Tek4L

Otago University are working on setting up a virtual world grid using Open Simulator.

Well, while I am in the winter wonderland of Queenstown somebody from Sun kindly added a comment on my previous post about Wonderland to point out that it does not run on Mac, as it is no longer dependent on Java 1.6. I have just installed the server and client on my Macbook Pro and it runs fine. I am looking forward to getting the server installed on a linux box so I can play around with some of the shared application functionality.

Just attending the APAN26 conference in Queenstown at the moment. There was an interesting session with Mark Billinghurst from HITLab yesterday looking at videoconferencing in an advanced network environment.

His main observation was that videoconferencing had not really moved forward at all since Bell Systems Picture Phone in the 60s. Even with the HD telepresence units that are available it is still a essentially a 2D experience. He had some interesting examples of experimental 3D augmented reality video conferencing. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this technology to make the mainstream.

He had some interesting statistics about the lack of uptake of videoconferencing, even when HD on fast networks was available. His view was that the VC use would not increase significantly until the experience was ‘better’ than a face to face meeting. The focus of existing systems seems to be on making it an ‘equivalent’ experience. I am sure the same thing must apply to numerous other technology applications in education.

I had a first look at Sun’s project wonderland last week. It is nothing staggering at first look to anyone that has been playing in Second Life, but it has some nice features like the immersive 3D audio, and the ability to hang applications like web browsers and open office docs on the wall and share them with other users. There is also the ability to bring in the real world via audio and video conferencing.

Hopefully we can get our own wonderland server up and running in the next few weeks so we can do some more detailed investigation of its potential in the educational space.

The only drawback at the moment is a lack of Mac support due to the client requiring Java 1.6, and this currently isn’t available for Mac  - but hopefully will be soon.

I have been busy investigating email and calendaring solutions for Core Education, the non-profit educational research organisation that I work for. The big question is do we go for the all in one PIM solution, or take the web 2.0 - many small pieces losely joined approached.

For the first option Exchange is out of the question so I have been playing around with Zimbra. It seems very good, and synchs with MS and Apple desktops, as well as having a very good ajax web interface and desktop client. We already have a stable email platform, and it is really just the calendaring component of Zimbra that we want, so is it worth all the drama of having to migrate all of our email accounts?

The other option I am looking at is keeping our existing email platform and using Google Calendar for group calendaring. I am hoping to trial this option with a few staff in the next week or so - will keep you posted ….

If you want a bit of light relief check out the youtube video that an enligthened member of our lms review committee had made in order to generate some student interest in the review process.

I have spent the last few days working on a new Moodle course format.

As we were busy setting up for our moodle trial we became increasingly unhappy with the default formats that display all of the topics/weeks/sections on the course homepage. This can be a bit overwhelming when you first enter a course. Also Section 0 displays at the top of all pages even if you choose to display a single topic.

There are some course menu options that give a left menu to easily access individual topics. However installing these leads to some rather nasty navigation, as you see muitiple links to the same content on the same page.

So, I have hacked the default topics format to create a ‘Single Section’ course format which just displays section 0 and news items on the course homepage, and allows access to other sections via a left menu.

I also hacked the weblib.php build_navigation function so that the name of the current section appears in the top navigation bar.

A demo site (log in as guest) is available at

http://www.host4learning.com/moodlemce/course/view.php?id=4

As part of our LMS review one of the key things we have had to look at are the possibilities of easily moving data from Blackboard (WebCT 6) to Moodle. After an extensive search it turns out that those lucky users who upgraded from WebCT4 to WebCT 6 (aka Blackboard CE6) are in a bit of a trap. Users of WebCT 4, and also native Blackboard, have utilities available that will convert courses into Moodle format.

However WebCT 6 does not have a full course export option, you can only export individual learning modules, and many of our staff are still not using the learning module functionality anyway. We were getting to the stage of thinking that conversion was going to be a very manual cut and paste effort when I happened to bump into somebody from NetSpot at a Sakai conference who mentioned that they were working with an Indian partner to implement some WebCT6 - Moodle export services.

We have provided them with some course backup files and they are currently in the process of running some trial conversions for us to look at. I will keep you posted on the outcome.

Spent most of last week playing around with Moodle’s WYSIWYG editor. We are about to launch a trial of Moodle and I really wasn’t happy with some of the limitations/problems with the existing HTMLarea editor.

There are moves afoot to replace the editor in version 2.0, but we can’t wait for this. Some work had been done by others on integrating tinymce3 and I was able to take this and build on it. I have managed to do a temporary integration by turning off the default editor and pasting the tinymce javascript into a theme header.html file.

Getting it running was the easy bit. I then had to integrate the Moodle image and link file browser, but thanks to reasonable documention for tinymce it wasn’t too much of a problem.

The integration was mostly achieved without having to touch core Moodle or tinymce code, so it won’t be affected by upgrades to either package. The only thing I had to hack in Moodle was the javascript form validation script as the form textarea content in tinymce was not visible to the validation script  without tinyMCE.triggerSave(); being run. This is a bit of a pain, but at least it is just one line of code in one file that will need to be re-applied after Moodle upgrades.

It mostly seems to be working now,  but I need to do some more extensive testing to make sure!

Details about the integration and download of the required files can be found at
http://www.host4learning.com/moodlemce/