newquisk's blog

Humboldt State

• Forerunner in Moodle work.
• Conducted student survey: Blackboard vs. Moodle: A Comparison of Satisfaction with Online Teaching and Learning Tools

Experiences at Amherst

• Some students liked having everything e-mailed to them, others hated it.
• Students said documents were easier to find in Moodle than in Blackboard, because it was easier to figure out where teachers put things.
• Students strongly liked the idea of using a learning management system.
• Students liked Moodle more, but not overwhelmingly so.
• Results mirror those elsewhere. Students generally like moodle more, organization is better, makes more sense to them.

Faculty perspectives on Moodle from Smith College.

German Instructor

• Upload image galleries - zip, then upload, then upload.
• Used German glossary -- items submitted by student, edited by teacher. Useful for correcting student errors but time consuming.

Psych Instructor

• Students tend to ignore side columns.
• Time outs uploading files from off campus via dialup.
• Problem with calculating percentage grades in moodle because of optional grades.
• Fractional grades also a problem, but may be solved in Moodle 1.7.
• Problems with excel export.

• UCLA, Open University are now using Moodle.
• Moodle support offered through Moodle.com, which is something I need to look into. Having a Moodle authority to talk to would be great.
• demo.moodle.org provides a working test version of Moodle that gets initialized every hour. Good place to go break things.
• Lesson module looks very interesting, allowing for students to assess one another. I need to try setting up one of these.
• The wiki module is much more robust than I thought, allowing for detailed histories and most of the wiki tools you'd expect.

Just in the nick of time (since we go live with our Moodle pilot on Monday), I’m attending a Moodle Interest Group conference hosted by NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computing Program). It’s a mix of basic introductory information (much of which we already know) with good experiential information from faculty and IT people who have it deployed. I'm going to be blogging the highlights of the different sessions here.

Moodle: Introduction & Highlights
http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/843

Moodle: Faculty Perspectives
http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/844

Moodle: Student Reactions
http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/845

Moodle: Adoption at Smith
http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/

Curious about Automator, Apple's graphical front-end for creating AppleScripts? Then check out this article on O'Reilly: What Is Automator (and Can It Make Your Life Easier). It's a little dated, and Automator's seen a few updates since it was written, but the concepts should still be good.

The iStatPro Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X has been updated, and now includes fan and temperature support for the new MacBook Pros, which lets me tell you that the innards of my notebook are now running from 100-116 degrees F.

The Cosmic Cup now has a blog. Not much there yet except for announcements about music and new coffee (but hey, I'm not complaining, seeing as how I like new music and love new coffee...).

Looking to provide your students with video or audio content during class? Want to assign your students audio or video projects for class? This session will cover the things you should know when assigning a media project as well as how to help you or your class get started. We will look at podcast, video podcast, recording clips from satellite programming and other ways of providing supplemental content for your course. 1:00-4:00 p.m., Thursday, January 11, 2007. Register with this form.

I'll be co-hosting the "Web Design Day" workshop with Courtney Bentley on Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Spend the day working with Dreamweaver to revise or build your personal or departmental web site. The morning session will give you basic command of the program as well as incorporate some best practices for web accessibility. The afternoon session will continue with more advanced techniques for using style sheets and making your site more accessible to search engines as well a your users. This session will be hands-on and you will have time to work on your own sites. Register here.

Ajax is becoming omnipresent on the web, but should developers assume that JavaScript is available when developing web-based applications? This blog post by Roger Johansson argues that for basic web apps, you can never assume that JS is there. It spawned a huge (and surprisingly civil) comment thread with a slight consensus agreeing with him.

I'm inclined to agree with those who say the only time that you can assume JavaScript is available is in an intranet environment, and even then someone will inevitably turn off JS so make sure things fail gracefully. For external users, your web page shouldn't simply stop working because a user doesn't have JavaScript enabled.