Moodle

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.

Ok, so perhaps that's a bit of a stretch. But the segment The Word on the Colbert Report is pretty clever, and it does show that someone in popular culture is paying attention to our use of language, even if he's making up some of his own words. This recent bit from a show is so funny that I can't help but want to show it to my students, but I'm guessing most of them have already seen it.

Check out the link. If this does not load, you want to go to "the word" and load the segment on the word Absinthestinence.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the groundbreaking Jack Kerouac novel On the Road. For any student who has not read it, it's a must. I know that probably makes people some automatically decide not to read something, but trust me on this one. For the occasion, an anniversary edition that looks so much nicer than my beat-up paperback has been published, and there is even a special publication of Kerouac's original scroll of the novel. This means lots of endless paragraphs, which is something that goes directly against what I regularly tell my students. But it goes back to the idea that you have to understand the rules before you break them. Besides, this is a novel, and my students aren't generally (I hope!) writing fiction in class.

One of the travel blogs I read posted something about it today, and I wanted to just tip my glass to Kerouac, who died too young, lived hard, and drank an awful lot.

By default each course site in Moodle has a General News and Announcements forum, and additional forums can be added to a course site to promote engagement and interactivity. In this Moodle Minute, hear about the four types of forums and the features they provide.

You can also find these instructions as part of the Moodle Faculty Quickstart Guide. Comments and suggestions about the podcast can be sent to .