Moodlebug

Chameleon Gallery

The best thing for me about Moodle 1.6 has got to be the new Chameleon theme. Over at my work site, we've just published an interview with Andrew Walker, web developer at Alton College in Hampshire, UK, who has been programming the interface for this innovative Moodle theme. I've used the theme over at the AoC NILTA Moodle site - if you've used Chameleon to make your site look good please do let me know via the comments so we can get a gallery of examples together. Let me know if you've added any additional code or elements, and do share any hints & tips.

Elgg/Moodle integration here at last!

Just in case any of you out there missed the announcement at the beginning of the month: Along with the brand-spanking shiny new 6.0 release, Ben Werdmuller @ Elgg News wrote:

"Catalyst have released their Elgg integration block for Moodle: click here to check it out. Additionally, Penny Leach has written some instructions for installation, which are available on Eduforge. Thanks to all involved for all their hard work!"

Cool! Check out the Elgg site if you don't have a clue why this is such a great thing (particularly for UK institutions currently considering their e-portfolio options) .

I'll be posting an overview of Elgg over at AoC NILTA next week - so look out for it!

Moodle learning resources block

Alton College have now made available their learning resources block, via Moodle.org.

The block lets you include a collection of links to your your library catalogue, iskills info, or other essential e-resources in every course. These can be generic links or course specific ones.

Because you’re gorgeous

Moodler Adam Bevan writes:

I have started to set up a Moodle site but find it very hard to make it look appealing to students. Do you have access to a list of attractive Moodle sites which I could learn from?

Anyone have any hints, tips or gorgeous links to help Adam make his site look yummy?

Leicestershire schools advised: don't use Moodle

This one came in along the wire this morning: Rawlins Community College in Leicestershire received a letter sent to all Principals and Heads from the Local Authority "discussing how schools should prepare for having a learning platform embedded by 2008; the jist is essentially to wait and see what they think might be best (as they haven’t yet made up their minds) but, in any case, they explicitly advise schools not to use Moodle (the only software mentioned in the letter) as it depends too much on specific local support and knowledge."

The fact that I was only very recently employed on an extremely successful project to promote and roll out Moodle across the same county, funded by the Local Education Authority, obviously makes me wonder what's going on with the radically restructured Local Authorities. I'm also curious as to what is motivating this particular, and peculiar, advice?

Subject Specific Moodle

JISC RSC for London, along with some of the other Regional Support Centres, have been doing excellent  work supporting Further Education, Adult and Community Education and other learning providers who are using Moodle with learners and within their organisations, with their Regional Support Group. They've recently begun to develop subject specific courses on Moodle to support their events programme.

Their are currently three under development - Health and Social Care, Modern Foreign Languages, and Business  - with the promise of more on the way. All courses have guest access, or visitors can create accounts if they want to use the SCORM packages. The Regional Support Centre for London writes:

"We are considering developing more subject specific areas of Moodle to support our practitioners, so if you find this resource useful or would like to be involved with Subject Specific Moodle development, please get in touch."

Moodle to deliver DiDA

The North West Learning Grid, a consortium of nineteen local education authorities, have integrated Diploma in Digital Applications (DiDA - paperless qualifications that focuses on the practical application of technology) resources into Moodle format. The single export file is scheduled for release in June. As well as web and DVD based versions, Moodle users will be able to take advantage of an easily unzipped download - hugely reducing the amount of staff time involved in making material available to students, and preventing unnecessary replication of work:

"We have made the resources available to several commercial companies so that they can be fully incorporated into their VLE services.  This means that schools will not have to do this work themselves. However in the case of Moodle, a free open source VLE, we have incorporated the resources into it rather than every Moodle school having to do this individually. We will provide a single Moodle export file that will enable schools to have a full  Moodle based course from the DiDA delivered resources."

Great work at e-subjects UK

Darren Smith is doing some fantastic work over at e-subjects.co.uk:

"e-subjects aims to provide a range of UK compulsory and examined courses in a downloadable Moodle format. All of these courses are released under this Creative Commons License and are free of charge. Just download the required zip file and restore the course using the link in your Moodle installation. Full instructions are available here."

A great initiative full of community potential. If you've got a Moodle course which would be interesting to other practitioners, why not share? Uploading zip files in Moodle is a snap. Darren writes:

"There is a GCSE ICT revision course and 6 A-Level Computing unit courses. These were all put together by David Berry and are proving very popular giving the site thousands of hits per day! I have also just put another one of mine up which takes students through creating computer games using game maker (which is also free!). My hope is that this will encourage others to make there courses available - this would be especially great if it brought in materials for subjects other than ICT."

Moodle at Bett movie

A mini movie of the interviews for the Bett film crew with Miles Berry, Ian Usher and me (looking tired & in need of more lipstick) are now up - although it's not as good as Leon's film.

OU tackle LAMS integration

The UK Open University's Institute of Educational Technology has received funding from JISC for a £50K project called JoinIn to work on a tool that will bring together groups of students working in the Moodle environment to take part in activities that are controlled by the open source LAMS system. The work in IET will involve Patrick McAndrew, Alex Little and Martin Weller with Niall Sclater providing links to the VLE work in the OU. Also newly employed by the OU and involved in the project is the fabulous Juliette White. The project is in partnership with Professor James Dalziel of LAMS International and Macquarie University, Australia.