My Moodle Mindomo Mind Map

I created a Mindmap on Mindomo.com for Moodle and haven't done much with it. But I will add stuff to it as I learn things about certain topics. I think this thing would be much more powerful if all the Moodlers on Moodle.org would join and collaborate on this. Please contact me so I can send an invite to you, if you want to collaborate.

• My Moodle Mindmap on Mindomo.com

Using Moodle: Integration with Captivate

A use on the Moodle forums asked an interesting question about Moodle and Captivate - just exactly what we're attempting to do at my organization. I figure I'll put this up on my blog for posterity's sake.

Allowing Non-Students To View Grades In Moodle

I've been visiting the helpful Moodle community and asking about how to solve a particular problem I face in deploying Moodle successfully in my organization: viewing students' scores. Teachers, Admins and Students can all view scores. Teachers can see the scores of all students in their classes; Students can only see their own grades and Admins can see anyone' grades. But what about non-Students who are also non-Teachers and non-Admins?

My organization is not unique in that we have Supervisors who need to see the grades of their employees. Also, we have Human Resources personnel who need to see the grades of any or all students. The groups may not be Teachers or Admins. In fact I'd rather they not have any Administrative access at all. How to resolve this problem?

The Moodle community says setup special Roles for these users. You can view the post here.

Learning to Tweak Moodle: It Sucks Less Than Others

I'm still a Moodle newbie. I feel I must jump into this application and really learn how to harness its power as both an Administrator and an Instructor. I know this app is powerful and can serve my organization's needs as a Corporate Learning Managment System, since so many other organizations are using it that way successfully - and these are much bigger, more complex deployments than what I'm attempting.

But I'm also a geek who likes to tweak. Does that make me a geak? Or tweek? I think the key to my successful deployment of Moodle is to learn how the programmers envisioned the application to work; learn the modules; learn the framework, structure and parameters of the app. Then, tweak it to fit my needs.

This requires a balance of IT geekiness along with solid Instructional Design understanding; and that must be paired with the specific learning requirements for my organization: mid-sized community hospital.

First, I'm tasked with eliminating our current LMS which is very costly to use and update - and its not user friendly (no one likes this application!). Since that application "sucks", hopefully I can create a solution in Moodle which is significantly less "sucky".

I think a combination of built-in Moodle modules (content and quizzes mostly, along with some forums and wikis) and Adobe Captivate for software simulations will do the trick. I plan to also add other multimedia such as video or Flash and perhaps a PowerPoint or two.

In the upcoming weeks I shall endeavor to see how much Moodle sucks less than our previous LMS. I hope to be pleasantly surprised. And I'm thankful for the helpful Moodle community of users and Admins.

Windows Collapsing says Gartner Analysts?

In response to a colleague's email about this article I decided to write this blog post.

Is Windows Collapsing?
A pair of Gartner analysts this week called the situation "untenable" and described Windows as 'collapsing'. They said Redmond must make radical changes to its OS or risk becoming a has-been. They basically accuse Microsoft not having responded to the market, is overburdened by too much legacy code and faces serious competition of a whole host of fronts.

Many of you responded to my question if Bill Gates' departure might be the cause of Microsoft's sharp brand decline. And what you told me was very similar to the above observations. Microsoft has stopped listening to you, is more interested in what is good for itself than what is good for its customers, and that the current Windows Vista backlash is a good example of the problems. They are riding (temporarily) on just the inertia of their defacto monopoly. I'm not a Microsoft basher and I make my living in their ecosystem, but I'm wondering what the majority of you thinks about this, so please vote in the current SunPoll!
http://www.wservernews.com/080414-SunPoll

CNet article here.

It's Not So Much That Windows is Collapsing As It Is The World Is Changing.
The world is changing. Philosophies are changing. Business models are changing. Software is changing. Microsoft can still ride on their inertia for quite some time however and they probably won't feel any sting. They have such a huge market share in office suites, operating systems and server OS's. People still need Microsoft whether they like it or not. I'm not sure that "Windows is collapsing" as Gartner suggests, but rather "right-sizing" is in order. All big companies face this issue at some time. Microsoft will learn to trim some projects to remain competitive in their core. At this time their core has been: Windows, Office, Internet Explorer. They have succeeded so far. But as I said, the world is changing.

Firefox, OpenOffice and Linux must only feel like a bee sting to Goliath. But Google, the juggernaut that it is, remains to be a force to be reckoned with. If Google and OpenOffice team up somehow, Microsoft may need to start worrying. Many years ago the phrase from the Sun CEO was "the Network is the computer". Google is poised to make that happen with or without Sun's Java or Adobe's Flash. In 10-15 years it won't matter what your OS is, as long as you can browse the Internet and have a standards-compliant browser, you will be able to do business. This scares Microsoft because they'll lose their share in the OS market, and Internet Explorer has not been known as a standards-complaint web browser. Two of the barriers preventing it from happening today are issues about Java and Flash - two of the most ubiquitous web applications (keys to the next phase of "Software As A Service (SaaS)". When these things become open source, or an open source alternative reaches critical mass - watch out!

