Martin Dougiamas

Hi all,

Just realised I never actually posted about Wave anywhere yet. I saw the Wave video the first day it was published and was intrigued and amazed like the rest of you. Like most truly lasting advancements, it takes a lot of ideas we are already used to and combines them in a way that is obviously better and more usable.

As to how this affects learning management systems like Moodle, I don't think it will totally replace them (as some have been saying).

Moodle (and similar systems) are (like it or not!) more about the *management* of learning at a higher level than this, a system of control and authentication that supports institutional policy and practice.

However, what I do think will happen is that many of the activities in Moodle will be replaced by services like these. Even in the very short term I can see Waves replacing Wikis and Blogs and Forums all over the place. Not everyone will want to use Google accounts for everything, and not everyone will want to run their own wave servers, but there will be many who do.

In a general way Moodle core will also have to get more and more live and interactive (Flash, HTML 5, etc ...) simply because that's how we all prefer our web software (hence many of the things in our roadmap like truly comprehensive web services and all the things like security etc to support it, so that Moodle can be used as an engine for other things).

Moodle 3 will probably be a complete rewrite around these principles. But first we ... must ... get ... Moodle ... 2.0 ... out ... the door ... !

Good one, Jon.

Aside:

The site is running Moodle 1.7.1+ and the teacher hasn't used the site himself for well over two years.

http://moodle.leapkids.com/user/view.php?id=3&course=1

Hopefully the admin can just delete it.

Worth mentioning is that Moodle 2.0 has a whole new blocks system and blocks will work on every page without awful hacks.

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Navigation_2.0_implementation_plan

It seems this does not use the official external API we've been developing for web services...

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Web_services_API_-_Function_List

Unfortunately $PAGE is implemented in only a few activities in Moodle 1, and it's very inconsistent.

(That's why all the work is being done on it in Moodle 2)

I assume you are looking for something generic you can put in the theme header or something ... you might have to parse $CFG->pagepath.