openlearn

Revise this

alex July 30th, 2008

It’s been long time coming but now the OpenLearn LabSpace allows users to edit (remix) units online - rather than the rather cumbersome method of downloading a Moodle backup file then re-uploading - or worse, trying to work with the OU XML format in notepad!

To create a new version of a unit, find the unit you’d like to edit then select the ‘make a copy for revising’ option from the ‘Versions’ block. After it’s created the new version you should see it listed (mine is v1.3 in the example image on the right).

On visiting the new unit you should see the ‘Revise this unit’ button in the top right (see highlighted area in image below).

When you click this you’ll get a warning message like the one below (as it’s wiki-like you’re able to edit other users content - they can also change yours!):

Finally you need to click the ‘Turn editing on’ button (this appears in the same place as the revise this button) and you’ll arrive at the standard Moodle unit/course editing page (as below), with all the links etc for adding and editing resources and activities.

Hopefully this new functionality will encourage more people to add their own content and edits (which has been somewhat lacking in the LabSpace so far) and also allow users to create much more interactive content (by adding Moodle activities to the units)… have fun!

MoodleMoot08 - Padova, Italy

alex May 12th, 2008

On Friday I gave an “Introduction to OpenLearn” presentation at the Italian MoodleMoot08 in Padova. The first day started in true Italian style - about an hour late - though to be fair this was actually more due to the fact there had been a train strike in the morning which had delayed a lot of the people arriving. The transport strike also explained why my bus from the airport to Padova on Thursday had been free, I’d tried to buy a ticket from the driver but he refused my money and just indicated for me to sit down, so I spent the hours journey wondering if the ticket inspectors would get on and I’d get fined! Fortunately not, and it was explained to me later that the refusal to take money is unofficial strike action by the drivers, for fear of robbery if they are carrying cash.

I was the only English speaker at the conference, but thankfully John Hannon (English teacher from Bari )translated everything on the fly for me, for the benefit of the entirely Italian audience of about 200 teachers. I just about managed to understand some of the other presentations, with help from little translations from the people sat around me.The conference was also being webcast - so I’m hoping that the replays will appear soon. [Update 15/5/08: the replay of my presentation is now available at: http://www.videoserver01.unimore.it/p85167542/, my talk starts at about 1'08. Presentations from the other sessions are also available - all in Italian ;-)]

My presentation seemed to go really well, I certainly had plenty of people asking me about OpenLearn and our tools (especially FlashMeeting), so I gave a few demos when I could get on a PC with an internet connection. A wireless connection wasn’t available, which meant there was virtually no-one using a laptop on the audience (so no complaints about noisy keyboards), still I managed to grab a machine with in connection so I could give a few demos of FlashMeeting (or the FM project as it’s now officially called), though it was a little tricky with no web cam and no speakers!

Roberto Pinna from the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) dept at the Università del Piemonte Orientale gave me a demo of their MeetingPoint application - it’s a web based video conferencing tool, so similar to FlashMeeting although it uses the opensource Red5 server (rather than the paid-for Flash Comms Server). The main differences (that I can see) are that MeetingPoint doesn’t record the meetings for later replay (as far as I’m aware), but it has a plugin architecture, so if there’s a tool you’d like to embed then you can do so - or (for example) replace the provided whiteboard application with something else.

Luckily I had the time to spend the rest of the weekend in Padova as it’s a really nice city - not far from Venice (but far fewer tourists), but plenty of historic monuments, and being Italy, churches. It’s home to the second oldest university in Italy (Bologna University had opened 3 or 4 years before) and where Galileo taught and his observatory it still standing. Some parts of the old university are still standing (see my pics) - the crests you can see in some of these picture are the shields from the previous directors of the university and faculties.

Other sights I got to were the Basilica di Sant’Antonio and Cappella degli Scrovegni. St Antonio relics, seem to consist of slightly more gruesome relics than I’ve seen before (usually bits of bone), including his lower jaw, tougue and larynx… hmmm…

Far less grim were the botanical gardens - “regarded as the most ancient university garden in the world”.

MSG Installation screencasts

alex January 22nd, 2008

I’ve just posted up some installation screencasts for MSG server to help out anyone trying to install it… more info.

Has also made me think that maybe I should go back and create one for using MSG within OpenLearn - specifically with a scenario for why you would want to use MSG within OpenLearn.

Reviewing the OpenLearn tools

alex January 11th, 2008

Firstly, a slightly belated Happy New Year!

