Suppose you have one "bad" post followed by 5 "good" ones.
The only option a teacher has is to delete the entire tree.
If there were an option to edit the post (as a teacher) he could censure (?) the bad section by xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
or ...
he will ask the admin to remove things in the post and having work enough I don't like that
You could change the line
if ($age < $CFG->maxeditingtime) {to
if ($age < $CFG->maxeditingtime or isadmin()) {in cvs:/moodle/mod/forum/lib.php. Then you as administrator could always change your own post. If you also change the preceeding line from
if ($ownpost) {to
if ($ownpost or isadmin()) {then you can edit anyone's posts. 
Thanks Gustav
Note this means I can now easily edit all of your posts in this course.
Edit: Especially Koen's English!
To be serious though, I'm really concerned about the potential for abuse or even just confusion this could cause. Having the edit button on everyone's post makes it very tempting to use, and some admins may not realise what effect their actions are having in an already fragile information ecosystem.
I'm definitely think this should be a optional feature that needs to be turned on.
I'm also wondering if we need to automatically add a line like "Last edited by someperson, on somedate".
I have modified both of the above posts.
Great, now I can learn from my mistakes 
I'm definitely think this should be a optional feature that needs to be turned on.
I agree
I'm also wondering if we need to automatically add a line like "Last edited by someperson, on somedate".
That really sounds like a good suggestion. Would it be possible to put the edited (added) lines in a different color too ?
The edited post (18 Feb, 04:19 - koen roggemans) appears in first position, before previous posts (eg. 17 Feb, 21:30 - Sébastien Jaffrédo). It seems to be sorted by creation date, but the displayed date is the modification one.
Yes, I have seen this done in phpBB (using very small text) and it clearly shows if and when someone has edited a post. Useful.
Also, Francoise Blin and I have been discussing teaching writing skills, where peer editing techniques are used extensively. She is interested in a switch to turn editing on for students in a particular forum, not just universally. I and other writing teachers would use that kind of feature extensively.
Don,
Hans de Zwart suggests making a wiki using a modified, editable form of the forum, and I agree but, in any event, in addition to editable forums as you were discussing with Francoise Blin some sort of cooperative writing ability would be highly prized especially by language teachers and learners (including Koen, and I?). Perhaps you might consider resurecting the library.
The link box is pretty big at the moment, eh.
Wiki people are from another planet: Bad words filters? NO! They trust eachother.
Anyone - yes you - can change any page on most Public Wiki sites.(look for the word edit..) To give some examples:
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb
http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HomePage
http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~FoxProWiki
http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage
To be honest most of these systems store all versions of a page to reconstruct it after a disaster.
and.. http://erfurtwiki.sourceforge.net
- Would be great to have that last one as part of Moodle for student workspaces and working on online documents..
- In educational settings you will choose for a group-password
(the better systems have levels of rights: view rights, add rights. I use http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki for working on groupproducts until wiki is in Moodle)
I know Martin is concerned that this could confuse those who are subscribed to a forum where editing is allowed. This is a very valid point but perhaps there could be a way of disabling the subscribing feature when 'editing' is turned on?
If we could get this working, this would be extremely useful.
Following a similar idea, if the teacher could edit students' journals directly (by highlighting some structures, inserting comments at a specific point, etc.) this would also be of tremendous value (to me anyway...). I am fully aware that I may be asking for something quite complex to implement (I am not a programmer...) but teaching writing skills in a foreign language is complex in itself.
And of course, my dream would be to have a module allowing collaborative writing on line...
Françoise
Francoise
Absolutely. As a fellow language teacher and one who is trying to set up a collaborative writing proect online, I am also stuck by the limitations of threaded disucssion spaces and like you, really encourage Martin to take us to the collaborative writing space of the future
Have you tried to use Wikis? I have not yet explored them in any depth.
I would love to hear about your site.
Allyson.
There may be limitations on discussion spaces in Moodle, but to be fair you should consider what values the existing structures impose on a community of writers. The journal is a place to think and rethink privately. The forum, however, is a public space where we respond to each other. To revise the forum is to mess with history. For example:
Say I become hot-tempered in a post and flame somebody. Perhaps two other participants respond to that flame with fair criticism. If I can go back and edit out the temper-tantrum, someone will read the forum and think the two responses to my initial post were inappropriately harsh. Now when someone reads the thread, as a whole are they really seeing what transpired?
