I’m glad to announce that I have just published a new Moodle activity.
This time I shelved NWiki project few weeks to design and to develop this new activity.
Most of you will know del.icio.us and I’m sure that some of you are using this service. So installing this module in your Moodle, you would be able to create mini-delicious activities inside your courses to do some kind of WebQuest.
The main idea is that students search information about a topic using the World Wide Web and share whatever they find with their partners. Using this tool, links can be tagged and organized easily.
Currently our module is fully implemented and works fine, I have no reported bugs to solve. But there are some pending task to do: implement course backup/restore and add some evaluation method.
Backups will be implemented as soon as I have a couple of hours and grading tool must be designed. I suppose that a drop-down menu used to chose a scale value would be great (like in standard Moodle’s forum). I would take into account any suggestion.
Here is a link to the download page. Enjoy it.
April 17th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
a nice activity that I would like my students to use, but …
… the tags I add to the bookmarks do show up in the tags block. However, clicking the tag in the block will not show me the list of the bookmarks.
Is it just me or is this not implemented yet?
Regards
Karl
April 18th, 2008 at 7:23 am
It could be a bug, but it seems to work well in my installation…
This activity module is designed for Moodle 1.9 Stable version. It does not work in other versions neither in Moodle1.9 Beta. I’ve been testing this module with MySQL but not with PostgreSQL databases. Which is your Moodle environment? It could be the problem.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Mine is a Moodle 1.9+ environment. I’m using MySQL. So it should work fine. Or is PHP 5 mandatory?
April 18th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
The result page says: “Your search did not match any bookmark”, by the way.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Sorry, ignore last post. That’s not what it says.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
some more considerations:
in my environment …
… the “search” tab lets me search in “my bookmarks”, but won’t find results in “all bookmarks”, which is a drawback on “social” bookmarking.
… once I entered a URL in one course, I am not able to add it in a second course: (repeatedURL), which would not be a problem if “all bookmarks” would show me all bookmarks of the moodle installation, but it doesn’t …
… with groups enabled in a course, the “all bookmarks” tab lets me know that “there are no groups in this course” or something similar.
April 21st, 2008 at 9:41 am
Thanks for your report!!
… the “search” tab lets me search in “my bookmarks”, but won’t find results in “all bookmarks”, which is a drawback on “social” bookmarking.
This must be a big bug, I’m going to fix it right now.
… once I entered a URL in one course, I am not able to add it in a second course: (repeatedURL),
I thought that I fixed this problem… I hate doing thing twice
…which would not be a problem if “all bookmarks” would show me all bookmarks of the moodle installation, but it doesn’t …
I’m agree with you, but I would like to respect course privacy.
My idea is to stabilize this module and create a global social bookmarking activity by adding a new tab at user profile (beside the blog)
… with groups enabled in a course, the “all bookmarks” tab lets me know that “there are no groups in this course” or something similar.
If you set this activity in any group mode, you must create groups.
April 21st, 2008 at 9:47 am
Using search:
You have to separate items with commas.
There are 4 types of search criterias:
* Text in title or in description: you have to write plain text.
* Tags: You have to write tag:tagname
* URLs: You have to write url:exacturl
* Inside url: You must write inurl:pieceofurl
Example: nwiki, tag:moodle, tag:wiki, inurl:dfwikilabs
I hope you enjoy this tip. User manual is coming soon.
May 7th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
… yes, but it’s still a real pity, that the tagcloud - I’m not talking about the tagcloud within the module, but the tagcloud block that you can install in Moodle - does not refer back to your module. even if it is clear that the tag was created in it. To be consistent, it should do so, since it refers to blog entries and interests in profiles.
It would be great if it did some time in the near future
May 8th, 2008 at 7:48 am
I’m totally agree with you. I created a basic module and now is time to improve it and integrate it with Moodle.
The real problem of integrate my module with tagcloud block and other parts of the platform is that I would have to modify some parts of Moodle’s core. I don’t want to do it, in my opinion, it’s not a good idea.
In few days I will be finishing another project and I will take up again this module.
I’ll do my best! Your reports will be taken into account (some of your reported bug are fixed already).
May 8th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Great!
Thanks again,
Karl
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:23 am
Hi,
I am curious about this activity. Is there a demo somewhere to get to know it live?
Best regards,
Jonas
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:44 am
Hi Jonas,
You can try it at DFWikiLABS Home Page. There is a course with a sandbox.
http://www.dfwikilabs.org/mod/bookmarks/view.php?id=172
Manual enrol is active, so you can get a user to play with it.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:10 am
Thanks so much! Very kind of you!!
I tested very quickly and have three questions:
1. How much can one add to the description of the bookmark? It would be good to be able to give a short presentation. Is this possible?
2. The Search function did not work, was that temporarily?
3. The role I had as a user, I could not play around with adding bookmarks myself. I guess you have blocked this function?
Best regards,
Jonas
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:36 am
You have to enrol into the course.
http://www.dfwikilabs.org/course/enrol.php?id=4
1. You can add quite a lot of text. A long presentation is possible.
2. I found a bug few days ago that disables search for guest user (I’ll fix ASAP).
3. Using guest user you can’t add any bookmark.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Thanks!! Yes, of course, when enroled it works fine.
Kind regards,
Jonas
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:39 am
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