newquisk's blog

Soapbox has been updated to the latest version of Drupal, as has the Organic Groups module. If you're using a group on Soapbox, please let us know if you encounter any problems by calling the Helpdesk at 610.330.5501 or help@lafayette.edu

Gateways

• Netvibes: A double-sided portal that allows for public and private views, as well as friending associates.
• iGoogle: A personal page with no external web presence. Content can be organized into tabs, Google App integration is a plus.
• Mahalo: A human edited search engine, with the goal of having 10,000 handcrafted result pages for the most popular topics. Firefox toolbar allows users to create user and topic pages.
• Shyftr: RSS reader that allows users to share and comment on each other's feed items.

Random Cool App

• PicLens: Image browser plugin for Firefox

Getting Started

• Everyone starts at Help Island, which has a handful of tutorials explaining how to interact with the world. Once you've learned the basics, you can move to the mainland, or elsewhere.
• Moving around is straightforward, using the directional keys. Getting from region to region can be done in one of two ways:
  • Do a global search, based on keyword.
  • Use the Map tool to enter a region, and then coordinates.

I'll be leading this brownbag on Wednesday, April 16 at noon in Gendebien Room, Skillman Library. Here's the announcement blurb:

The Read/Write Web continues to evolve, proliferating connections between web sites and spawning thousands of new social networks. Come learn about the success stories of 2007 -- such as micro-blogging tools Twitter and Jaiku and the newly-open Facebook.com -- as well as what's on the horizon for 2008. Lunch will be provided.

Moodle 1.9.0 is out. Among the new features:

• New Gradebook. That’s worth repeating … new Gradebook!
• Integrated Outcomes
• Performance enhancements
• Tagging is now a core function

So what does this mean for Lafayette? Well, we're not upgrading any time soon -- going from our current version (Moodle 1.8.4) to the new one (1.9) is a huge step, and it's not the sort of upgrade we'll do during the semester. But the release does mean we'll be able to start evaluating it on our test server.

Gradebook is probably the single biggest reason to consider upgrading; it has support for fractional grades (and there was much rejoicing!), which is probably the single biggest thing faculty have been demanding. Integrated support for Outcomes sounds cool, but we'll have to see how robust it is. The performance enhancements will be huge; the fixes to Moodle’s statistics-crunching cron alone are tremendous. I’m not so sure about tagging; I like the concept, but I’ll need to see how it’s executed.

I'll be at DrupalCon Boston from March 3 through March 6, which I'm attending for the day job. While I'm keeping an eye out for stuff related to higher education, most of the sessions deal with developing Drupal for any environment, be it a campus blogging platform or a science fiction webzine. Here's what I've got lined up so far.

Now that the semester is underway and Moodle is ticking along at version 1.8.4, we've started turning our attention to Moodle 1.9, which is presently at Beta 4 and will hopefully be ready for release by May. The Moodle core team (at http://www.moodle.org) is making a concerted effort to knock out bugs and fix functionality issues that showed up during the sometimes-bumpy 1.7/1.8 versions, and one of the big things (at least for us) that they're fixing is how to upload resources. This tracker report, while technical, explains what they're doing.

In a nutshell, they're the new "Edit Resources" page (which is used to upload files, link to web pages, etc.) will now have the ability to "post without previewing". This is something our faculty have wanted for a while; as is, Moodle forces you to preview *everything*, which is a real pain when you're uploading a Power Point presentation, since it forces you to "preview" that presentation by downloading it again.

EduSpaces, which was a social networking site for educators and those who use education technology, is being taken offline. The site was notable for being a large scale implementation of Elgg, an open source social networking tool that's been slowly working its way through beta status.

One of the issues with EduSpaces, and apparently Elgg as well, has been a lack of funding for the project. I suspect this is because people -- both developers and users -- don't yet feel a strong need for a social networking alternative to the commercial products like MySpace and Facebook.

There's a new listserv for librarians interested in Drupal: DRUPAL4LIB. You can join it via its archives page. I've just signed up, so I don't know how high traffic it is, but it's great to see there are enough people interested in using Drupal with library web sites to warrant such a list.

The Easton Area School Board's meeting tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Easton Area Education Center, 1801 Bushkill Drive, Easton, as it does the third Saturday of every month. What makes tonight different is they'll be discussing (and likely voting on) plans to renovate March and Paxinosa Schools. It's item K under section XI. NEW BUSINESS of the agenda. As part of these renovations, the school district has stated they intend to close Paxinosa and March schools next year (2008-2009) and have the students attend the old Middle School instead (its students having been moved to the new Middle School in Forks).

Parents of the affected schools met about two weeks ago to discuss this, and submitted a number of questions about the projects and their associated plans to the school board.