The fact that we error in communication and might need to face criticism, speaks to another really significant element of the writing process: that what we say becomes permanent. I find that there is a great laziness in prose from my students because they are used to writing in instant messenger applications. Their shortcuts, their misspellings, their rants are, for the most part, written on the air. Forums should have a different feel. There should be times in the writing process when we edit and revise (read journals, exercises, assignments, workshops, etc.) but there have to be public moments when things stand as record. If I make the terrible mistake of insulting one of my students in class on a Thursday, there is no way on Friday of taking those words back. In this way, I think the forum should stand as a record and encourage everyone to consider the audience from the start.
Likewise, I feel comfortable calling students on specific posts on occasion. Buddy, do you see how you didn't read the preceding posts carefully? Pal, do you see how you said something quickly in haste that has turned into an incredibly complicated debate? I would rather have his NEXT post reveal that he heard my suggestion, rather than have him revise history and make it not stand for anything.
Forums are "snapshots in time" of a "public us" that I think reveal our passion, our ideas, and what we have missed. It is usually in the "what we have missed" part that we need the commentary of others in order to grow. (As I am sure that I will be lectured by other Moodlers for whatever blinds me at the moment.
best,
Tom
Tom
Maybe we need to differentiate between users' needs on this matter of editing. I come from the language teaching area, where at times, I need my students to go through a process of peer editing. This means they need to be able to make comment directly onto a shared text, not add comment within a thread. The text needs to be in front of them, so as we would with pen and paper, comments can be added. This finally results in changes in draft, which of course is written by the orignal writer. Authority (ownership of the docuemnt) is not in question.
There seems not to be a unified understanding of editing. From a langugae leanrners' perpsective, it is a valuable tool for learning about / working with the details of language, message adn meaning, not just simply a mater of replying to a message.
Where now?
Allyson
-T
Tom,
You've written an excellent explanation here of the philosophy underlying the "no editing after 30 minutes" limitation of Moodle. I vote for it to be included in the FAQ!
That said, this thou shalt not edit thy post after 30 minutes limitation, it seems to me, is one of the major drawbacks of Moodle. Other popular forum software, such as phpBB and BlackBoard, all allow a person to edit his post for as long as he wants... or at least gives the admin the option of turning that feature on or off.
The option to edit one's post for as long as one wants encourages open and more honest / authentic online communication. I have seen this transpire in my courses on Blackboard. The reality is that most people do not use the edit feature... they're too busy. But knowing that it's available should they need to is very comforting and encourages them to post their thoughts anyway, even if it is not perfectly written.
It's not that with the "edit anytime" feature, a student would post just anything, without concern for quality-- they know that even if they edit it later, someone may have already read the first version. So they tend to use that feature responsibly, or at their own risk.
Forcing a posting to be set in stone after 30 minutes, as it were, is a scary thing, especially for perfectionistic personality types, of which there are quite a few in my classes... it can discourage open and authentic reflection.
I am kind of dreading showing Moodle to our students for this very reason.
Almost everything else about Moodle is an improvement over BlackBoard.
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
This is not just an "at their own risk" issue. Editing posts after they have been mailed out and after people have read them affects everybody.
Suddenly things people remember can't be found anymore, history is revised, the fragile web of memories that makes up a community is broken. There needs to be a place where some record of interactions is preserved and forums is that place. The process of discussion is as important as a polished final text, particularly in collaborative learning.
Imagine if our most public social forums (such as the mass media) could be rewritten by politicians and celebrities whenever they felt like it!
Four solutions for you:
- Firstly, Moodle has other places for reflective rewriting, such as journals (and soon Blogs), and also places for public collaborative writing (such as Wikis, Glossaries, Exercises etc). I suspect the reason BB and PhpBB have these features is because there are no other place they could put them.
- Note that the 30 minutes is an admin option (you can set it anywhere from 1 minute up to 60 minutes)
- Secondly, 30 minutes re-editing does not mean a 30-minute limit on editing ... on your first edit you can take hours if you want. You can take weeks if you want, using a journal or your own word processor, then copy and paste into a forum.
- Lastly, Moodle is open source. If you truly feel your students can't deal with the change (and I strongly suggest you do real research on this before assuming it's the case) then it's a three-line hack to make it work your way.
