Hello,
I'm an English teacher in a small university in Taiwan. Formerly a computer programmer, still a geek. Looking forward to all that's ahead.
TMN
Hi Tim,
Nice to hear from you. I am an English teacher, too, up in Sapporo, Japan. I work here with Glenys and others on the Moodle for Language Teaching community, which you might check out. A good place to post questions about teaching foreign languages is here.
I am sure there are user groups in Taiwan but if you want to come up to Japan, there are a number of face-to-face conferences on Moodle:
- CALL Workshop 2011: at my university on October 15th
- MoodleMoot Japan 2012: big conference with 50 workshops/presentations on February 22-23
If you still want to keep up with programming, there are number of projects that my colleagues and I are working on. Two guys in Nagasaki have just put together a video recording/CALL lab module in Moodle 2.1 and we are looking to test it and refine the interfaces and add activities. I am working on a course-sharing repository and building a rubric design tool for EFL speech making and composition writing--and need some help there. My PHP skills are next to nothing but I love designing modules--Moodle makes it easy for us teachers to customize.
Keep in touch! Don
Hi Don,
Thanks for the reply. I'm very, very interested in wiping the dust off my programming skills. I worked a little with C and C++ (and a lot more with a couple other languages, one of which is obscure) in a previous life, and work with Python still today to do my daily chores. I am now lookng at PHP, and... well, it doesn't look too challenging at all, but I'm not far into it yet.
I'd probably wanna manipulate rtf docs, storing the results, etc. as my first project, but I hope to be involved in the PHP community for a long while (if I get some positive results my first semester), so would of course be interested in moving up to more complex things.
My area of pedagogical interest is mainly writing/composition... but again, of course i will go through some migration of interests as time goes on.
Thanks and later,
TMN
Hi Tim.
Perhaps I might interest you in Marginalia-enabled Moodle forums. And Nanogong. But if you're using Moodle 2, the Nanogong is out of the question - for the moment, unless some form of funding comes through. Marginalia works for both Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0. Some more thoughts on Marginalia here.
Implementing hacks for Moodle is not for the faint-of-heart. As long as you do not faint, and you have a heart to make your Moodle course pedagogically stronger and a more effective learning tool, then hacking Moodle by following step-by-step instructions can be done to your heart's content.
Frankie Kam
Frankie,
The PHP programming is not challenging at all. It's all the *other* things that present the ultra-steep learning curve for me. I have zero-point-zero experience with Internet-related software etc.
Thanks,
TMN
Hi Tim and welcome. I'm new here, and looking forward to improve too!
(Edited by Helen Foster to remove website link according to our Policy on Advertising - original submission Saturday, 27 August 2011, 12:47 AM)
I'd probably wanna manipulate rtf docs, storing the results, etc. as my first project, but I hope to be involved in the PHP community for a long while (if I get some positive results my first semester), so would of course be interested in moving up to more complex things. celebration costumes