Uses Moodle user account avatars. Check it out at:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=197229#p926781
Frankie
P.S., I'll be blogging about it soon. http://moodurian.blogspot.com.
I don't know what I think of this Frankie.
Why not just use Facebook itself?
But it does look good.
-Derek
Hi Derek.
Well, firstly, it's part of a learning experience for me as I build the wall and "integrate" it with Moodle. Secondly I can customise the wall anyhow I want to if I have the knowledge. Thirdly I can become the next Mark Z. Well, two out of three ain't bad.
BTW, it looks better in Chrome than in FF (I'm experiencing some white-space formatting issues when viewing the wall in Mozilla FF).
Regards
Frankie Kam
Hi.
It get's better. I modified my /course/format/weekcoll/format.php file so that the "Wall" gets added to the front of my course page. Hehe.
Live demo:
http://www.moodurian.com/course/view.php?id=36
Username: studentscm
Password : studentscm
Question: will the "Wall" enhance the learning, or will it be a distraction to the students of the course?
Hi Frankie,
Been following this thread. It looks great and I think it's something that's conspicuously missing from Moodle. I think Moodle could and should be a more social and more collaborative platform than it is at present.
Re: Question: will the "Wall" enhance the learning, or will it be a distraction to the students of the course? - In my opinion, I'd say that it depends on so many other factors. Ideally, it'd facilitate interaction, interpersonal engagement and hopefully collaboration between learners. There's a fair amount of research that suggests "social presence" (Liam Rourke, Terry Anderson, D. Randy Garrison, Walter Archer, et al) increases cognitive engagement and mitigates the relatively high rates of attrition from online courses. That said, it's a matter of HOW you use and moderate it rather than IF you use it.
Edmodo looks like a great platform; I've only dabbled with it (Not enough hours in the day to try everything). I've also played around with some open source alternatives; http://elgg.org/, http://status.net/, and https://joindiaspora.com/ See this article here: http://blog.matbury.com/2012/01/08/safe-social-networking-alternatives/ There's pros and cons to all of them but I'd say a major weakness across the board is the lack of decent administrator oversight and moderator tools. For example, teachers and moderators need to act quickly and appropriately in the case of inappropriate behaviour or content being posted (or back-channelled through private messages!). Which leads me on to...
Re: Why not just use Facebook itself? - I co-authored an article on this very topic (commercial social networking platforms in general): http://blog.matbury.com/2011/12/11/a-thorny-issue-protecting-teachers-and-learners-right-to-privacy/
I hope this helps!
I'm now convinced. I met recently with some guys from a small music school, and they have been using Moodle and Facebook. A couple of the lecturers have used FB as an ontrack, motivational channel to the students. I think musicians kind of need a bit more of that than the average.
One was locked out of the practice suite on a Friday, late, and didn't text or call the tutor - he Facebooked. This I don't know what to think of yet. I do have encounters with one of these guys where I think he is only sometimes with me in the room. Kind of like continuous partial attention as the Microsoft woman woman suggested.
But the "educational connection".
Here's a question I looked into yesterday: these guys were at another meeting where we were looking at Moodle in the future in a trades training connections. Selena Chan http://mportfolios.blogspot.co.nz/ has worked with Baking apprentices using their cell phones to take pictures and upload into what became evidence of their work. The research suggested at that time that most did not have computers, but all have cell phones and good ones at that. So to upload a photo when on a 4am shift was quite cool. And to do it quick and easy.
I checked out the phone to moodle connection yesterday. I could not get my phone to work. The options are many: http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Mobile_Moodle_FAQ
This is a relatively recent post from Terry Gribbons, but he seems to not be here in Moodle.org any more: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=206733 and we have a new mobile option in the wind, this from Martin: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=206758
I'd like something that just works.
SO: my aim is to have a really simple way to support students through a course with quick Mobile > Moodle connection for images/sound clips and video. Art, design, culinary, music. Then for the students to be able to add words to this, and choose for a more formal writeup.
A FB like wall that can do this I think would be great. I just hope it is simple, clean and not locked down. I wonder if a decent forum in Moodle, or maybe an enhancement to the blogs could work, or can we FB style the blogs?
I'm not worried about moderator/back channel studd Matt: Moodle doesn't have this now.
I'll be interested to see what the FB inititiativres in Moodle look like. You are hitting at paradigms here though. I hope you don't get caught up in difficult things for small return, or taking on too much.