Yesterday we had an interesting discussion about how we could evaluate and review the social tools included in OpenLearn, namely, the Knowledge Mapping (with Compendium & Cohere), MSG and Flashmeeting. Our feeling is that they’ve not been as successful as we first hoped, and there maybe lots of different reasons for this. For MSG I’ve detailed some of the possible reasons in a JIME paper that will be published soon.

It’s quite interesting to compare how OpenLearn is viewed externally to the OU vs how it’s seen internally (and within the OpenLearn team). The feedback we have from external users is that, to paraphrase, “OpenLearn is great, I can get free OU content”, whereas I’m slightly dissappointed that MSG isn’t used more than it is. I guess the difference is due to the fact that users may see the site as a way of getting content, and not necessarily somewhere they can come to to gain access to tools, such as IM, video-conferencing etc.

Video/audio chat in MSG…

alex November 15th, 2007

Ever since I started working on MSG we’ve been asked for extra functionality to be added, most notably group-chat and option to have audio/video chat. We’ve always tried to resist giving in to these requests - on the basis that other IM services already do these things so why reinvent them, also, it’s all open source so if you can add them if you want!

However we’ve kinda given in to one of these, the video/audio chat one, the reason being that it’s actually relatively little work - we already have a service (FlashMeeting) which provides this type of functionality - so just need to link the 2 together. Well, we’ve nearly got this finished so when you’re in a chat session, there’s a one click launch flashmeeting - which automatically books the meeting and gives you the link to it…. so far so good - and also dubiously solves the group chat issues, since flashmeeting is multi-user rather than 1-1 (in fact better at multi-user than 1-1)…. but then we realised that we’ll only be able to apply this solution to the OpenLearn server.

The FlashMeeting and MSG OpenLearn servers have the exact same user base and account ids/emails etc all match up - so it’s quite trivial, however we run into problems with our general FlashMeeting and MSG servers as they have different user bases and even different policies on who can get accounts on each server. FlashMeeting accounts are only created by the FM team (you can’t self register - well, not without an OU email address?), but MSG has (or rather, will very shortly have) the ability for anyone to register - so we can’t then automatically auto create accounts the FM server. I know there are ways we _could_ do this but too many variables and too much if.. else if.. else if.. else.. code for my liking ;-) Another case for us to seriously look into whether OpenID and oAuth can really help solve these types of problem for us.

There are other services that we could use (recently found MeBeam - or rather they found us) which offer free to use, no-registration multi-user chat/audio/video facilities. However, we’ve not finally decided on any of these yet… and any other suggestions for services we could link to gratefully received ;-)

OpenLearn conference

alex November 1st, 2007

Spent the last couple of days at the OpenLearn conference, which was all quite interesting, although maybe not directly relevant to my day-to-day work - the things that were really relevant I should know about already!! - but interesting nonetheless. I won’t write about all the presentations I went to as there was some active blogging on all the sessions - so pointless for me to replicate all that here. The sessions I found most interesting were… John Seely Brown, Alan Cann, Erik Duval, Ray Corrigan and Tony Hirst.

One thing I did notice was that whereever Open Educational Resources (OERs) were discussed it generally referred to content - and essentially static content at that. Whenever tools were discussed they were as a surrounding/supporting activity rather than being OERs in their own right - as mentioned in the wikipedia OER article.

IE crashing with MSG

alex October 25th, 2007

Came back from holiday yesterday (see the pics!) , to find a stack of emails about problems with MSG crashing IE. This is a bit odd as we’ve not updated MSG for a little while, so strange that it just seems to have started occuring. It seems quite an erratic problem, but it does bring the whole browser down - something I find a little odd for a purely javascript application.

I’m really hoping to get this fixed very soon, but haven’t yet found the root cause, I can reliable recreate the issue, so just need to find why it’s happening.

Plus I need to get my presentation for next weeks OpenLearn conference written sometime soon!

Update (29th Oct)… I have now got the problem resolved, though still don’t know the real root cause. I fixed it by going back through the changes I’ve made recently and seeing at what point the error started occuring.
The change which appears to have been causing the error was when I switched from using <a href=”javascript:….”> to using (what I thought was the proper way!) of adding/removing event listeners. The actual problem occured with the call to detach event, although it didn’t fail everytime - it would work for the first few times and then randomly cause the browser to crash. I did notice that the carsh would only happen if I had the MSG client and the referring site (the one with the users presence icon) open at the same time, if only one was open the crash wouldn’t occur.