I suspect this is why Microsoft is now pushing their "Silverlight" web application as an alternative to Flash applications. They did the same with pushing Internet Explorer to force Netscape out of the browser business (but the Mozilla project lives on, which has ties to the Netscape project). They did the same with pushing the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine to force Sun's Java out of business, but Sun opened up some of its source code and Java still lives on! They bad-mouthed Linux, but its still strong; however server deployments of MSFT are increasing in markets where Linux has remained flat or is losing ground. Now they're pushing Silverlight over Adobe's Flash.

Unless they can get enough developers to write applications in Silverlight instead of Flash, I can't see this as succeeding. But they have money to throw at it. However, so does Adobe. Adobe is no slouch. They have PDF files, they have Shockwave and Flash files - all ubiquitous on the Internet. Micrsoft has tried to compete against Adobe's Photoshop and Dreamweaver applications and have largely failed (though FrontPage is certainly a better application than it was years ago). Microsoft would have to throw away some serious cash to be competitive in these areas. I think shareholders would balk at that - I would if I had MSFT stock.

MSFT throws its money at many projects which do not generate revenue: Xbox, Zune, MSN search engine (not sure if this is actually a money loser though), etc. They have their hand in hardware (gaming hardware) and other software (gaming software). MSFT has its hands in everything it seems. Now they want to throw money at Yahoo! in an attempt to be competitive against Google in the search engine market. Good luck!

Bottom line: Microsoft has some house cleaning to do, but don't count them out just yet. They are still key players - like it or not. They still have a lot of muscle. They are still huge! The question is: in these rapidly changing times, can this Titanic navigate these icy waters?"

Why Moodle for Corporate?

This blog post is in response to a question asked of me (privately) here. Rather than respond only in private, I though a blog post would help other Moodlers.

Richard,
Would you mind sharing how you arrived at an open source solution as your best option; and how Moodle ended up as your top choice?

The answer is simple: there has not been a corporate vision for learning at my organization beyond the required/mandated learning for maintaining certifications and compliance with standards. We have an LMS for that purpose but we are not satisfied with it. It is hosted offsite and it is not easy to update (takes considerable time and money each time).

Then, we began to look at upgrading our entire hospital medical information system and realized that would require training for which our current LMS was not a suitable solution. We would either have to keep our existing LMS as well as deploy a new one for the new training, or look for a way to migrate our existing LMS courses into our new LMS.

I am a fan and user of Open Source Software, so I naturally looked to Moodle to solve this problem (especially since I have a background in education as a Technology Coordinator and Educator). Moodle appeared to have the features that we needed so we decided to go forward with a beta-test. Moodle met with approval from the VP's since it was "free" and our current commercial LMS wasn't meeting their expectations (they didn't see a reason to spend more on another LMS which might put us right back in the same situation). I am still in the process of creating that beta-test for approval. If it meets the stakeholder's expectations then I will proceed with creating more content and importing existing content, after migrating from a sandbox server to a production server.

One of the first things I hope to test soon is authentication with Active Directory. There's documentation on this here.

Informal Learning :: Ageless Learner

I discovered this excellent resource about Informal Learning today.  The author includes eLearning as a Formal Learning model along with classrooms and meetings.  This is a great discussion starter article.  I suggest all people interested in Educating / Training people to read this as a starting point.

If you can agree with the definitions of this article, then many Web 2.0 applications might qualify as formal, but unexpected learning.  I might argue that formal learning takes place in a controlled environment, where the Instructor has the control.  Informal learning then occurs outside the boundaries of that type of control.  Blogs, Wikis and Social Networks / Communities would be Informal Learning models in my definition since the instructor doesn't necessarily control those environments.

The instructor can, however, have significant influence in these informal learning models.  For example a mid-sized business can setup an intranet portal and Learning Management System with blogs and a wiki.  The classes offered on the LMS are formal training whether they take place online or in a classroom.  But the instructor can encourage students to use the blog to journal about their learning and then summarize their learning on the wiki, where all other students can edit the final wiki.  The instructor can also edit the wiki.  The learning community becomes important, if not foundational to the learning process, but it is in an informal manner.

I would include both these formal and informal learning methods in a global Knowledge Management plan for an organization.  If you've not thought about Organizational Knowledge Management, get this PDF or visit this site.  Learning Management is only a portion of the Knowledge Management plan, and both Informal and Formal learning must be a part of that plan, to the extent that the more an organization plans and implements informal learning, the better they can influence and control the informal learning methods.

Does anyone have other thoughts on this?