In mod/forum/lib.php and mod/forum/post.php, change this line:
OLD: $adminedit = (isadmin() and !empty($CFG->admineditalways));
NEW: $adminedit = (!empty($CFG->admineditalways));
And add this to your config.php:
$CFG->admineditalways = true;
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Martin, thank you for that thoughtful (and very prompt) answer!
I agree that this issue is different here in Moodle (vs. BlackBoard) because Moodle sends email, so in a sense, the email is the official record of the posting. BlackBoard has no email feature (and because of this, Moodle already has great advantage over BlackBoard).
You say it's a one-line hack to make editing available forever... I would love to know this solution!
Even though I am starting to understand the philosophy of a posting being a permanent record, all the students and faculty at my school have been trained by BlackBoard to expect to have the ability to edit. I want to give that option to them (as well as explain why they might not want to use it) to avoid a revolt.
Thanks for understanding.
Learning how to transition BlackBoard-brainwashed users over to Moodle,
George
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
LOL!!
ok ok you got me!
still, I would like to know how to do that two-(or however many)-line hack
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
...giving me a taste of my own medicine. argh!!
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Seriously, if anyone wants this they should look at the Wiki module, permanent editing is exactly what it was meant for.
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Does the post automatically indicate if an instructor/admin has altered or adjusted a post and the date and time it was done?
If not, could that be an optional feature?
WP1
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Let me clarify my questions.
- Is there a notice generated somewhere within a post (usually at the bottom) that the post has been adjusted/corrected by a admin/teacher with date and timestamp?
- If so, can it be an administrative option determined in each forum for this notice to show?
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
And "shenanigan" some of them will. I think a good forum policy adjusted to the forum topic and located at the top of the forum page helps with this issue.
Any other opinions?
WP1
Plus, if a teacher can't properly monitor busy forums isn't there an underlying issue about student numbers?
Hi Martin,
How to allow students to edit only their own posts? Your solution above (in its current incarnation ) allows a student to edit any post, regardless if they wrote it or not.
Thanks for your help,
George
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
I agree with your assessment completely. A forum, in the context of the way it is used in Moodle, is a record of a conversation - a historical record - it cannot be changed.
For this reason, I'm puzzled why there is a 'delete' option on posts. Deleting a post in this record can also mess up the continuity and drastically change the meaning. I just spent quite a bit of time tracking down a post that I read via RSS that no longer exists on the Moodle site.
Shouldn't we consider removing the delete function as well (for the same reasons)?
I guess the administrator (or teacher) should still be able to delete posts that have broken rules of conduct, but so should they be able to edit posts for the same reason (editing could be less destructive; remove offensive words). If deleting is allowed, something should be added in its place ('post deleted for reason X').
I propose that deleting a post should follow the same rules as editing.
mike
I respectfully disagree. Because if you eliminate even the "delete" option, you isolate a lot of potential Moodle users, especially those switching over from BlackBoard, or phpBB or other popular forum software.
In BlackBoard, the teacher can choose whether a student is allowed to edit or delete his own post, regardless of time frame. Note that BlackBoard is widely used in major universities. A huge potential customer pool for Moodle. Our college (not yet a major school) has switched over from BlackBoard to Moodle, and one of the few things we're discontented with is the inability in Moodle for students to edit posts after 30 minutes (or whatever time frame).
In phpBB (one of the most popular forum softwares of all time), users can edit posts for as long as they want, and a note appears at the bottom of the post "Last edited [time and date]".
I suggest keeping the delete option. And also, adding in the ability for an author to edit his own post regardless of timeframe, or at least, allow the teacher to set this option.
If you insist on eliminating the ability to delete, could you make it at least an option that teachers could set?
Thanks!
WP1
http://moodle.org/bugs/bug.php?op=show&bugid=849&pos=2
Has it worked well? Are there any potential issues I should be aware of before using the hack?
Thanks so much!
Daryl
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
This is really distracting. I really think that deleting has to follow the same rules as editing.
mike
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Note, though, that the same thing can still happen if you are replying to a post that hadn't been mailed out yet. Someone could delete it from under you. However, I don't recall this ever happening to me.
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
The change you made was for Moodle.org only and not for the distribution? Correct??