I've just gone back on FB after a 7 month gap to follow a relative in Azibajahn sporting events. I can see why it takes up more time in some people's lives than it should.
Go well.
-Derek
Hi Derek
Just to share with you my 2-day experience so far with the "wall" on my Moodle site. After the initial flurry of updates by my students, the updates have all but died down. Mostly because I had given them an exercise to do which was to post about their idol/mentor/model in life. That they did. so until the next exercise or activity, I doubt if many will venture into posting random updates. Anyway, yesterday I managed to integrate the single one wall for all courses, into the Collapsable Weekly course format. You can see the effect below.
I thought that it looked cool, but yesterday, 10 minutes into my class with a small group of Diploma programming class students, I felt that it had become a distraction.For one thing, I found myself looking at the wall much too often in hope that someone would post a new update. Instead of focusing on the main resources below the wall, I was looking for fresh updates on the wall.
So I thought, hmm....wouldn't it be nice to be able to hide and show the wall on demand. Well, I could embed the [iframe] tag inside Week1's collapsible section. Then I thought I'd put the [iframe] tag inside the Accordian resource object. And so it commented the code that embeds the wall inside my course format's format.php file, and proceeded to add an Accordian resource object. The result is a wall that I can turn on and off at will. See the image here (wall is off). The trigger object is that green cube you see below which is my modified icon of an Accordian resource. when I click on the green cube, the Wall will activate and expand.
and here it the wall expanded.
I can then "hide" the wall by clicking on the green cube icon. Perfect! Less visual distraction. If students want to distract themselves, they'll have to manually click on the green cube first.
At the moment, the wall shows al updates from all students of all courses. A kinda Moodurian.com site "global" wall if you will. What I am trying to do is to make the wall display only updates that are from the current course. That way students only see updates from other students within a specific course. After that, my next step is to modify the code so that different instances of wall objects can be created on demand within the same course, without having to create duplicate mysql tables. E.g, without having to create table comment (for one activity), then table comment2 (for another activity), etc. In other words, the way to go is to create a wall activity that can be added by the Activities drop-down-box by the course administrator.
My plan is to allow myself to easily create multiple walls that will act as discussion points for students. So one wall is the main wall for the Programming course. Another wall is for students to post links and WWW resources on flowcharting. Another wall is for students to discuss about pseudocode. Another wall is for students to discuss about the merits of C++ over C programming language.
Moodle has been doing fine all this while with its workhorse, the forum resource. And the forum resource has its strengths and merits as a method of facilitating asynchronous communication. I just feel that this Wally thingy will bring in a new dimension to asynchronous communication in Moodle by being more fun, easier to use, and which appeals to the tablet generation of use-by-finger-tip-to-scroll-the-page generation.
So that's the roadmap I'm working on as a personal project. And I'll be sharing the code, steps and walkthroughs as I go along this odyssey of making my Moodle site more like Facebook.
Thanks for speed reading this
Frankie Kam
Hi Frankie,
So far so good!
I think that, since it's such a well known platform, users will expect any social networking platform like this to behave just like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Edmodo, Elgg, BuddyPress, etc. They all seem to do some very similar things:
- Organised by relationships rather than activities, i.e. each user creates their own circle of "friends".
- Social networks are separate and distinct from groups, i.e. users can have "friends" from different groups that they aren't members of.
- They can create their own groups and invite others to join.
- Group "owners" have some degree of moderator control and responsibility (I think this would take a lot of pressure off faculty staff!).
Re: using mobile phones to upload photos and other media files, it's great in principle but so many people have Apple iDevices which prohibit media sharing except through apps. I had terrible problems on a BYOD social blogging project: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=208466 I guess if there's an effective Moodle app for iOS, users can download, install and use that.
Hi Matt
Ever tried Joomdle? It's got a cool front-end with wall and all. Links to your Moodle site.
Frankie Kam
Hi Frankie,
Thanks for thee heads up. I haven't tried it out. I had a look at their project site as I was curious about why anyone would want to do that. In the docs and on the forums, there seems to be a fair amount of interest in selling and monetising elearning, so I guess it's geared towards meeting those specific needs.
Are there any other reasons to put Joomla and Moodle together?
>Are there any other reasons to put Joomla and Moodle together?