Moodle For Me (For Now)

I've been beta-testing Moodle at my organization since mid-2007, version 1.7.2. I like that Moodle is Open Source Software. I've now officially joined the Moodle forum and even posted in a forum for corporate users of Moodle. I don't have any experience on other Learning Mangement Systems, but I have 8 years experience using Content Management Systems starting with Mambo, then Joomla and now also Drupal and about a year's worth of time using blogs such as Blogger and Wordpress. I've found that Moodle is comparable to managing those other systems, but I'd like to have a little more control at block positioning like I can with Joomla.

One problem I have with Moodle is the categories / subcategories / courses displayed on the front page. I have many items to fit into each of these and I'd like a way to expand/collapse that on the front page. I think it's overwhelming for my users to see all those options and I'd like to limit their choices. In Moodle you either see them all or you don't see any. I can restrict to show only categories, but all the subcategories will display with them. That is still too overwhelming for a user interface.

My solution was to code a table in HTML and insert icons from the Nuvola series and use this as my course navigation tool. Users can click on an icon/category to view the courses and subcategories in each. It's much prettier this way; easy on the eyes; not overwhelming for users. Here is a screenshot of it:



Another problem I've found is the implementation of the blog and wiki modules. I'd like the blog module to be more like Wordpress or Blogger - full-featured. The Moodle blog could be very valuable as a site-wide blog if it had more features and lived "outside" of the Moodle world instead of always being tied to courses. The same could be said for the wiki module. Both are good ideas, but need to be further developed. As it stands I won't be implementing the blog or wiki features of Moodle. Instead I have deployed TWiki and WordPress on Linux sandbox servers.

Too bad about the blog and wiki modules, because I'd like to use Moodle as a complete Knowledge Management platform at my organization. Instead we have a hodge podge mix of using Shared directories, Outlook/Exchange, SharePoint (the free one), and now Twiki and WordPress - all hosted onsite on our own servers.

K12LTSP - Thin Client Computing for the Masses!

In the dark ages (circa, just after the DotCom bust of the new millennium), I had heard of Linux, Unix and BSD operating systems, but had never put any time in on them.  I was familiar with the idea that most of the big corporations ran their mission-critical applications on Unix machines with custom-coded operating systems; most web-based applications were hosted Linux or BSD based operating systems.  That was enough for me in early 2000.  I had grown up with MS-DOS, BASIC for programming and later, Windows as an OS.  Boy the times have changed!

Later in 2001, I took the position as a Technology Coordinator for a small school district in the Ozarks.  Budgets were tight back then, and I inherited an ancient computer lab with which I was supposed to teach students how to be technologically literate so they could have useful computer skills when they entered the job market.  Those computers were pushed to their limits just to run Windows 98 (and some of them struggled to run Windows 95).  Those computers were filled with malware, spyware, adware and other vices of the Internet age (the proxy filter which the school was paying thousands for was not working correctly).

Then a good friend from my high school days (who is an ultra elite uber geek government contractor with top secret security clearance) told me that I should learn more about BSD and Linux (he was a professed Unix-geek, but a fan of the BSD and Linux variants).  BSD proved to be too needy and geeky for me, but Linux appeared to have the mixture of just the right stuff for me: community support, hardware drivers and user-friendly (sort of) applications.  I jumped in on Red Hat version 7 and never looked back.  Soon after I learned of the K12LTSP community which turned out to be a lifesaver (and budget saver) for me.

It wasn't long before I had a beta-test application server setup (1 Ghz Celeron processor with 512 Mb RAM).  This machine would serve the applications to my oldest PCs (Pentium 1, 133 Mhz machines with 64 Mb RAM).  Suddenly, the old and slow pieces of junk were moving at what seemed like lightning speed!  Eureka!  I had discovered the greatest secret for Technology Coordinators everywhere!  Don't throw away your old piece of crap machines from the late 90's!  They make excellent "thin client" computers (I call them "fat clients" - because PCs of the 90s were anything but thin).

Next I decided to install a Pentium 4 machine as the application server instead of the Celeron machine (that became the new, fully-functioning proxy filter).  With a Pentium 4 machine running at 2.4 Ghz and with 2 Gb RAM, I now had some "serious" horsepower to play with.  I setup a classroom writing lab for the English teacher in her own classroom with 9 "fat clients", a laser printer and an overhead LCD projector (sorry, no Smartboard).  The kids and the teacher loved it!  Now she didn't have to reserve time in my outdated computer lab so her students could do their writing or research.  That classroom became self sufficient overnight.

Suddenly the Science and Math teachers wanted a mini classroom computer lab like the English teacher.  Then the History teacher joined the fray.  Next one of the upper elementary teachers wanted one also, and so did the Special Education teacher! Wow!  This thing started taking off!

