Glossary of common terms

A symptom or psychoses prompted by too much Moodling. Oodle-Moodle often manifests itself in relationships that have been stunted while Moodling. Husbands, wives, and children may ask an oodled soul to "step away from the machine" and to communicate once again with hand gestures and verbal cues rather than emoticons.

Might be contagious.

The areas within a course that hold activities are known as sections. This is a generic term that covers weeks and topics.

Activities in Moodle are educational things to do. They include, for example: discussing a topic in a forum, writing a journal entry, submitting an assignment, or completing a quiz.

Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, but now it's just a name.

It's also a verb: "I try and moodle every day!"

This point of view maintains that people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environment.

Everything you read, see, hear, feel, and touch is tested against your prior knowledge and if it is viable within your mental world, may form new knowledge you carry with you. Knowledge is strengthened if you can use it successfully in your wider environment. You are not just a memory bank passively absorbing information, nor can knowledge be "transmitted" to you just by reading something or listening to someone.

This is not to say you can't learn anything from reading a web page or watching a lecture, obviously you can, it's just pointing out that there is more interpretation going on than a transfer of information from one brain to another.

Social constructionism is a term that defines a particular view of education. It acknowledges constructivism as a description of what each learner experiences, while focussing on the power of constructing artifacts (like text) within a social environment.

From this point of view, education is best served by creating experiences that would be best for learning from the learner's point of view, rather than just publishing and assessing the information you think they need to know. Each participant in a course can be a teacher as well as a learner. A 'teacher' in this environment is an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with others in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.

Moodle tries to promote this view, but is not constrained by it.

This is the setting inside config.php that tells Moodle where it is installed.  It has to be a full URL to the web site's "natural" address.  Some web sites may work under more than one address (for example www.example.com and example.com) but you should pick the main one.

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by The Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation. Firefox is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, illumos and Solaris operating systems.

(Entry edited by Helen Foster to update the information. Original entry 10 February 2004.)

Meta Data is data about data, describing the type of data under discussion. Meta tags in HTML are used to identify which version of HTML is in use, the language (both used by the browser to parse, or interpret the code) and other technical information. Two special meta tags of great interest to web weavers are the content and keyword tags. These provide special information that's often used by search engines to enhance retrieval of the page.