Knowing might lead to change
Users experience systems differently from designers and operators. Problems are usually fixed only when they are known to exist.
More tinkering in WordPress
Condensing my WordPress blogs (this one and our travel blog) into a single database and moving the associated files solved my immediate problem. I was able then to ‘downgrade’ my hosting service, though the reduced cost has been applied to an extended subscription rather than a refund. I’ll continue to argue that, though with little real hope of a satisfactory...
Wrangling WordPress installations
I did some renovation on this site earlier this year when I changed the theme and created some pages under a Professional menu to replace the professional site I had been using while working prior to retirement. I had intended to do some more after we returned from our trip to South Australia but had not started until this week...
Muddling in Moodle
Those of us involved with developing and teaching courses hear a lot about the desirability of consistency which sometimes seems to be interpreted as just short of uniformity. Historically that is based on student responses to a survey conducted a few years ago which was interpreted as students wanting to see the same features in the same locations in different courses....
Creating digital solutions in EDP4130
It’s late January. I started writing this earlier in the month, soon after I was back in my office and thinking about first semester courses. After a couple of years working with the most recent iteration of assessment in EDP4130, a project-based design challenge, it was time to consider a change. In 2015 and 2016 students created teaching resources for the two...
Muddling through Moodle books
I want to be a good corporate citizen but that can be difficult when the tools (like a web server) that enable you to do your job are withdrawn. Still that impulse got me thinking about using Moodle books to present study material. If that could be made to work, without subverting the quality of presentation of materials, it would get material in-house and offer advantages of being easily printed or downloaded as eBooks for use on computer, tablet or smartphone.
Coding & photos – vacation rumination
Coding has become a hot topic in educational circles. In a previous post – The second coming of coding: Will it bring rapture or rejection? – I responded to some comments posted by Bron Stuckey and concluded that a key challenge would be the limited experience that most teachers, and students preparing to be teachers, have of coding in any form. In...
The second coming of coding: Will it bring rapture or rejection?
Coding, aka computer programming, made it into the headlines earlier this year when Federal Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, asked Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, whether he would “support coding being taught in every primary and secondary school.” The Prime Minister initially derided the idea with a comment about kids going to work as coders at age 11 but later confirmed that...
READ MORE The second coming of coding: Will it bring rapture or rejection?
Down and up the greasy pole
It seems there is no constant but change. I was feeling pleased with myself over my success with a Greasemonkey script to produce simple statistics for comparing results from multiple markers in the Moodle assignment system. My infrequent forays into coding had made that process a bit like climbing a greasy pole but I’d eventually succeeded in reaching the top...
Greasing the wheels of progress
For the past eight years we have been dealing with assignments submitted online through a locally developed system, EASE (Electronic Assignment Submission Environment), which was originally planned in response to perceived deficiencies in WebCT Vista, our LMS from 2003 until around 2008. By the time EASE was ready we were in transition to Moodle as our LMS but EASE offered enough that...