Glossary of common terms

Abbreviation for Internet Explorer which is Microsoft's web browser.

Originally provided free to undermine Netscape's browser dominance in the 90's and currently provided bundled as standard with Microsoft's microcomputer operating systems.

Many people are switching from IE to Mozilla's Firefox to avoid the perceived risk of spy-ware and other security risks.

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.

Shibboleth is not only a kind of linguistic password that identifies one as a member of an 'in' group, it's also the name of a middleware project of Internet2.

The Shibboleth project is developing architectures, policy structures, practical technologies and an open source implementation (also called Shibboleth) to support inter-institutional sharing of (web) resources subject to access controls.

Some key concepts of Shibboleth are:

• Federated Administration
• Access Control Based on Attributes
• Active Management of Privacy
• Standards Based
• Framework for Multiple, Scaleable Trust and Policy Sets (Federations)
• Standard Attribute Value Vocabulary

Using Moodle with Shibboleth authentication has the following advantages (depending on the Shibboleth federation you are part of):

• Access to Moodle can be restricted very accurate (e.g. you allow only students from universities A, B and D to access your Moodle, but not students from universities C and E. Or you allow only medicine students.)
  
• User accounts are created automatically as soon as a user logs in the first time.
• The user profiles are set up automatically (e.g. the users firstname, surname and email address is inserted the first time a user logs in)
• The user profiles can automatically kept up-to date all the time
• So you don't have to care anymore for user management issues because this is basically handled by the Identity Provider of the Shibboleth user (e.g. the home university).
• Once Shibboleth users are authenticated, they can access other Shibboleth-enabled resources without loggin in another time. Due to this single sign-on mechanism, they e.g. can jump from one Moodle installation to another or the can access a Shibboleth-protected library or a web shop, always being authenticated.

Plans for the future concerning Moodle:

• Automatic course enrollment according to Shibboleth attributes.
  

NZ Open Source VLE Project is a New Zealand-based project, hosted at Eduforge.org

It is helping Moodle adoption as part of a greater project of developing OSS e-learning application software for deployment throughout New Zealands education sector. System integration of portal website framework, lcms, content creation tools and modular toolkit.

An acronym for PHP Extension and Application Repository. PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components.

For more information see http://pear.php.net/.

Postnuke is a free, open source, database driven php website. Many Moodle people use postnuke as a front end page to forums, calendars, guestbook and other non-education specific activities. There are literaly thousands of free themes, and hundreds of open source modules that a postnuke site can use.

However, the administration and permission system UI for postnuke can be daunting for newbies, and often requires some basic knowledge of php coding to implement many tasks.

http://www.postnuke.com/

A great website for educators to start at is the postnuke education forum.

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.
It has much to do with internet and social constructivism ;)

Digital rights management (DRM) is the umbrella term referring to any of several technical methods used to handle the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading and monitoring of the rights held over a digital work. In the widest possible sense, the term refers to any such management.

An abbreviation for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" - technologies for creating interactive web applications.

Firebird is a fully featured and powerful RDBMS and is derived from Borland InterBase 6.0 source code, which has more than 20 years of handling databases from just a few KB to many Gigabytes with good performance and almost free of maintenance!

It is open source and has no dual license. Below is a list of some of the Firebird’s major features:

• Firebird has full SQL 92 Entry Level 1 Support and implements most of the SQL-99 standard, plus some very useful additions.
• Full support of Stored Procedures and Triggers
• Full ACID compliant transactions
• Referential Integrity
• Multi Generational Architecture
• Very small footprint
• Fully featured internal language for Stored Procedures and Triggers (PSQL)
• Support for External Functions (UDFs)
• Little or no need for specialized DBAs
• Almost no configuration needed - just install and start using!
• Big community and lots of places where you can get free and good support
• Optional single file embedded version - great to create CDROM catalogs, single user or evaluation versions of applications
• Dozens of third party tools, including GUI administrative tools, replication tools, etc.
• Careful writes - fast recovery, no need for transaction logs!
• Many ways to access your database: native/API, dbExpress drivers, ODBC, OLEDB, .Net provider, JDBC native type 4 driver, Python module, PHP, Perl, etc.
• Native support for all major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS.

Firebird is financially supported by Firebird Foundation which get his founds from company donations and paid membership subscriptions.

See http://www.firebirdsql.org/ for more information.