The Auricle

Busy week this week so there's limited time for writing long articles. However, I'm presenting a paper at next week's ALT-C conference at the University of Exeter which I'll make available on Auricle on Wednesday. The title of my paper is … E-Learning and Frameworks and Tools: Is it too late? - the Director's Cut. […]

In my three previous Moodle Meanderings articles we've sort of 'poked a stick' at Moodle and verified that in fact it's alive and looks well, so this time we decided to see how easy it would be to extend one aspect of its functionality. Let's be clear … Moodle is still a work-in-progress. Nevertheless, I […]

One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is how easily open source course management systems like Moodle will scale. So let's see what the Using Moodle forums have to offer here. Once in the Using Moodle forums I keyed 'scaleability' into the Moodle site search engine and got one article returned! But all […]

As readers of last Friday's Moodle Meanderings article will have seen Martin Dougiamas (he of Moodle fame) invites interested parties to join in the Using Moodle forums. So I've pitched in to said forums with some comments on how syndication solutions like RSS/Atom could be exploited. Martin Dougiamas is lead developer for Moodle which he […]

Now that Moodle, the open-source course management system, is fast approaching its 1.4 release we've started to give it a serious look over. So here is the first of what might become a series of impressions. I've looked at the 1.4 Developer release of Moodle, but this is pretty stable and is representative of what […]

E-Health Insider reports that the NHS 'University' has cancelled its procurement of a 'virtual campus'. The E-Health Insider article states: “The virtual campus was intended to form the cornerstone of the NHSU, providing learners and tutors with access to information and resources. NHSU was also planning to use the virtual campus as its spine for […]

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I'm presently looking into blogs that offer some different functionality than presently available in pMachine Pro for a colleague and I came across this very useful comparision chart by Owen. In addition to this very useful chart, Owen has links to the OpenSourceCMS site which hosts demo versions of various php/mysql CMS applications including the […]

Over at Michael Feldstein's E-Literate site he has a couple of articles which are worth a look. The first, What's Wrong with the Sakai User Interface is a polemic less about Sakai than the discussion component offered in the first public release. Michael makes some excellent points about the limitations of 'threaded' discussion particularly: “Conversation […]

A quick visit to the Sakai Project led me to an interesting article in which Syllabus Magazine interviewed Ira Fuchs the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's vice president for research in information technology. The Mellon Foundation supports the Sakai Project to the tune of USD 2.4 million so Fuchs' views on the future of learning management […]