Art,
Sadly I have a centralised IMAP password server, copyrighted course materials, exams that I do not want other students to take (the gradebook would become a nightmare), students who do not like their photo to be seen by non-class members, and a Japanese language site interface and course labels (the latter would not be translated even if visiting users were to change the language of preference). Also, I don't mean to be xenophobic but it is far more difficult to control the behaviour (including hacking, or "control F5-ing")of those students who I cannot fail. I think that there are also administration workload problems (who does the administration) and conversely, kudos issues (who gets the kudos for having a super moodle? I agree that doing it here at Moodle.org would be the best solution).
Finally, I would have to mark my students to encourage them to take part. The Moodle forum has a really wonderful socio-behaviouro-constructivist structure in that the rewards for participating are both social -- make friends and communicate with people worldwide -- and behavioural -- get dog food or a class credit, Pavlov, via the use of the grading mechanism. If the debate took place on a shared Moodle then how could I grade my own students? How could I ensure the security, privacy and untangling of their grades? Not intsurmountable but..
All in all while I would love to *link 2 moodles*, the emphasis is on 2, or more, a plurality (network) of moodles, rather than one common super Moodle. I would prefer a peer to peer network, using some kind of inter-Moodle communication.
I am not sure how RSS would work either but I guess that
1) there could be a page or block inside each class which would show what students were saying in the other class via RSS. This alone would be pretty cool. Does anyone have an English class (TOEIC 400 level, sorry) that wants to exchange RSS feeds in this way?
The problem with this would be that there would be no interweaving of the threads, and thus little continuity between each forum. Each poster would appear to be responding to themselves, while someone in the other class started a new thread to respond. It would be like holding a converstation by shouting accross the classroom.
2) It might be possible to work out a way to interweave/interleave the display of the incoming RSS and the moodle forums? Does anyone know how difficult this would be?
Alternatively, as mentioned in the previous post, a different technology, such as
3) some sort of (trackback like) ping. I have no idea how this would work, but bloggers seem to do it.
4) writing into the database of the other site. This sounds like it might pose massive security problems, but be quite easy to do (except for the fact that the userids would be non-existent in the other moodle...hmmm).
i once had a discussion between Japanese and American students about whether dropping atomic bombs on Japan was a good idea. The US students generally said it was, and the Japanese students generally said it was not. So as a discussion it did not get very far but as a language learning excercise it was quite successful. The opposing team -- from a US airforce training school! -- were not nearly so satisfied, alas.
Tim
tkmt
]
