Updated release of Marginalia annotation for Moodle forums

Updated release of Marginalia annotation for Moodle forums

by Geoffrey Glass -
Number of replies: 2

I have updated the Marginalia annotation feature for Moodle. It adds the capability for users of forums to highlight passages of text and create associate annotations in a margin beside each post. The annotations can be searched and shared with others. Code and installation instructions are available at www.geof.net/code/annotation/.

Since I previously announced the feature on the Moodle forums, I have made a number of improvements:

  • Marginalia now supports Internet Explorer in addition to Firefox
  • users can view each others' highlights and annotations directly on forum pages, not just in the searchable summary
  • the search capability has been enhanced
  • numerous bug fixes, optimizations, and better documentation
  • support for Moodle 1.6

The system is currently in use at Malaspina University College and Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada. I would like to thank BC Campus for funding this effort, and for allowing its release under the GNU General Public License, and to Simon Fraser University for their support of the project through Dr. Andrew Feenberg's Applied Communication and Technology Lab in the School of Communication and through the Learning and Instructional Development Centre.

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In reply to Geoffrey Glass

Re: Updated release of Marginalia annotation for Moodle forums

by Robert Lovell -
This looks great but I am having a hard time following the install instructions. Most mods I download just involve dragging and dropping files into the appropriately folder. Is there an easy way to install Marginalia?

Thanks
Rob
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In reply to Robert Lovell

December 2008 Marginalia Release

by Geoffrey Glass -
I missed this at the time, but it's worth answering.

The short answer is "no". Most Moodle plug-ins are units of functionality independent of each other. Marginalia, however, adds functionality to an existing plug in: it adds an annotation margin and other UI elements to the forum module. This is something Moodle doesn't anticipate, so there's no simple way to do it. Marginalia therefore has to directly modify the forum code with a patch.

The longer answer is that although there is no way around patching the forum, I have just released a version of Marginalia that is easier to install. It uses the hooks Moodle provides to automatically set up the database, and it consolidates its language files into a block plug-in.

The latest release has numerous bug fixes and UI refinements. It also features a quote button that makes it easy to quote passages from forum posts (highlight a passage and hit quote: it will automatically paste the quote into any post you might be editing, or start a new post if necessary). The quote feature can also be used to effectively convert annotations to forum posts. Users had been trying to conduct discussions in the margin, which was rather impractical, especially since discussion is what the forum itself is for.

You can get the latest at code.google.com/p/marginalia.
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