For info this was the code that was causing problems:

var oldImg = presenceNode.firstChild;
//remove any current listeners
if(oldImg.removeEventListener){ // Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox
oldImg.removeEventListener('click', launchClick, false);
oldImg.removeEventListener('click', readMessageClick, false);
} else { // IE
oldImg.detachEvent('onclick', launchClick);
oldImg.detachEvent('onclick', readMessageClick);
}

So I replaced this with the code below that just alters the location and title of the link (also a bit of adjusting to add the <a> in):

var oldAnchor = presenceNode.firstChild;
var newAnchor = oldAnchor.cloneNode(true);
newAnchor.href = "javascript:readMessageClick();";
newAnchor.title = MSGAPIconf.str_oneMessageUnread;


So, glad to have got it fixed, but would be even better to know why this was really happening at all!

Update Number 2 (1st Nov) - The fix has now been made live on the MSG-OpenLearn servers.

Updated OpenLearn

alex August 30th, 2007

This morning the live OpenLearn servers have been updated with quite a few improvements…

  • RSS feeds published for a variety for units (including unit content)
  • MyLearningSpace and MyLabSpace - so you can see your courses, recent forum postings etc in one place (well really it’s 2 places!! - one for each OpenLearn site)
  • More prominent forums - so will hopefully generate some more discussion, and what dicussion there is will be more visible to users
  • much more sensible login navigation for users with OUCU (SAMS) user accounts
  • plus, obviously the most important update (!) is to MSG block, so you now receive much more obvious new message notifications, when a new message arrives you’ll see a small pop up box appear in the bottom right of your browser window (in a similar way to how GTalk informs you of new messages)

Plus there have been lots of other updates to the servers too (bug fixes etc), but the ones above are (IMHO) the most significant.

In ‘other news’, I’ve put the FB stuff on bit a of a backburner for now, whilst we get chance to think about what exactly we want the FaceBook MSG application to actually do. The other (real!) reason for this is that I had quite an obscure bug which took most of last week to track down and fix. In the MSG forums there were a few people who weren’t getting automatically logged in to MSG. There didn’t appear to be any pattern to who was affected, and I didn;t have a user account which displayed the issue, so was difficult to pin down. Eventually we found it was to do with not all users being auto logged in to both LearningSpace and LabSpace, and it was these users who then didn;t get logged in to MSG. So we’re pretty sure we’ve got the issue fixed now, but if you’re still affected then please let us know!

Filtering with MSG Map Widget

alex June 29th, 2007

I’ve just finished updating the MSG Map Widget so that you can allow filtering. The filter can either be specified in the javascript command and/or an optional filtering control can be added to the map. You can also select whether you would like to display just the online users or both on and offline users. Another new option is the ability to have the map refresh every x seconds (the previous version showed the users at the point the page first loaded). See the map below for an example - this one shows all OpenLearn users who have enrolled on courses with ‘german’ in the title. Feel free to have a ‘play’ with the filter:

Few points to note…

  • You can’t select to highlight the text in the filter box, you need to delete each character - which I know is a right pain. I’ve not figured out why this is - I’ve a feeling it’s something to do with the fact that text box is within a Google map, so ’selection’ doesn’t work in the same way - since holding the mouse button down whilst dragging means something different in the map context. But I could be wrong about this!
  • Similary the tab to ‘go’ button on the form doesn’t work - you need to use the mouse :-(
  • When the maps says it’s showing ‘all’ users this isn’t quite true! It actually shows all the online users, plus up to a maximum of 100 offline users. This is help prevent potential performance problems when displaying 100’s or 1000’s of markers.

I’ve created a page on the MSG website to explain the various options/parameters available.
All feedback welcome :-)

In situ editing for LabSpace

alex June 28th, 2007

Encouraging users to remix and upload content back to the LabSpace has been a bit of a problem, most likely due to the fact that downloading and editing the content on your own PC is such a pain (finding XML editing package etc etc). So we’re looking at being able to edit content in situ, which should make it far easier for users. Enabling this won’t be quite a as easy as it first seems (even though Moodle provides most of the necessary functionality) - most problems being related to tracking changes and version control.

In the meantime, Jenny gave me access to be a ‘teacher’ on a course I had uploaded, meaning that I can now edit the material in situ. Giving users permissions in this way this might be an interim option until the full in situ editing is enabled, though it could be time consuming if lots of users requested access - so will need to wait and see if the porgramme team give this the go-ahead ;-)

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