David Scotson

You may need to be more specific about what questions you are being asked with regard to security of summative assesment. Salespeople often create impressions of software's capabilities that are somewhat out of touch with reality, particularly when the salesperson and/or the customer is non-technical. And Moodle cannot hope to compete against vague or fictional capabilities of other systems.

In general, I believe the security of summative assesments have very little to do with the VLE system itself, and more to do with processes and preparations that surround the test e.g. note items 8 through 13 of this checklist for summative testing in WebCT:

http://www.elearning.canterbury.ac.nz/documents/testtips.shtml

Am I missing something? Where in Moodle does it need to know the geographic location of IP addresses? And what system is currently used for this? (edit: did a search and found out the answers for myself. You learn something new every day!)

Regarding the demo, the system returned nothing when I went to look at the Choice but this was a deceptively poor showing as when I clicked through to hostip.info it got the country at least correct, though it just guessed at the town/city.

This seems to be happening to others as I note the results are one third 'exactly right' and two thirds 'Could not locate my IP address at all'.

Your mention of game reminded me of this article:

Gaming the system: How moderation tools can backfire

There's also links to more wide-ranging discussions on this topic on Meatball Wiki.

From studying management accounting I'd say that for anything complicated, it is fundamentally impossible to outwit (to put it bluntly) the people you are trying to control with these systems and the more control you attempt to seize the greater the distortions and negative externalities you will introduce.

This is particularly true where both the process and the outcome are unknowable or unquantifiable (i.e. most white collar and creative work as well as community building and learning). And any focus on one measurable trait instantly demeans the importance of the unmeasured (and unmeasurable).

I'l note that most discussions of these systems assume a large, dispersed and anonymous population like the slashdot readership. If a slashdot-style site was used for a University discussion area with each comment tied to an identified member of a class I'd expect a very different kind of discussion.

Of more interest to the kind of small-scale learning communities, which I expect Moodle is primarily used for, is this article with its particular focus on creative output:

Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator

I'd like to help but I'm not sure I know where you're going wrong.

Is it just this particular header image that's troubling you or are you generally fuzzy on CSS/HTML, or maybe just the way it is used in Moodle?

Can you get simpler CSS to affect the headers e.g. change the background and text color?

As for changing the other images, try looking here:

http://moodle.org/wiki/index.php/Themes

In particular the section about the pix directory.

Do you mean it didn't:

• put the resource in a frame

or it didn't

• keep site navigation visible

No browser but IE can currently show Word documents inline (as far as I am aware) they just open in Word, so the first isn't really a problem.

It should probably display an empty frame below the navigation frame so if it's not doing the second one then there's something amiss.