Glossary of common terms

short for 'Structured Query Language'


(I entered this entry only because a forum search for 'firebird' also brought up ALL the entries that included 'sql' even as a substring as e.g. in 'mysqladmin'.)

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.

Applets are small programs written in Java and embedded within web pages. Most recent browsers can run these small programs if you have Java installed on your computer.

Breadcrumbs are what Hansel and Gretel used the famous fairy tale to remember the way back to where they came from.

Moodle DOES NOT use breadcrumbs, as this is what your browser is for and why it has a back button/menu.

Moodle has a navigation bar in the header (and optionally footer) that shows the location of the current page within the site structure.

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.

Abbreviation for "Cascading Style Sheets". CSS defines styles and colours and how they should be applied to a web page.

The Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) is a method of storing files on a server that helps coordinate many people working on those files. Moodle's code repository was managed using CVS from the beginning of the project up until 2010 before switching to Git.

An electronic collection of information, stored in tables of data. For example, Moodle contains a table of all users in a site. There are many brands of database software, but most people use MySQL.

The place where Moodle can save uploaded files. This directory should be readable and writeable by the web server user but it should not be accessible directly via the web.

The dirroot is the name for the directory in which you have installed Moodle. It's a setting in config.php that must be entered correctly.