Martin Dougiamas

I'm not sure a page of pictures qualifies as a virtual community, no. But hopefully it's what this site is becoming!

Still it's quite fascinating to see the pictures of you all on one page ... you look like good people to hang out with!

Actually, I'm going to be in Hawaii in June, at the ED-MEDIA 2003 conference, presenting a paper about Moodle. Is anyone else from here going to be there?

I was curious what a roomful of Moodle users might look like, so a few lines of code later: http://moodle.org/userpix

I've just been doing some writing about this, and I thought a discussion about separate/connected knowing would be appropriate here.

In a way, separate behaviour is the default form of interaction for many people. In these busy times most of us find it easiest to "interact" by using other people's thoughts as a springboard to talk about our own ideas. I must admit most of my own posts around here are like this, simply because of the volume and nature of basic technical support.

Acting in a connected way is much harder, but ultimately a great deal more rewarding in any community environment. By taking the time to listen carefully, and then building on the ideas of the other person and asking further questions of them, I have found two main things happen:
the other person feels valued as a community member and encouraged to participate further, and
you engage more deeply with the topic, and think more deeply about the implications for yourself and others.

The idea of the ratings is to encourage some meta-cognition about these processes. The idea is pretty new, though, and what little feedback I've had about it seems mixed.

So how many of you are using the separate/connected ratings in your own forums? If not, is it because you can't see any use for it in your own environment? Does the concept in general make sense to you?

I'd love to hear any thoughts you may have about this aspect of Moodle.

It should be quite easy ... see mod/resource/view.php and the list of types in mod/resource/lib.php

Works OK for me - if you can track down what the problem is on your site that would be appreciated.