Linux and Open Source Software had saved the day (and thousands of dollars in licensing fees versus doing the same thing with Microsoft).  Linux and OSS allowed me to:

• create a web server (free)
• create a CMS (content management server) (free)
  
• create an email server (free)
• create an Internet proxy filter (free)
• create a file server (free)
• create several application servers for classrooms (free)
• use MS Office file formats, running on OpenOffice (free)

Of course, today, Microsoft may offer deep discounts to remain competitive with these Linux / OSS offerings.  But, at the time I needed it, Linux and OSS came through for me - not Microsoft.  And so, it is with this history in mind, that I look forward to see what wonderful advances will be offered to our global society because of the efforts of the Linux / OSS community.  I watch with particular interest the Ubuntu project, and the K12LTSP project.

Thanks to all the Linux geeks!

Technology & Learning: Top 10 Tech Trends

The article is here. Pages 16-17 show trend #9: The Penguin is Snow-Balling. Interesting. I'm glad the Linux and Open Source Software is finally a regular on the radar screens of this magazine. But if it's only now starting to be covered regularly in this national magazine for Educational Technology Coordinators, then it will be years before the readers at large are ready to accept it in the mainstream.

Nevermind that Dell, HP, and IBM have already shown their "supposed" support of Linux as an OS (after all, what company cannot - especially a company that makes servers?). I know. Linux on the server is way old news. Linux on the desktop - it just ain't there yet! I know that argument. But I also know when I needed a functional computer lab in a terminal-server environment with no extra money... the ONLY solution came from the OSS community (in the form of the K12 LTSP community). To do this the Microsoft way would have bankrupted my small school district.

Here is an interesting article about Dell and Ubuntu. And here is another one.

Just food for thought.

Technology and Learning cover story: Linux

I don't know if you need a subscription to view this or not, but here it is:
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/tl_200711/

I must admit that I'm a bit jaded on this subject, having been a public school teacher and technology coordinator for 10 years, and an avid Open Source evangelist. In my state, Missouri, I have found that I was either ahead of my time, or that no one wanted to save money on licenses and using otherwise unusable hardware. I presented at the state technology coordinator's convention; got an article printed up in the Missouri State Teacher's Association magazine; got a local TV story done about it and a local newspaper story - all about the great virtues of the K12LTSP project and Open Source Software. It felt to me that no one wanted to listen to a young enthusiastic teacher/techie. All I wanted to do was show them the way to a better technological world! And they wouldn't listen! But I'll show them! One day I'll get my revenge. Muwaa ha ha ha ha ha!

Just kidding. Getting a little silly here.

It's neat to see more articles in this national magazine touting the virtues of OSS and Linux specifically. Perhaps the learning community will soon embrace the OSS philosophy. I have left the field of public education and now work in the healthcare industry (still doing technology and learning though - and still using OSS even though my IT dept is an all Microsoft shop). In fact, recently I've been setting up for different OSS servers: Moodle, Joomla, Drupal and TWiki.

Open Source Wiki Craziness!

Having been a user of wikipedia and many open-source applications with public wikis, I foolishly thought it would be easy to setup a corporate wiki for my office. Wrong! I'm a fan of Ubuntu for a quick Linux deployment whether for desktop or server applications. So I quickly downloaded the latest Ubuntu and went to Google the most highly reviewed open source wikis available for me to install. How many wiki applications do we need in this world? Why are there so many developers working on so many variants of wikis? I don't get it. I think wiki development would proceed much more efficiently and quickly if the developers would team up into a small handful of wiki categories/types instead of the myriad of wiki types available. I mean how many PHP-based wikis do we need? How many perl or python wikis do we need?

Perhaps the wiki developers are so fragmented because they can't get along and come to a working agreement on the scope of their projects? I don't know - I'm not a developer. But I am a user of wikis and I'm fairly competent to install applications on Ubuntu (not just using Synaptic or apt-get either!). But first selecting a wiki, and then installing/configuring a wiki has got me quite frustrated! I first selected MoinMoin because its the wiki application that Ubuntu uses on their public wiki. That installed rather easily, but I found that installing a new theme was not nearly as neat and tidy as installing a Joomla theme. And it was supposed to be designed for easy theme manipulation! Then I started thinking that I might prefer more control over my corporate wiki than what MoinMoin provides, so I pulled MoinMoin and decided to try Twiki.

Gulp! What a headache! I followed the instructions found online for installing Twiki on Ubuntu 7.10. Twiki will ONLY work on the server / localhost! I can't access it from the network! Why? How can I configure it for network access? The online wiki HOWTO does not help. Aaargh! I'm frustrated for now. But hopeful that tomorrow I can try it all again! One more try with Twiki, then off to MediaWiki perhaps. And who knows what nightmares lurk around the corner for tomorrow's install.

How can I be a wiki evangelist / champion in my organization when I can't even get the darn thing working correctly?