+ on printing costs each year! Imagine what you could spend that sort of cash on, rather than on “one use” booklets that inevitably get tossed away at the end of each semester.

So what if we could make the use of these booklets electronic in nature? The obvious question was how do you make the electronic version editable to the extent that students could submit work, without having to print out pages, write on them and hand them in? That would just defeat the purpose of trying to go paperless.

So, in a wonderful combination of serendipity and old fashioned professional networking I have a potentially workable solution to play with. I have to thank Pam from Newcastle High for her insights in showing it to me.

Firstly, my target group. In my case, the participants will by our Year 10 (2010) students, who will have their DERvices (netbooks) and will hopefully, by then, will be skilled in the use of them. These netbooks have Adobe PDF readers and creators and OneNote preinstalled, making the whole process possible.

OK..here’s how it works.

Take your paper version of your booklet. Stick it through your photocopier, so it produces a complete PDF copy (in my case 40 pages). Upload the PDF booklet to your Moodle course, and make it available as a resource file. At the same time, create an “Upload one file” assignment activity that is named after the worksheet, or whatever, and put it in the same area as the booklet PDF.

Now, in class, when you want to use a resource or activity that is in the booklet, the kids can open the PDF booklet to the required page. Select the page for printing, but instead of printing it to paper, in the print dialogue window, select “Print to OneNote”. The page selected will now appear in a OneNote notebook. For those that know OneNote well, you know you can click and type anywhere on the page. In this case, the kids can click and type anywhere on the selected page imported from the PDF booklet. The kids can now do their work on the page, and when they finish, save it as a PDF file on their PC.

They head to Moodle, and upload their work as a PDF to the assignment activity. The teacher can open the file, grade the work and feedback to the kids….without touching one piece of paper! Samples of student work can be collected and presented electronically as an ePortfolio, without carting folders, books or paper to your Head Teacher or Principal.

Sure there will probably be limitations that don’t suit everyone’s workplace, but I my humble opinion, it’s a right step in an exciting direction.

Our documentation wiki, Moodle Docs, has a nice feature for users browsing in one of the 27 languages other than English. If you view a page which is not yet translated, a message is displayed encouraging you to translate it and also providing a link to the English version of the page e.g. http://docs.moodle.org/nl/backup/restore. Thanks to Moodle developer and Czech language pack maintainer David Mudrák for figuring out how to do this (MDLSITE-90).

This feature came up in our developer chat when deciding upon the wording of the 1.9.7 upgrade notification message. Rather than having lots of explanatory text in Moodle, a neater solution is simply to include a documentation link.

Moodle plug in

Actividad para el taller EDUSOL 2009 – WEB 2.0 PARA DOCENTES Y SU INTEGRACIÓN AL MOODLE, y bien he de aceptar que en su momento este blog lo cree o me registre en wordpress para obtener una llave para usar Akismet (el API de bloqueo de spam, para poder usarlo en otra aplicación), regreso al mismo el día de hoy para aprovechar y colocar mi reflexión de actividades para el taller.

Este año en especial he tomado este taller, más pensando en como integrar la Web2.0 a mi actividad docente, más que en la discusión que he tenido en más de un foro de si la Web2.0 es mas bien una colección de herramientas para facilitar el contenido en detrimento de los derechos de publicación y de uso de la información por parte de los autores y de la necesidad de crear infraestructura en lugar de utilizar la de grandes compañías muchas veces ajenas a nuestro país y mucho menos vinculadas con nuestro plan de trabajo educativo, mucho menos nacional.

Así que gratamente me he llevado una gran experiencia del taller, el cual ha superado mis expectativas, al mostrarme las experiencias de los participantes y del tutor, en especial he de decir que para empezar ha sido divertido que el curso comience por el ejemplo, al en su mayor parte integrar video de youtube y presentaciones de slideshare para presentar el contenido, especialmente me deja pensando en cuanto del mismo se ha creado expresamente para el curso y cual se ha adaptado para el mismo, cosa interesante tambien de la misma Web2.0 y esperemos mas adelante de la educación abierta y reutilizable, también me queda una estupenda experiencia de compartir con los compañeros de curso ya que así no se ha quedado nada mas en los ejemplos y sugerencias propias del taller, he podido ver en acción lo propuesto en clase y me llevo más de una idea para aplicar en el proximo semestre, especialmente ya que estamos utilizando Moodle para apoyar nuestros cursos presenciales, así que compañeros y estimado Miguel Angel Córdova Solís, en hora buena por esta experiencia tan enriquecedora.

Achégovos dous estupendos manuais para aprender a usar a plataforma Moodle. Se vos pide datos de acceso, podedes entrar como convidados:

• Manual creado por Carlos de Paz (IES A Sardiñeira – A Coruña)

• Este manual creado por Juan Casado (CEIP A Sangriña – A Guarda)

04 Tut Teleformando Profesores

Resolviendo_Actividades