Martin Dougiamas

I don't think you're being melodramatic.

I've been worrying a lot about these issues in the wider sense since Hotmail started.  I'm really not a tinfoilhat conspiracy person but it's very clear that Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are doing everything they can to amass ever-more-detailed dossiers on their users by combining data from an ever-widening amount of sources.  And have you seen how pushy the Google Toolbar is becoming?

The purposes of all that and the effects on our society can be debated, but we certainly should all be informed that it is happening.   I can recommend the TACO extension for Firefox - try it out and see how much tracking is going on these days.

A field in the Moodle plugins database to indicate that the software contains tracking code is an excellent idea.  I've added MDLSITE-1585 to the list.

Just some really quick thoughts from someone who doesn't know mnet anywhere near as well as I should, there are two main things to think about here:

1) Cross-site authentication.  This seems to be well met by OpenID/OAuth2 etc.  Moodle should be a better part of the wider internet here as both a consumer and a producer.

2) Pulling/pushing data between systems like multiple Moodles or Mahara etc.   To me this sounds like a job for our Moodle 2.x web service infrastructure, and if it needs more security then let's add that or recommend users run everything under https.  We just need to simplify the complex set up we have now.

Just skimming through, but please please please let's not even consider having any module-specific code under /search

Hi all,

We're busy here on 2.2!   Starting today we are breaking the usual weekly integration cycle and moving into a continous integration phase untll the 2.2 release.

This week our very hard-working integration team of Eloy, Sam and Apu are (hopefully) landing the last big features for 2.2 from various sources before a code freeze this weekend (no new features after that).  See MDL-30160 for the many new things in Moodle 2.2.

On Monday 14th we'll have everyone working on our usual functional QA to make sure there are no major regressions, and fixing any bugs that we find along the way.   Hopefully we should be all done in two weeks, and we can release on December 1 as promised.

Cheers!

Usability is definitely a big issue for us all right now.  We have all used better interfaces than Moodle offers, and I agree with basically all the detractors of our current interface.  I've been thinking a lot about it.

I'd say there are two things we should approach here at the same time.  In fact I've started putting them on the Roadmap recently.

1. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit.  Small easy-to-fix usability problems that really impact new users.  These are the small specific issues that Tim mentions above.  Stuff like better defaults for a new site, and less-cryptic names for things like the "HTML block".  A major project for 2.3 will be identifying as many of these as possible and fixing them.  I'll be posting more about this soon to gather info on people's "favourite" pain points (some of this has been happening already in past months, I've been observing new users with Moodle).
2. We need to seriously look at the whole workflow of building and conducting and following courses. There's been a lot of good ideas about this over the years.  We need to look at these and implement them in the medium-term, like 2.4.   And yes, probably engage full-time usability experts to help.

Finally I should say that usability is really really REALLY hard to get right.  A lot of so-called experts still produce interfaces that we (individually) may not like.  Think of the outcry every time Facebook is updated, think of all the frustration you still experience even with the very latest stuff from Apple, think of the new 2.x quiz-editing interface in Moodle which, even though a usability person with training developed it by the book has ended up as something that I personally find completely non-intuitive and confusing.

Perfect interface design always has to cope with prior learning and technology constraints.   All we can do is continue to strive to find a better balance.

One other thing I think we need to be mindful of is changing the Moodle paradigm too radically.  Evolution not revolution.  There are a lot of users who have invested a lot of time in learning how Moodle works, and we can't alienate them.