I’ve been very busy these last weeks because GSoC and other projects I’ve been working on. But I’m so close to the end, so close to my deserved holidays!!
Simple LTI Module for Moodle is nearly finished and ready to send to Google. I implemented a basic Moodle module following Simple LTI spec (an IMS Global Learning Consortium’s LTI 2.0 approach) so there will be a lot of work to do in this new application next months.
Dr. Chuck (my SoC mentor, and Developer Network Coordinator at IMS and Sakai guru) has really good ideas but, unfortunately Moodle core is not as versatile as Sakai. I don’t want to hack Moodle core to develop some of this great functionalities. I prefer to dedicate the rest of the year to design and implement some of this features in a smart way, not in the tricky one.
There isn’t an official release of our module but you can check it out from our code repository (you will need a git client). I have created a new course a DFWikiLABS site called Moodle’s IMS Simple LTI Module where you will be able to find some more information and docs and a link to a test site where you will be able to see Simple LTI Module and Filter in action.
So instead of see a plenty of data in a table in many pages, you can see all logs in a timeline inside a single page. Using mouse you can scroll along time and popup some bubbles for extra information.
I created a course in our Moodle for this project. As soon as I have some minutes I will configure it to give access all users to an online demo.
Course is over and all students taught by my Ludo have presented their final projects. Congratulations! You all made a great job, I’m glad to have been working with you last months.
My boss mislead me to teach a course about Moodle development, so tomorrow evening I’m getting a train to Madrid. I’ll be out few days but I’ll upload all stuff (slides, code, etc) to this blog ASAP. My speech is on Wednesday, today is Monday, I haven’t started preparing it, poker game tonight, mmmm…. yes, ASAP.
I’m going to explain most relevant Moodle libreries, such weblib.php or dmllib.php, modules architechture, XMLDB and capabilities. I’m going to use newmodule to make an introduction and our Social Bookmarking activity as a case of study. I supose I’m going to replace some lines of code by TODOS and ask to the public to fill the gaps.
I’ve been very busy last weeks preparing my exams so this blog has been a little bit “unattended”. Last Friday I released a new version of our Moodle Social Bookmarking Activity and I hadn’t time to say it to anybody, neither to my boss. (Hello, Marc!! I’m at my office. Where are you? On holidays??? )
Today I spent few minutes fixing some bugs of our social bookmarking module for Moodle.
I packed all code in a zip file that you can download from Morfeo.
I seize the opportunity to explain one trick about this module. You can enable link preview using websnapr. I included some javascripts in our package that you can configure in a minute.
You only need to get a developer key from websnapr web site and insert it into /mod/bookmarks/preview/previewbubble.js.
var developerKey = 'your developer key';
Our activity looks cool with this script. Thank you guys from websnapr for let us using it, you are doing a great work.
This year I’m not going to be a Moodle SoC developer either. Something happens every year, too much work, other projects, etc.
As I said in another post, my SoC is about Moodle but is not a Moodle project…This is a strange world, Sakai fundation wants to enable Moodle to interact with their CMS.
But this post is about the real Moodle SoCs, so let’s go. This year there are 12 exciting projects and I would like to comment some of them and encourage all their students and mentors.
Usability Laia Subirats is going to detect and solve some Moodle usability issues. Buff, it going to be a hard project. It’s easy to detect usability problems in Moodle but to fix them is work for daredevils. Molta merda, Laia! I would like to make you some suggestions: quiz and grades. Some time ago I worked at UPC’s Moodle help desk and teachers had several problems at creating quizzes. This summer we are going to upgrade our platform to Moodle1.9 and I have a theory: our teachers are going to freak out with grades… I hope I’m mistaken, but my old partners will have a lot of work and phone calls.
XMLDB/SQLite
Andrei Bautu will be mentored by Penny Leach to develop a new database abstraction layer and adding a mechanism to copy a live Moodle database into a SQLite database. This will be very useful to implement a database testing utility. A couple of friends of mine are going to be very grateful for this project. They are administrating and improving Atenea and backuping and restoring its database to test new indexes and partitions it’s a horrible work…
Animated grade statistics report
Jejejeje, teachers won’t need MS Excel anymore. Great idea!
Blog improvements and the addition of a blog assignment module
Since version 1.6, Moodle includes a blog. It’s an awful tool. It was time to decide to improve it. Also including a blogging activity could be very useful.
Messaging improvements
Luis Filipe Romão is going to improve messaging interface and to develop an API to send messages from other part of the system.
Moodle IDE Grady Laksmono’s project is about create an IDE based on Eclipse to make life more easy to all Moodle’s developers. I’m going to try it!
There are some other projects, but I have no time to comment them, today it’s Monday, I arrived to my office an hour and a half ago and I must start working right now…
I have a problem: I don’t have enough mp3’s in my laptop. I use to listen music while I’m programing and I’m getting bored of them. So during last 3 or 4 months I’ve been listening music from youtube or last.fm.
Less than a month was enough to me to realize that I was losing too much time every day choosing next song so I tried something longer, I listening conferences and speeches.
This time I dedicate this post to David and Ferran (DFWiki creators) who are designing and developing the new Moodle API and Webservices.
Here is a YouTube video from a Google TechTalk about designing APIs. Joshua Bloch is the speaker, the Principal Engineer at Google. He also led the design of numerous Java platform features as Java Collections Framework, java.math package and the assert mechanism. This guy knows about what is talking about…..
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