Learning the World

Our Moodle Wikis were working just fine (well, they were working about as well as the Moodle wiki ever does) until 1.9.4. That’s when they broke; you could select and upload a file (e.g. a photo), but the screen would go white (indicating a PHP error) and your file wouldn’t make it to the wiki. As we have a number of wikis that upload photos, this was a problem.

The issue appears to be a change in the default settings for the wiki. Making the wiki configuration tweaks described in this Tracker report fixed the problem:

• MDL-10641 Wiki binary files option broken

Audio recording tools for Moodle are something that’s come up several times on campus. English and foreign languages faculty would love to be able to use such a tool with students; in English they’d use it to work on student’s inflections and readings of poetry, while foreign languages would use it as part of spoken language critques.

I experimented with using NanoGong to do this, but unfortunately it was just too unstable; the Java applet running it refused to save files on two of the three computers I tried it on … including computers on which it had worked.

COVCELLL has created the audio recording assignment that works with Moodle 1.9. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, and would love to hear from anyone who has.

Google’s announced support for seamless integration between Moodle and Google Apps thanks to the work of third-party developer Moodlerooms:

Moodlerooms, a SaaS provider of Moodle, just launched an application built on the Moodle platform that lets school admins bring Moodle and Google Apps together with a single sign-in. So now, students who told us they didn’t want to sign in to multiple environments – like an LMS to get their course content and a productivity suite like Google Apps to actually do their work – have the answer they’ve wanted.

If you’re wondering about how this is technically done, read on:

Moodlerooms used the industry standard SAML 2.0 and OAuth protocols to securely integrate with Moodle, building on open extensibility features of Google Apps Education Edition. Using these extensibility features, any educational software vendor can take a similar approach to provide user directory synchronization, single sign-on, and user data integration with their service.

This is cool and all, but there is a downside, as illustrated by a recent bug Google accidentally introduced into Google Docs that allowed documents in Google Docs to be shared with anyone you’ve ever shared a doc with. The bug only affected .05% of users, but still it illustrates the potential drawbacks and dangers of using a web cloud-based app like Google Docs. Which isn’t to say that Moodle itself is perfect, but you’re increasing you’re exposure by relying on two web-based apps.

By default, Moodle uses Magpie RSS to parse its RSS feeds. Unfortunately Magpie tends to be buggy, and hasn’t been updated since 2005. At Hack/Doc Fest II at Kenyon College we put together a patch that swaps out Magpie RSS for the much more current SImplePie RSS (hat tip Charles Fulton, Kalamazoo College, who did most of the patching).

Details on how to swap out Magpie for SImplePie can be found in Moodle Tracker:

• MDL-7946: Use simplepie instead of magpie for rss parsing

This seems like a no brainer swap to me, but the tracker item could still use some vote love. The tracker doesn’t mention it, but this problem still affects Moodle 1.9.4.

By default, Moodle ships with a default number of emoticons turned on — filters that turn text smilies into graphical ones. This is all well and good — the nuances of speech can be lost in the written words, and emoticons help with that — but it can cause problems, particularly with some of Moodle’s more obscure emoticons colliding with math terminology.

For example S(n) gets turned into an S with a “NO” icon. There are two problems here — S(n) is a legitimate mathmatical formula, so it shouldn’t compete with emoticons. Also, (n) is a pretty obscure emoticon, so it throws people for a loop when they accidentally trigger it.

The emoticon can’t be disabled on the course level, but it can be disabled site wide, per this tracker item:

• MDL-11444: A way to disable emotions

In short, you go to Admin > Appearance > HTML Editor and can then edit a list of emoticons. Here’s a list of the problem emoticons that I’ve disabled within my install of Moodle.

• (y) = yes
• (n) = no
• (heart) = heart
• (h) = heart

Open University has deployed iTunes U, Apple’s free education version of its popular iTunes Store. This post talks about the OU’s adoption of the service as well as some of its early experiences with it.

I’ll be curious to see what impact this has on iTunes U/Moodle integration. OU is a huge Moodle school, and I have to think that they would want seamless integration between the two services.

This Moodle plugin uses a heavily modified version of the IMS Enterprise plugin to integrate Moodle with Banner. I haven’t tried it yet, but one of my goals for the spring semester is to get exactly this sort of integration up and running so I plan on trying it soon.

• Banner/Luminis Message Broker Plugin for Moodle

Firefox 3 for Windows has changed the way it handles copy and pasting text from other applications, such as Word, which in turn is causing extra code to show up in posts to a variety of web apps, including Moodle, Drupal, and WordPress. Firefox 3 for Mac has its own issues (namely it won’t copy/paste rich text from Word at all).

This Moodle Tracker report offers one scenario where the problem pops up. I encountered it earlier in the semester as well, and unfortunately the best workaround I had at the time was to tell folks to use IE to do cutting and pasting if they wanted to preserve their formatting (or copy/pasting into Notepad before pasting into Firefox 3 if they didn’t.

The extra code is style data that Firefox 2 omitted, but Firefox 3 includes:

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New
Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} span.EmailStyle15
{mso-style-type:personal; mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;
mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:windowtext;} @page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> 

Digging around on the web, I found a post (”Pasting from Word in Firefox 3 Doesn’t Remove Meta/Style Tags”) that explains the problem:

The problem is due to that Firefox 3.0 is presenting itself to MS Word as a XML client and the content pasted in the editor has new format different to this one pasted in Firefox 2.0. That is why the regular expressions used by the editor’s Paste From Word filters are not stripping the new MS Word XML formatting. 

I can’t find anything in Bugzilla that speaks to this (my guess is that it would be viewed as a feature rather than a bug).  

My understanding is that there’s always extraneous code coming over from Word, but that the various WYSIWYG editors (TinyMCE, CKEditor) endeavor to strip out said code. The problem, aside from the fact that Firefox 3 has changed the way it does copy and paste, is that the editors haven’t caught up with the changes. I found posts for both editors discussing how to deal with this.

On the CKEditor site, there’s a tracker report about improving the editor itself:

• Ticket #2291: Simple copy & paste from Word document – extra code not stripped

Scheduler, a third-parting appointment scheduling module for Moodle, doesn’t deal properly with Daylight Saving Time. Events spanning the daylight/standard time boundry appear one hour earlier in the scheduler after EDT reverts to EST.

A report for this bug is up in the Scheduler bug tracker (which is independent of Moodle’s own tracker; registration is required to view/comment on this bug)

• Scheduler doesn’t deal with Daylight Savings Time