Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
It’s time to get hacking again. The fourth Moodle Hack/Doc Fest — in which we spend three days working on code, documentation, and support materials for Moodle — will be held at Smith College on June 3-5, 2009. This time around we’ll be focusing on making Moodle 1.9.x as rock solid as possible, as most … Read more
The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) is sponsoring its first round of Moodle usability testing this spring. here are two tests, one for faculty, one for students, that evaluate common tasks that they are likely to encounter when working in Moodle (such as updating their profile, responding to forum assignments, creating assignments, grading assignments, … Read more
One of my big projects this year — Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project — is now live. The project, known as CLAMP, is being funded by a NITLE Innovation Fund grant that was awarded to Lafayette and five other colleges last June to foster collaboration among liberal arts colleges in maintaiing and developing Moodle. The … Read more
Moodle Core’s announced a number of big changes to the Moodle gradebook for the 1.9.5 release. Among the changes: the student name column is now sticky (which means you can still see if if you scroll to the right to look at additional assignments). The categories page has been re-organized and color coded to make … Read more
Google has announced support for seamless integration between Moodle and Google Apps thanks to the work of third-party developer Moodlerooms: Moodlerooms, a SaaS provider of Moodle, just launched an application built on the Moodle platform that lets school admins bring Moodle and Google Apps together with a single sign-in. So now, students who told us … Read more
By default, Moodle ships with a default number of emoticons turned on — filters that turn text smilies into graphical ones. This is all well and good — the nuances of speech can be lost in the written words, and emoticons help with that — but it can cause problems, particularly with some of Moodle’s … Read more
One our first tasks in getting usability testing for Moodle up and running is to find software that can capture video of everything that’s happening on screen, while simultaneously recording the audio of the user’s thought process. We’re still looking at Windows options, but the hands-down favorite on the Mac is Silverback. This $50 app … Read more