mighty.grey.eagle

Just go to the Moodle site and download the XAMPP version. All nicely packaged together an never fails - at least not for me.

Could be many possibilities. Moodle 1.7 is very new and it may have broken your theme. If you let me know which theme you are using I can try it on our test system.

CLEO are producing sample courses at the moment - mainly so that they can be used for training and bringing staff on board. Perhaps your broadband consortia could be persuaded to join together with CLEO. That way everyone gains.

Parental access sounds good in principle but there are a number of problems. I suspect that some students would not respond as positively to Forums and Chats if they knew that their parents were reading their posts. Also how would you monitor what the students were saying about names, addresses and telephone numbers? Remember: A parent can still be paedophile! A simple solution would be to write something that summarised the assessment details and then these were e-mailed to the parents.

I think that many of you have missed the point. Beer might be a good idea but surely the most important point is to choose a pub with wireless access. Otherwise how are you going to talk to each other? That way, if there is someone stuck alone in the SW they can still feel part of the geek community Actually I might sneek along and hide in a corner. You never know, after a few pints the vi, emacs debate might become very heated. Or the finer points of DHCP RFC...... Feel free to comment back since I will be going out with a load of teachers

Yes please . Just let me know where.

Did anyone manage to get all of the BBC archive? We only managed the news items and "WW2 Peoples War". Wouldn't mind a look at the rest. Also. Has anyone got anything useful out of the "WW2 Peoples War"? Seems to consist of a load of XML.

That is probably because the blog has been turned off in the administration!!!

They are correct, but unless they are willing to take it to the next stage rather than simply moan about it you can safely ignore them. This must be a first. Geoff arguing that blocking a MICROSOFT product might infringe a user's human rights 8O

I think that you are going slightly over the top here, Geoff. It would be an interesting case where a student went to the Court of Human Rights just because the word f**k had been blocked. Secondly, on a slightly lighter note, there have been times when Hotmail has been blocked in school (not by us I may add). Suddenly the office is beseiged by sixth-formers claiming their human rights have been violated!

The Moodle forums can send out e-mails of the postings. Can these not be used?

Within 5 minutes of posting the comment about the Moodle interface "improving" I noticed on the moodle.org site a posting saying that Moodle 1.7, which should be released early next month, will have the HTML Quickforms API embedded in it. So it looks like it should be easier to use sooner rather than later.

Looked at this a few years back and, in the end, opted for Moodle. If you look at the roadmap for ATutor most of that is already implemented in Moodle. As for the interface you may be right - but Moodle isn't that difficult. Most of our teachers seem to find it quite simple. Work is going on at the moment using AJAX to make it a little more drag and drop - if that is what you need!

Jam tomorrow. Expensive jam as well.

Thanks Tony for the OU background. What people miss about the TCO is the cost of support. You would have to pay an absolute fortune to get the equivalent support of the Moodle community. It was interesting at the Moodlemoot last year where an Oxford University speaker, talking about Bodington, confessed that a number of departments had set up their own Moodle systems for the extra features and in order to get control for themselves! At the time Bodington had blogs and Moodle didn't. That appeared to be the only thing in it's favour. However if Bodington had had an extra "D" in the spelling I might have changed my mind But then again it has got stronger over the years, changed it's colour, got taken over by Interbrew, then they closed down the brewery.....don't get me started.

Interesting to note that they quote the Open University as an informed source in their document and then, as Geoff has mentioned, ignore the fact that Moodle has become their VLE of choice.

Very nice, but does SIMS work any faster?

Why? Set up Moodle on an machine and play. You will soon see which works better.

You are quite right about "most" of SCORM 2004 being required (check here) but, even if Moodle doesn't have these features yet you can guarantee that it soon will have. The Open University, which came on board about 6 months ago, are developing a good head of steam and you can bet that they will want this feature. Look at the commercial companies. They will promise you anything as long as they get a sale.

Looked at the Uniservity site a few weeks back. Looks like they are trying to jump on the VLE bandwagon and (this is the teacher coming out in me) the site was full of spelling mistakes! Don't look at anything but Moodle. Go to Moodle.org and browse the forums. Ideas flowing everywhere and fantastic support.

Bonnie Langford???? Oh my god. Anyway. Back to geek uniform. What about tanktops? I am sure I have one at home that my mother knitted for me.

Just been across to the IT office. Three technicians and not one likes Dr Who! All of them have short hair and there isn't a Nirvana teashirt in sight. What is the world coming to?

Not sure about this book - the author seems to have had a very minor presence on Moodle.org. A book that is available now is by Jason Cole (from the Open University). I found the book slightly dull but some of our less knowledgeable teaching staff have found it useful. You can find it here If you want several of my free Computing/ICT courses go to Darren Smiths site which can be found here.

Can anyone see a trend? http://www.google.com/trends?q=Moodle%2C+Kaleidos%2C+Blackboard%2C+Class+Server Can anyone spot Kaleidos?

Thanks Ric. It might be easier if I send a technology teacher down. They are the ones who need convincing !