Martin Dougiamas

Alan writes in the Moodle News forum:
Later on I will require automatic login authenticated against a user database gleaned from novell (into mysql) and/or only students from my school will be able to register/login etc.

Great! I look forward to your help with that!

How do you make Novell usernames available to other applications? More specifically, how could Moodle connect to them?

Good post, Alan!

I'd be interested to hear more from you down the track about how the high school students have taken to online courses (I've only used Moodle with postgrads).

Your concern about the enculturation of online learning is especially interesting. Perhaps you have experienced (as I have, many times) what happens when even good technology is just slapped into a culture with the expectation everybody will just use it.

I think the first thing to keep in mind is that the advantages of online learning are not always obvious. In fact, for many situations where there are face-to-face alternatives then online learning may complicate the situation too much for many people. Unfortunately this does not stop some implementers.

When there are advantages, though, I think you need to know them and promote them widely and vigorously. Does it promote deeper learning of this subject? Does it allow more time flexibility? Is it providing voices to students who are normally drowned out? Is it promoting the use of electronic resources (and thus greater reusability)? ..etc.

From the other angle, the technology as a whole needs to be simple, consistent and persistent so that it keeps drawing people in. These are the types of qualities I'm pursuing in Moodle.

I'm not sure what the problem is with content and department guidelines - I would assume that's up to individual teachers. Can you explain that further?

Interesting ... that file refuses to display for me on Mozilla 1.1, IE 6.0 or Photoshop 7.0. However, I WAS able to open it using CompuPic Pro. I resaved the image as a new JPEG file and it seems to work OK now (attached).

So I think the original problem is that there was definitely some errors in that particular JPEG file.

Basically everything that is not alphanumeric is converted to an underscore and then underscores are condensed. It's for safety and also aesthetics. I found my colleague kept uploading files with difficult names like:

something - something.doc

which ended up like:

something_-_something.doc

but the current clean_filename routine produces:

something_something.doc

which I think is much nicer.

I'm open to discussion about it! (perhaps in another forum though, like the 'Using Moodle' course ... )