Moodle plugins directory: Socialwall Format | Moodle.org
Socialwall Format
A big thanks to a new Moodle 3.3 version which was patched and fixed by David Herney Bernal
If you have a fix or improvement we would love to include it. Please contact Chris Kenniburg.
Initial funding and support provided by the Regional Educational Media Center (REMC) Association of Michigan.
The Moodle Socialwall will transform your Moodle course into a social learning platform. This includes a familiar post interface, timeline of posts, filtering of the timeline, and integration with Moodle's activities and resources. A social learning format allows teachers to pick up the tool and begin using it right away.
Google Presentation for Moodle Socialwall Course Format
A super big thank you to REMC Michigan http://remc.org for supporting and funding this project.
Special thanks to Moodle Partner Synergy Learning http://www.synergy-learning.com for doing the hard work of developing this course format.
Special Notes:
- Do not change an existing course to the Socialwall format. It is possible and will work just fine, but will have undesired results/consequences due to how social wall puts all activities and files into topic one (behind the scenes).
- All activities and resources added to a Socialwall course will appear in Topic One if switched to the standard Topic Format of Moodle. It is possible to switch from Socialwall to Topic Format if a teacher wants to move into a more traditional online learning model. The teacher would then just need to arrange their activities and resources into the topic areas.
- Using CSS you can alter the appearance of the Socialwall. An example can be found in how the evolve-D theme displays the Socialwall and timeline. evolve-D Theme
- Be sure to activate the URL Resource filter to get automatic embedding of Youtube videos and links.
- The Alert Block is designed to display class alerts and other useful events in the course. It is recommended to add this to your sidebar.
Installation and Use
Watch a Google hangout we did explaining how to install and use the Socialwall Format.
Additional Information
The eCommunity Platform uses a new Moodle Course Format (called Socialwall) which alters the way a typical course looks and behaves. Most people use "Topic” or "Weekly” course formats in Moodle.
This is new course format offers a timeline, where teachers and students may post and/or comment on. It is fully integrated in Moodle, so teacher may:
- make different kind of posts (Alerts, sticky post)
- attach activities to timeline-posts (via Drag and Drop too)
- attach files and URLs to posts
- comment on posts or reply to comments
Students (depending on capabilites) may:
- make standard posts
- attach resources (files or links) to posts
- comment on posts or reply to comments
- view results and feedback of assignments in their timeline
The Socialwall-Package includes:
- a new Course Format (called socialwall, format_socialwall)
Optional:
- a new Filter (filter_urlresource) to alter the way a posted url-Resource will be displayed
- a local plugin (local_filterurlresbak) to backup and restore the filter data (unfortunately moodle doesn't support backup and restore for filter data).
- a new Block to display upcoming events and alerts related to the course (block_alerts).
Useful links
Screenshots
* Please provide missing URLs - most notably the bug tracker to be used, and the public source code repository. Most of the following comments would be reported as individual issues.
* Please consider adding Andreas Wagner from Synergy Learning as a contributor (author) here in the plugins directory (if possible, assuming he has moodle.org account created).
* In the English (lang/en/) language pack, we do not use capitalised headlines and titles (such as "Socialwall Format", "Edit Notification Settings" or "All Module Types"). To make your plugin fit nicely into overall Moodle UI in English, these should be fixed.
* Ordering of comments: I do understand the reasoning that the most recent comment is probably the most relevant and should be displayed first. But I learnt this does not work well. People tend to reply to previous comments so they are not isolated but form kind of conversation. That is why it is more intuitive to order comments time ASC (oldest first, newest last). If there are concerns about too long comments thread, you can always display X most recent comments (again newest last) by default and show something like "Older comments" link before the first one. Clicking that link would load skipped comments via AJAX and prepend them to the currently displayed list. My experience says this should probably work best (and afaik it is also how common social media handle it).
* Some sort of confirmation before deleting a comment might help.
* There is a typo in the version.php: $plugin->depencies
* You may wish to make the selectors in the styles.css file more specific to your format only. Prepending the selectors with '.format-socialwall' might be enough.
* You may wish to provide PNG versions for the pictures so that they are displayed properly even in browsers that do not support SVG yet (that should be quite rare these days but still).
* Constants like TIMELINESECTION (defined int he global namespace) do not have frankenstyle prefix.
* You may wish to use more restrictive param type on the comments form action (PARAM_TEXT is supposed to be used for plain text with multilang filter support. PARAM_APLHA, PARAM_ALPHANUM or PARAM_ALPHANUMEXT work well for this type of parameters.
I found the overall coding style clean and easy to follow. Well done. I'll be happy to approve this once the bug tracker and source code repository URLs are filled with the hope that other issues raised in the review are fixed soon in an update version of the plugin.
I am going to mark this as needing more work. Please schedule the plugin for re-approval once the issues are addressed. Thanks in advance.
I have installed this plugin on my moodle site, i love the idea and it will really enhance my site, i have just had a few minor problems.
these are :
1) the comment block is actually not clear, thre is no outline shown ??
i thred to post a video with a youtube link and nothing happend ? have i done somehting wrong, my istall looks nothing like the layout in your bideo above?