WP1
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
Re: The philosophy underlying "no editing after 30 minutes"
I think the 30 minute time out period is a good compromise, although not perfect. Even before the 30 minute time-out someone could have read or responded.
mike
You can't edit speech, you can't edit email and letters (once sent), and you can't edit face-to-face activity. Forums are the online analogy of this and should be that way. It's a very particular kind of time-oriented interaction that shouldn't be messed with.
I feel very strongly about this. Leave all the editing to the other modules designed for it.
You can't edit speech, you can't edit email and letters (once sent), and you can't edit face-to-face activity. Forums are the online analogy of this and should be that way. It's a very particular kind of time-oriented interaction that shouldn't be messed with.
Yes, in a serial analogy, speech is uneditable, like a ticker-tape of stock prices. But communication is more than the actual words we speak, isn't it? As we construct knowledge, don't we edit speech in our minds? The resulting concept in our heads is an incomplete or overcomplete summary of a conversation, including interconnections to other thoughts and points.
Discussions/Forums have many purposes and some purposes could be for re-usable knowledge. Normally we pre-plan documents and put this re-usable knowledge into FAQs and Resources and Documentation. But what if at first we didn't intend to create re-usable knowledge, or didn't have authority to create it? Sometimes a simple forum question generates discussion that becomes worthy. We may need to think about intermediary forms of condensed insights--less pre-planned than a FAQ or glossary. How do we transform a useful discussion into something more permanent. How many great threads like this disappear into the old-thread wasteland?
I don't where this is leading.
In short, I think we need discussion tools where heavier forms of moderation/facilitation can be applied. I am eager to try the Wiki tool to do this but I have doubts--isn't it a single document, not a discussion? One example of an expanded discussion is polling attached to forums. This is a very useful combination, because comments can explain the reasons for a particular vote. We have also talked about "great"threads getting assigned as "sticky" threads that stay at the top. What if we could keep this thread intact (uneditable) and then attach a summary at the top and stick it in a place where anyone concerned about forum tool development could see it?
Hmm. How about the ability to archive part of the discussion rather than delete it? The first post after the archived part of the discussion would need to be a summary of what had gone before. also one would need to be able to access the archived posts (which I suppose would need to be searchable too).
Would this solve some of these issues? Is it possible?
(p.s. stuff just keep appearing on this site! This is an anchor)
You can't edit speech, you can't edit email and letters (once sent), and you can't edit face-to-face activity. Forums are the online analogy of this and should be that way. It's a very particular kind of time-oriented interaction that shouldn't be messed with.
Yes, in a serial analogy, speech is uneditable, like a ticker-tape of stock prices. But communication is more than the actual words we speak, isn't it? As we construct knowledge, don't we edit speech in our minds? The resulting concept in our heads is an incomplete or overcomplete summary of a conversation, including interconnections to other thoughts and points.
You can have both: the unedited original discussion, and an edited resulting concept written elsewhere. Keep the forum content as it was written, except insert (i.e., in another forum post) hyperlinks off to a static page which provides a summary.
It's already permanent. Part of learning how to use forums effectively is to learn to search them effectively. Consider Google Groups (once known as DejaNews), the archive of Usenet news postings dating back to the 1980's. What a treasure trove! I can't count how many answers I've gotten from it.
If users would just learn how to effectively research a topic; it's not easy, but neither is being intelligent.
Why must the summary be on the same page as the thread? Why not intersperse reply posts which include hyperlinks to static pages containing summaries?
Please take the time to research the wiki concept. There are exemplary wiki sites which not only describe the concept in words, but display it in action.
Google for wiki: the best sites are in the first three results.
Please do this
Peter
is this part of 1.2 ..........would help me a lot!!!!!!
Peter
I've retrieved http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/moodle/moodle/mod/forum/lib.php
and installed but still can't figure out how to edit a forum post. I'm logged in as admin. Any help, clues, hints or pointers would be appreciated.
Did you uncomment the line
$CFG->admineditalways = true;
in config.php?
Thanks Gustav. I've done this now and all's well, thanks again.- What about the ability to preview a post before posting it. I think it might help a bit. The reason is the Text window can be limiting so one may not know how a post will look until after actually posting it. This is very true if you inclue an image with the post. .
- Also there is no spell checker right now [although one is one the way].
