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 initiated in 1999.
Using Moodle is for those who are interested in how Moodle development (technical and pedagogical). Tracking down the best forum for RSS discussions was a little difficult but eventually I alighted on the Blocks forum where I found a well populated discussion initiated by Paul De Jong called RSS feed (news) in a block. Blocks are Moodle sidebar components found either on a home or course page. Paul has created a block which allows one RSS channel per course to be configured by an administrator or teacher. Students can then link to resources from this channel at the course level. Different courses can have different channels specified.
Now while I like what Paul has done the power of such a Moodle block would be considerably magnified if instead of configuring one RSS channel per block a list of channels could be specified so that the student could select from a range of possible distributed feeds. And what if the Moodle block could be configured to allow students to add their own RSS channels of interest (which could be private or shared)?
Also, why lock such functionality just to the course or topic level? A Moodle course can be configured to present weekly or as numbered topics. Why should a different syndication block not be available each week?
I remain quite impressed with Moodle but my previous comment about tracking down coherent sources of information still stands. Our understanding of what it is doing and intending to do has improved since last week but we've had to work hard at gathering bits from here and there in the forums. The forums seem to be more component than issues driven meaning that, for example, important RSS information could be distributed over a number of forums.
Nevertheless, at the moment, I feel it is definitely worth persisting and hopefully, because interest in Moodle is increasing, the growing community will 'evolve' better documentation. I want to like this initiative and its deliverables but let's see how I feel in a few weeks.
Now who is going to write the seminal Moodle book?
