• Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: Moodle and Twitter
• Helen Foster’s blog: Moodle 1.9.5 release coming soon!

Check out slides from keynote by Martin Dougiamas from morning of Wednesday 6th May at the Educause Australia conference in Perth, Western Australia. The content of the slides include what Moodle is, what it provides, why people use Moodle and a few slides about Moodle 2.0 and what is coming.

Do you Tweet? Follow Martin Dougiamas @moodler.

An e-mail from Martin Dougiamas to Moodle admins:

Hi,

Two things you should know about as a registered Moodle admin:

Firstly, a reminder to keep your Moodle sites upgraded to prevent security issues.  Using recent weekly versions such as 1.9.4+
(http://download.moodle.org/) will help ensure your site is protected.
Some recent security announcements are at http://moodle.org/security and there is documentation about upgrading Moodle here:  http://docs.moodle.org/en/Upgrading

Secondly, please note that some Moodle interface changes are planned to arrive in stable CVS in a week or two, so be warned that the Gradebook may have a new (and we hope you agree it’s better!) appearance.  This sort of change is a very rare occurrence in a stable branch as we take stability seriously.  In this case, however, there were several important usability and calculation issues raised by the community and the benefits of these fixes are large enough to justify the change in 1.9.5 (and 2.0 of course).  Please make sure your teachers are all aware of this change before you upgrade, and make sure you are prepared for it.  Avoid upgrading during a busy assessment period, for example.

Exact details about the Gradebook changes (Stage 1) are on this page:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Gradebook_improvements_in_Moodle_1.9.5

and you can read Helen’s recent announcement here:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=120167

If you have any issues about the gradebook interface changes PLEASE let us know as soon as possible:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=119925

If you have any questions about upgrading or general Moodle issues please start with http://moodle.org/support.

(Please don’t respond to this email – I get more email than I can handle already)

Cheers,
Martin Dougiamas (Lead Developer)

It looks like the original “Moodle” account has graciously given it to Martin Dougiamas and Moodle. Moodle’s lastest tweet reads:

Thanks Charlene for giving us your “moodle” twitter account! The plan is to use it for official news about Moodle software and community.

Follow Moodle now!

Check of Global Classroom‘s post yesterday about a great opportunity to get some Moodle training for free! it looks like they found this through a discussion in the Moodle Meet Ning. I have not logged into that Ning for awhile, it looks like they did a little makeover. I need be better at checking that out!

Fresh out of the box Moodle sets each user’s default setting Forum Auto-subscribe: as Yes: when I post, subscribe me to that forum.

This can be changed by the user when they edit their profile. However, I have found out that many users do not know how to change this, that it can be changed or they forgot to change it. I’ve gotten several questions from teachers wondering why they are getting these strange e-mails from Moodle telling them that Sue Johnson has posted in a Forum in the Moodle Training course they were in months ago!

Now, we tell our staff in the training to change this setting in their profile but I think it would be much easier to make this feature an “opt-in” instead of an “opt-out”. There has been a lot of discussion about this issue and Martin Dougiamas explains that it basically encourages interaction. In my opinion, having this feature be an “opt-in” situation works best for our district. Teachers get enough e-mail and it will more than likely just annoy or frustrate them if they don’t know why they’re getting all of the e-mails or how to stop them from coming in. If a user wants to really follow a Forum they will take the time to click that option when they post.

Another problem with Subscribing to a Forum is that sometimes I want to follow just a post in a Forum, not the entire Forum! I think there should be a “Subscribe to Thread” option, like many of the Forums on the web.

Anyways, while searching the web and the Moodle.org Forums I found an answer to setting the Auto-subscribe setting default to be “No: don’t automatically me to forums” for new users and a way to change that setting for users already in the system:

If you have access to your database through phpmyadmin, then just do the following.

1. Select the mdl_user table
2. Click on the pencil (to edit) beside autosubscribe
3. Change the default value from 1 to 0

The above will change the default value for all new accounts.

1. Select the mdl_user table
2. At the top, click on SQL
3. Erase what is in the query field and enter the following:

UPDATE mdl_user SET autosubscribe = 0

4. Press “Go”

This will change all existing accounts to “No: don’t automatically subscribe me to forums”.

Note: It’s always a good idea to back up your database before doing anything like this. Use at you own risk

Source: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=94386

I do not have the rights to phpmyadmin for our Moodle site but I was able tell our network person how to do this and it was done. It seemed to have worked but as we continue trainings some teachers are still getting the “Yes” option. I am currently waiting to try it again with our network person to check out the problem. Although, I am having problems with it working 100% all of my research has pointed to the above solution. Any information about this issue would be greatly appreciated! I may be missing another setting I need to cahnge. Any opinions or information on this?

I was looking through the U of M Moodle link and I ran across a link to an old interview with Martin Dougiamas by my current boss! So I asked him (he was right next to me in his office at the time), “Hey, Tim! you interviewed Dougiamas?!” He came out and said yeah had! Download the podcast interview on his blog, The Savvy Technologist. I have not listened to it yet but I plan to listen this afternoon. It was back in 2005, so it will be interesting to hear Martin’s thoughts and see if it corresponds to what Moodle is now.

Other links

• Patrick Malley – The Future of Moodle Templates
• Moodle Blog – Moodleblog.org

Blog posts from The Global Classroom

• 10+ Ideas: What to do with a Moodle classroom
  
• Scales and the Moodle Gradebook

Other

• A reliable and straightforward guide to using Moodle 1.9 – A blog post and review of the book, Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development. I have not read this book, I may have to take a look at it–but will a lot change once Moodle 2.0 comes out?
• Introducing Anomaly for Beta Release – A new theme from New School Learning.
• Moodle Journal – A blog about Moodle and E-Learning (added to my Moodle Blogs links).

The Moodleman Blog has recently posted a sneak peak at conditional activities in Moodle 2.0. Before I read the post I was not sure what this even meant but Moodleman writes

“Conditional activities now say that if a student has “completed” an activity/resource (or range of activities/resources) they can then see the newly created one.”

I never really thought of this concept but it makes complete sense and it could make a teacher’s life a lot easier! Moodle.org even has a forum dedicated to this type of thing. In earlier versions you will need a hack but it looks like it will be in the core of Moodle.org (I believe).

For more information take a look at Moodle.org Docs on Conditional Activities. Read more about the feature and watch a video walkthrough on Moodleman’s blog post: Moodle 2.0 Sneak Peak – Conditional Activities.

Realizing this ability in Moodle 2.0 makes me excited to show our users (in the way future..) that this is possible. I believe this will save teachers’ time by allowing them to do more at one time. For instance, instead of having a student complete an activity, then having the teacher go back to unlock or create a quiz and directing the student to complete it–a teacher is able to do everything at once instead of editing the course twice. I think this will also work great with motivating students to complete their work. Knowing they have the power to see or reach the next activity may motivate them–like a game.

I just wonder how easy this feature is to set up in Moodle 2.0. I might focus some attention on this on my dev site and post on it in the future.

Any thoughts?