- This is also another problem. Occasionally one cannot edit a post. Something happens and something freezes while editing the post. Sometimes one has to delete a post they may have saved less than 30 minutes before because they cannot make the correction for some reason and then re-write the post.
Just a few things to keep in mind before making a decision about this.
WP1
Spell Checker: Prediction - Grief Ahoy. I don't know about other languages but keeping English users happy will be a task in itself. So what if each post isn't perfectly spelled?
Cant edit post: Can't comment, have never experienced this.
Ray
Sometimes the thread is very long and takes a while to load. A preview page would be shorter and quicker to load.
A multi-language spellchecker is on the way.
WP1
I think it's both patronizing and presumptuous to impose an artificial limit on editing time upon Moodle users. If Moodle admins choose to utilize "bad pedagogy" or whatever is being railed against in this thread, what business is it of the developers to impose that viewpoint when it would be trivial to give the option?
Like it or not (and I don't), forums are currently the flexible and adaptable method of sharing information on Moodle. The announcements section is a forum -- we have no choice in that matter! We utilize this forum for announcing activity pairings, and these change. It is ridiculous to force us to choose between (a) abandoning the announcements, or (b) posting replies to ourselves correcting the original post, which forces students to read the entire thread before figuring out exactly what's going on.
If an editable blog performed the default news function in Moodle, I'd be more (but not perfectly) happy with this design decision, but since it's not, and since there is more than one way to use a forum not simply for learning discussion purposes, I feel this is an unnecessary restriction on users' ability to use Moodle as they see fit.
I got around this in 1.8.2+ by editing mod/forum/lib.php around line 2257 to
if ($ownpost or $editanypost) {
//if (($age < $CFG->maxeditingtime) or $editanypost) {
$commands[] = '<a href="'.$CFG->wwwroot.'/mod/forum/post.php?edit='.$post->id.'">'.$stredit.'</a>';
//}
}
i.e. always allow the edit link...
There must also be a start and stop date on each forum. Without these types of configurable features, the Moodle Discussion forum is less than desirable.
just found this thread, and i think it needs to change.
on twitter i can delete, on facebook i can delete, in forums like quora.com,stackoverflow.com etc i can edit and it stores when i edit the reply/comment.
it's a paradime users are used to, and when you take it away from them its probably not a good thing.
The problem is that Moodle forums are threaded. I have now replied to you. If you now delete your post, where does my post go?
(Actually, sam solved that in ForumNG, were moderators can delete a post at any time. The post gets replaced by a 'This post was deleted by the moderator' placehodler.)
Perhaps more seriously, if you could edit your post, then my reply might no longer make sense. Once you have added your thoughts to a discussion, and others have read them, and perhaps built on them, then I am afraid that your contribution is no longer just yours. It has become a part of the thread, and should stand as is.
Also, after the 30 minute time-out, that is when the post has been emailed to all the subscriber's mailboxes, so editing it after that won't be seen by many people.
On the examples you cite. Twitter and Factbook are about having a personal space online where you can express yourself. No problem if you can do what you like there.
I'm not familiar with quora.
stackoverflow 'discussions' are not deeply nested. It seems be restircted to three levels: question/reply/comments no reply. So that makes it easier to delete most things. I am, however, really surprised if they let you delete your question if several other poeple have written good answers, or rated it highly, or edited it for clarity.
Anyway, for me the 30 minute editing time-out is a good compromise. It gives you time to notice and fix most of your errors, while still allowing subscription emails to be sent, and other people to build in your ideas in the discussion.
If you every really need to amend your ideas later, you can either reply to yourself with the new thoughts, or you can find a moderator to make the edits for you.
I don't like the idea to reply to myself: in nested view, my reply would be shown in a crazy invisible place and not at the end of the thread, so it can't suggest to develop a discussion.
A different way to solve problem: reply to myself with a link. So, if I want to change my old email:
1) I can open a new thread, and I write there my email in its new version (if needed, including an "errata-corrige"), with a link to previous thread;
2) in the "old" thread I can reply to myself with a link to the new thread, and everybody can understand that there is a new version of the mail elsewhere.
Moodle contains in itself a lot of solutions to a lot of new problems.The real problem (with old and new mails) is that with Moodle 2 mails are sent to subscribers without css, in a very bad and unreadable view. Can anybody solve THIS problem?
Luciano