Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

WordPress was interesting and simple to setup, but lacked some of the content control that I need when doing online instruction. I’ve heard about Moodle, but haven’t played with it for a while. I downloaded the latest version (http://moodle.org/) and did a fresh install. It required about the same amount of time as WordPress for the install and setup.

Now I have a complete content management system designed for online instruction delivery. I can setup multiple students and different courses. Then assign students to these courses, keeping everyone in the right track.

Each student and course has a custom calendar. The student’s calendar is only reflected in that student’s account. The course calendar is distributed to everyone in a course.

The forum tool provides for an easy way to communicate with one or multiple students with a mechanism for feedback.

There is a quiz creator and filters to import most kinds of previously-created content. On top of this, there are tons of add-ons developed by people moving to Moodle from other systems. Take a look: http://www.trustyetc.com/moodle

It looks like the browser wars are back. I just downloaded and installed a stripped down version of Mozilla called FireFox. I like it. It has some of the same features as Netscape. One that I use all the time is the Right-click – Open In A New Window. It’s on top of the pick list where it should be. In IE, it’s second on the list.

This may seem petty… but we’re talking about something I do hundreds of times every day. Also, if I want to go to the link in the same window, I would click on the link… not right click and select the first option–open in the same window.

You can also right-click and view a graphic. You can’t do this in IE at all. This is another thing I do all the time… because people continually break the rules of HTML and place BIG pictures in LITTLE HTML spaces.

Also, when I want to find a word on a web page, CTRL-F opens the search box. In IE, I have to keep that box open while I search for the word over and over down the page. In FireFox, you can use F3 to repeat the search (like it should be).

I’ve started my own Blog server. After looking at several different open source servers, I ran across this review.

http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm

The review had many more titles than I had looked at. The bottom line was the same. They recommended WordPress and that’s the way I was leaning as well.

So I downloaded WordPress

http://wordpress.org

The product requires two pre-installed components – PHP and MySQL. Since almost everything uses these two components, I already had them installed. All I had to do was create the MySQL table for WordPress (the instructions in the docs outlined the whole process). Five minutes later, I had a blog server.

Everything worked just as advertised except for the file upload. I needed to change the folder permissions on my server to allow the anonymous user account write access to the upload folder. That didn’t really surprise me.

I’m still testing everything out to make sure it works the way I want it to. Once I’m sure it’s secure, I’ll open it up to the outside world

Over the weekend I got one of those calls. It was a friend with a computer problem. All my friends seem to have computer problems. Or is it the other way around… all the people I know with computer problems seem to be my friends.

It was the normal “I didn’t do anything”, “it just doesn’t work like it always has” kind of problem. So I had him bring the machine over… along with some snacks (a small price to pay).

When I started a browser, I saw the problem. Pop-up windows all around. They were popping open faster than I could close them. So I suspected spyware.

Spyware is something you can get from just using a browser in a normal way. It’s not necessarily a virus, but a virus can have the properties of spyware. It’s usually some piece of software that gets buried in your browser and will try to take your computer to places on the Internet without asking. A good example is a program that will replace your browser start page with a new page. Many times the new start page will look like a search site or something. The “behind the scenes” part is that the spyware is keeping track of what you are search for and will pop-up windows for advertisers, etc, based on what you enter at the search site.

I did a Google search for

+spyware +freeware

to find something that was free, and found Spybot. I hopped over to Download.com and saw that they rated it five out of five. Based on that, I downloaded it and installed it.

It found 167 pieces of spyware installed on the computer. It removed these and immunized the machine from further attack. Then I ran the update feature of the program and it found the latest version. That version found 22 more pieces of spyware and immunized the machine from a few thousand total spyware programs.

The browser ran noticeably faster, and there were no pop-up windows at all.

Over the summer I looked at several technologies that will drastically change the way I do things on a daily basis. There are several new technologies readily available that enable me to easily create dynamic content in a predefined environment that is trivial to setup… and more importantly — free.

I’ve looked at several CRM’s and I’m installing one now. CRM=Content Management System. Of course, I have been using a CRM of sorts for a while. A blog is a specific type of CRM. I was looking at something I could host myself. Something that was more flexible.

I started with a wiki. The term, wiki wiki is Hawaiian for quick, fast or informal. The most popular wiki is http://wikipedia.org the open source online encyclopedia. It took a few hours, but I got a wiki up and running. My home server is a Windows 2003 Server. So I had to first install PHP. This is the scripting language that most wiki use for processing information. Then I installed a database server. Most wiki’s use MySQL. Both PHP and MySQL are free.

I played around with several wiki’s, but couldn’t find one that did exactly what I wanted. Then I found Mambo

http://www.mamboserver.com

Mambo uses both PHP and MySQL. Getting it to work with those components was fairly easy.

The advantage of a Read/Write webserver is the convenience of others adding content to my server. Of course, I don’t want just anyone coming in and creating content on my server. So everything is password protected. All users are required to have a username and password. This allows me to control exactly who is on the list of people that I trust to create content on my server.

I have a Mambo server available only to my Intranet right now. As I work with it more, I’ll open it up to the outside.

More later.