Blogs

Re: Course specific blog needed...

Jeremy Russell — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:14:21 GMT

by Jeremy Russell.

Hi Sam,

I did it and it worked beautifully. Thank you very much for the much needed help. You made my morn.

Jeremy

Re: Course specific blog needed...

sam marshall — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:12:15 GMT

by sam marshall.

oublog instructions (once installed):

1) go into course
2) turn editing on
3) click 'Add activity' dropdown and choose 'OU blog'
4) complete form, click save

there you go, course-specific blog. Students can go to it with the link, add posts, read posts, all done. It's completely independent from anyone's 'global' blog.

HOWEVER this will be a shared group blog for everyone on the course (or you can set it up to divide by groups). I.e. everyone can post to it and you see everyone's posts together.

If the feature you would like is that, within the course, each individual gets their own separate blog (you have to use a dropdown to see somebody else's posts, or optionally, maybe only teachers can even see other people's) then ou blog does not do this yet. It's being developed at present, actually might be committed within the next few days if a code review this afternoon goes well...

--sam

Course specific blog needed...

Jeremy Russell — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:05:31 GMT

by Jeremy Russell.

I am trying to find a blog system for Moodle that can have separate blogs for two separate courses we are running this semester. In the past we had just one course that used the existing blog and had little trouble. Now with two courses online we need to have separate blogs. As it is now there is just the sitewide blog that is visible to both courses.

I have installed OU Blog and ran into some difficulty setting up the separate blogs for the separate courses. There seems to be little documentation for this module, at least from where I was looking. Can someone either refer me to some blogging alternatives, or give me a hard and fast method of setting up separate course blogs using OU Blog?

Any help and/or assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Re: There was an error .....

Pete Richardson — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:54:15 GMT

by Pete Richardson.

Simon,
At last I have got the Blogs working using your 'null' solution.

Not sure why previous attempts failed but all working OK now.

Better late .....

Pete

Re: Blogs and comments

Nadav Kavalerchik — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:31:02 GMT

by Nadav Kavalerchik.

"comments in system/personal blogs"patch:
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-21206

Re: Blogs and comments

Doug Holton — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:21:11 GMT

by Doug Holton.

Yeah I can't believe there are still no comments on blogs

Re: OU blog - Catalan translation added

sam marshall — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:49:35 GMT

by sam marshall.

Thank you! I have committed it to cvs so it should be there from tomorrow's downloads.

--sam

Re: OU blog - optional blog module

Roger Emery — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:10:35 GMT

by Roger Emery.

Cheers Sam.

I'll write a db query and send the tutor a spreadsheet export of the result.

Afraid my code (or queries) will never be described as high quality, but I'll post what I do up to here in case its useful to anyone else.

Many Thanks
Roger

Re: OU blog - optional blog module

sam marshall — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:40:31 GMT

by sam marshall.

Thanks for comments.

1) Sorry, but there is no way to view all contributions to a course blog from a single student on one page.

We are about to implement a new 'individual course blog' feature which works kind of like the group course blog only with individuals (so you can use the dropdown to see posts from each user as a separate little blog within the course). This could support use as a learning journal (if you use 'separate individuals' mode so that only the student & their teacher can see their own blog, not the other students).

Anyhow, while this feature will be nice and some people want it, it probably won't do what you want (a 'view contributions...' option) because this is for blog posts only and not comments.

2) Hopefully you can figure out the query, I'm not as familiar with oublog tables as some other modules (I didn't originally write the code) so can't do it without looking stuff up and don't have time for that right now.

If you are interested in implementing high-quality code and user interface etc for your feature so that it could be included in the public version, please get in touch with me (use moodle private message and give your email so i can reply that way) so we can agree on a specification for how it should be done before you do it. However, I have to admit it will probably be lots easier if you just hack together the feature for your own purposes, or alternatively just use the pure database output without php.

--sam

Re: OU blog - optional blog module

Roger Emery — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:41:44 GMT

by Roger Emery.

Hello,

First the positive - I have a BA English tutor over the moon with the OU blog tool - her students love it too.

The Question:-

Is there anyway of viewing all the posts and comments by an individual student in a course blog activity? (and even across more than one blog in one course?)

Have a tutor doing some marking and wading through a sea of posts that wants to organise them by student for exam board.

If not an interface function to do this, then a query.
I've been looking at the mdl_oublog_posts table which will give some of the posts by 'lasteditied' student, but I need to link in the comments also to get a full picture of what each student contributed (I know this will take the content of the posts out of context)

Anyone invented this wheel, before I re-invent it?

Many Thanks for any help
Roger