>
I would say that Joomla's strength is a Content Management System which makes it "easy" for you to create a nice front-end website. Moodle's strength is as a Learning Management System. So you get the best of both worlds. And Joomdle's Social Wall does look nice. Then there's also Jomsocial which is a Joomla plugin that turns the Joomla CMS into a full-fledge social network site. Moodle lacks the social networking aspect. So I suppose Joomdle bidges the two so that:
(1) the lesser student gets distracted by all the social networking aspects and spends less time on the Moodle learning aspects
(2) the better student leverages on Joomdle/Jomsocial/Joomla's social networking features to more effectively collaborate.
regards
Frankie Kam
Hi
I was with a client last week who mixes Joomla and Moodle to have one sign-up for customers who then have no hassle moving between platforms. The client uses the joomla site mainly as a front window, but customers can sign up to receive newsletters.
Jeff
I've blogged about this on
http://moodurian.blogspot.com/2012/10/wheres-wally-adding-facebook-like-wall.html
I've also decided to give the code for free to the first 20 persons who email me at boonsengkam@gmail.com. Just for fun, to see how many people actually read this post!. Hehe.
Disclaimer: use the code at your own risk. Do not sue me if your Moodle production site is nuked. I'm just a starving PHP programmer.
I would be interested in that code if you have any of the 20 slots left. I had to post here. For some reason the email you supplied got returned. bjohnson@rasblm.org
Thanks!
Hi Frankie,
A thought occurs to me. More people might jump at your code faster if they knew about your installation service. It has saved me time and headaches, allowing me to focus other things. There must be others out there who would appreciate a Moodurian enhanced Moodle without the worry.
Care to comment?
Best wishes,
Nick
I am somewhat reminded of this video Frankie:
Hi Nick and others
If anyone faces any difficulties in installing the code on your system, or if you have serious time constraints, you can always either PM or blast me an email.
I hope that was subtle enough...
Frankie Kam
Fellow Moodlers,
I am pleased to announce that I am the proud owner of a Wonderwall on my Moodle. It looks and works great! Am I the first?
Thank you Frankie for your work developing this and for installing it for me on my server. I wouldn't have had time to do it on my own!
The new semester starts on Monday (delayed by 8 weeks because of the Quebec student strike). I hope to be able to report back with news about how well students take to it next week.
Best wishes,
Nick
Hi All
My vision is for Moodle to have better usability features and factors that will encourage student and teacher engagement around the globe. Enter the Moodle wall based on Srinivas Tamada's Facebook Wall Script 3.0 (FBWS3.0). I've spent hours working on this one. Hope you like it as I think it's a Moodle first of sorts.
I've adapted Srinivas' FBWS3.0 code so that you can have a single separate wall for each coursepage, and within each coursepage, a separate wall for each and every resource (label, webpage, book, etc.).
Here's my latest work for Moodle 1.9.15 Now your Moodle site can have multiple walls. One for each resource (label, webpage, book, etc.).
Like what you see? Here's another view:
http://www.moodurian.com/course/view.php?id=38
Username: studentscm
Password: studentscm
Try entering text with http:// links. Youtube and TED.com video urls with the http:// prefix will embed a video window within the wall.
Go ahead, give it a spin and let me know what you think.
Frankie Kam
boonsengkam@gmail.com
http://moodurian.blogspot.com
Hi All
My latest work on the Wonderwall.
Feedback and comments are welcome.
More instructions here:
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=197229#p940745
Frankie Kam
My latest work on the Wall...the WunderbarWall.
 |
| Figure 1. Nicedit Rich Text editor integration. |
http://moodurian.blogspot.com/2012/11/wunderbarwall-for-your-moodle-19-site.html
Frankie Kam
WonderWall with Like and Dislike buttons for each update to the Wall.
Live site:
http://www.moodurian.com/mod/resource/view.php?id=4278
Username: studentscm
Password: studentscm
Now that each post comes with user interactivity, this raises the usefulness of the Wall to a whole new level. That of community interaction. Many thanks to the brilliant William Thomas of Wctdesigns for his post that saved me much time and effort. Thanks mate!
Give it a try.
Frankie Kam
Might be of interest to anyone reading this - we've just created a portfolio plugin that takes stuff (artifacts, to use the portfolio term) from any moodle course & exports it to the moodle blog. See https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=222275 for more.
Chris