Learning the World

Woolamaloo  is a stand-alone app that’s great for trouble shooting your iTunes U site, particularly when you’re trying to get your authentication/authorization bridge built. Also good for doing bulk operations (like mass uploads of files) rather than relying on the single-file-upload option native to iTunes U.

Check it out at: http://itunes.uic.edu/Woolamaloo.html

With the start of the semester less than two weeks away, our faculty are hitting their Moodle courses. Some are importing course data from previous semester’s courses, and in doing so they discovered a bug in which Moodle creates ghost duplicate entries of imported activities. The “ghosts” have the same structure as the imported activities (e.g. if you import two forums and two word files, you get ghost duplicates of those activities without any text or file links).

The tracker report for the bug is here:

MDL-14326: Moodle does not delete empty course_modules after the restore

A related tracker report can be found here:

MDL-10993: Restore creates duplicate activity/resource icons with no text

For us, the problem occurs during imports, and the second tracker accurately sums up the problem we were having. 

A patch isn’t available yet, but Tracker reports a possible fix version of 1.9.3 and 1.8.7. 

I’m experimenting with installing NanoGong on one of our test servers running 1.9.2. It’s a browser-based auto recording/playback tool for Moodle (and other apps) that our English and Foreign Languages faculty are interested in. So far I’ve got the NanoGong assignment working, but in-forum recording isn’t working.

NanoGong crashed under Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) under Safari 3 and Firefox 3, but recorded/played back using the same browsers on Mac OS X 10.5. Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 3 worked fine on Windows XP.

I’ll be continuing to experiment to see if I can get forum recordings working properly.

There’s an iTunes U authentication block available for Moodle 1.9 now. I haven’t had a chance to do more than kick the tires on it, but it seems like it’ll handle basic authentication to a protected iTunes U site using admin, faculty or student credentials. It allows you to create a block with a link to an iTunes U course. It doesn’t generate a list of the resources available in that course (which would be fantastic) but it looks like it might do what I need it to do in the short term. I’ll try it out more next week and report back.

Martin Dougiamas, creator of Moodle was honored at OSCON 2008 as “Best Education Enabler”.  Very cool.

This isn’t so much a bug as an undocumented feature that we don’t really want.

If you upload a file to Moodle (for example, a Word document) as a file resource, download that file, make a change to it, re-upload it, and then re-download it … you won’t get the changed file you were expecting, because the original download’s been saved to your web browser’s cache.

Web browsers like to keep copies of all the files they download in a cache. The idea is that this speeds up your surfing experience — why download something again when you just downloaded it a minute ago? So what’s happening is that your web browser is snagging the file and making a secretive copy of it deep with in its cache (a copy separate from the one you saved to your desktop or downloads folder). When you upload a changed file and then try and re-download it, the web browser looks at the copy it secreted away instead of the one that’s one the server.

Fortunately Moodle has a way around this, by setting the $CFG->filelifetime variable in config.php to 1 second. This causes the file’s “life time” to become exceedingly short, thus forcing your web browser to go and get a new copy instead of the original.

I’ve found that Firefox is better about listening to such “don’t cache this file” orders than Internet Explorer is, so if you continue to see this behavior in IE, try using Firefox instead.

Apple’s improved iTunes U’s handicap accessibility by adding the ability to set alt-text for images on the site. It’s not entirely intuitive, but to add the alt-text to an existing image you need to click on the “upload image” icon for the image in question. You can then add the text without having to upload a new graphic for it.