Well, you thought you were all set up for blogging, but there’s much more to think about if you want to be a serious blogger (you can tell by how often I post here, that I’m not quite there yet). This link will lead you to a great list of things to think about and do when you start blogging. I like his choice of CC license. I need to think about that myself…
Archive for the ‘open source’ Category
Life Beyond Code: Blogging Starter Checklist
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006Top WordPress Plugins
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006Now that you’ve fired up WordPress, here’s a list of useful plugins to soup-up your install.
Learning Japanese? Using Firefox? Get This Extension Now!
Friday, December 16th, 2005The technology available to us just gets better and better. For those of you who are struggling with Japanese (or even if you’re on top of the language and just want to refine your knowledge), there’s an extension called Rikaichan available for Firefox which allows you to read Japanese in real time as you hover over text. My colleague, Rick Lavin, and I were passing around web pages on adding extensions to Firefox. You will also need EDICT and KANJIDIC in order for everything to work.
I like this setup so much, I save a template with html tags in which to copy and paste emailed memos. This allows me to have the same resources for reading email messages.
Enjoy!
moodle 1.5
Wednesday, June 15th, 2005Although there is no official announcement on the http://moodle.org homepage (it’s still linked as a beta version), the download page shows moodle 1.5 has reached stable status. I uploaded it last week, and I really like its feel. 1.5 has added a message feature which allows users to send an instant message to other members of courses. The message feature could be used in a number of ways. One is to alert learners who have not fulfilled a particular task that something needs to be done. For language teaching, it can also provide an opportunity for more spontaneous communication. Another feature is a more robust quiz module. The latest quiz module includes an adaptive function to allow users to try a missed question again or move to an easier question on the same item. Quiz-makers can choose a percentage for a penalty or allow learners to earn the same credit. I have not used the adaptive portion yet, but plans are in the works. Film at eleven…
On the downside, the wonderful Journal module is being phased out. For those of you who are not familiar with journals, they allow learners to respond in writing to a particular topic. Teachers can then evaluate all the learners as well as provide feedback, all from one page. Journals have been replaced by the Assignments module. Now teachers have to click on each student’s work and provide the feedback/evaluation on individual pages (in addition to the extra time for the loading of each page). Fortunately, Journals can be reactivated in the Modules page of the Administration area. This reactivation has saved me time and clicks in the past week.
As I learn more about the new version, I’ll try to bring my comments up to date.
Review: xoops
Saturday, February 19th, 2005I’ve been using moodle for more than a year now in my courses. It’s an excellent package for putting together online and/or hybrid courses. I am comfortable using it and thought I would explore other options out there for the next semester starting in April. Coincidentally, today I was talking with one of the teachers in the Information Science section of the Administration faculty about getting a course management system (CMS) running for our university. It turns out the costs are too high to put one in place at the moment (that’s why I started my own domain–to run a CMS). He heard me talk about moodle and suggested I try zoops. I had seen a presentation at the JALTCALL conference in Mito, Japan in June, 2004 and did not see anything that could make it compete with moodle.
Anyway, I downloaded the package and uploaded it to the domain here. I needed to upload just one part of the package, which was a bit unintuitive, but the rest of the installation went very smoothly. For this, it earns very high marks. xoops can install modules very easily and comes with about ten ready to go. All you have to do is choose the ones you want and install them one at a time. You can also go to the xoops modules repository and choose others to install. At this writing there were 297!
The sole reason I tried xoops was because I was told there is a quiz module available. I installed that one and was facing a serious user interface problem. Unlike moodle, which gives you many kinds of quiz question types, I had to work my way through an interface that had only ‘create a category’ and ‘delete a category.’ I created one and went to the next screen filled with more of the same. I never did find a place to write a quiz question. In contrast, moodle asks what kind of question and even has several formats with which to write quiz questions and upload them. Until xoops has this kind of module, it will never have the utility of moodle.
Clearly, xoops is a CMS, but it is a content management system. It cannot be used to do the same kinds of things moodle does without a major amount of customization. To make a course, for example, I see having to create groups and using permissions for each student. I did that with phpbb (a great dedicated discussion board package, by the way) for a couple of semesters, but I had mostly the same students all the way through. Most of the work setting it up was just in the beginning.
If you want courses which are easy to set up, go with moodle.
