The issue is that capitalism involves lending money at interest. If you lend at 5%, then one of two things must happen. Either the money supply must increase by 5% or the velocity of circulation must increase by 5%. In either case, if this growth is not met by a concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, it becomes inflationary and the system collapses. But a perpetual increase in the supply of goods and services will eventually destroy the biosphere.

Monbiot.com » Identity Politics in Climate Change Hell

There are a number of Course Management Systems (CMS) for running courses via a website. These are also sometimes called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE).

I use Moodle to look after the Organic College’s distance learning courses.  This has been fantastic but I often find myself looking around at other services which would be easier for course participants to use to get things done. For example:

• Wordpress or Blogger would allow participants to create rich blogs more easily than they can in Moodle
• Picasa desktop and Picasa Web Albums would allow easier uploading and displaying of photos
• Wikispaces has a much richer and easy to use wiki system where participants could work collaboratively on documents.

There are lots of other examples of where a free web service that has been designed to do one job does that job better than the CMS. In an effort to improve the experience of participants on our courses it’s been challenging to make decisions about using these other services. Stepping out of the ‘walled garden‘ of the CMS means that they will have to learn new systems, create new accounts and potentially get confused as to where they are on the web. The extent to which these things are a problem very much depends on the individual.

Matt Crosslin has an interesting series of articles called ‘Death of the Learning Management System’ over on EduGeek journal that address some of these issues. In part 5 he looks in particular about how to connect users of the CMS with other services. He says:

We need to start seeing the LMS as the control panel of a subway system. As trains go all over the place, the relay information back to the control panel so that the head conductor can know where they are going and what they are picking up on the way. In other words, use the tool to make the instructors job easier while also launching students out on to the web to learn.

This is similar to the approach I’d like to take; Moodle is a fantastic way to look after the course content, but it would be good to make using other web services part of the course experience whilst still connected to the ‘control panel’ - i.e. Moodle in our case.  The beauty of using an Open Source CMS is that plugins can be written to adapt functionality. In the above article Matt mentions that he will look at writing some plugins for Moodle to provide more of this kind of functionality. If Susweb gets time that will be something I’ll look at as well.

I couldn’t resist posting this picture which I found via Graham on Mark Wallace’s blog.

Some people may find this provocative!

these people may be a tiny bit insane.

WordPress Idea — Picasa desktop upload to Wordpress button.

10 reasons why mind mapping is great. I use Mind Mapping a lot both for planning, research and summarising. Both hand-drawn and computer-created (currently use iMindMap) are valuable.

It’s been a long time in gestation but I’m excited to be writing the first post for ‘Get Growing‘ - a site dedicated to growing your own food. The aim is to provide inspiration and information to encourage more of us to start producing and eating things we’ve grown ourselves.

From small acorns…

There are lots of reasons why I wanted to start writing this - reasons that will be covered in future posts - but a particular motivation for starting now is that I’m about to begin a new garden. I’ve grown a few radishes as a kid and had a few lettuces in the back garden over the years, but I’ve never seriously spent time tending a garden and growing a good proportion of my own food.

Why am I starting to garden now? Where is the garden? What will be on this website? All questions to be answered over forthcoming posts.

For now it’s ‘time to get growing’…

Wordpress 2.6 is being rapidly deployed to all my sites. Some really useful new things, especially the enhanced security and Google Gears integration.

The admin panel is now starting to look really good. But I can highly recommend this drop down menu plugin which is the icing on the cake and improves speed of use.

My friend Graham has just posted his latest response in an ongoing debate which is well worth reading. I’m with Graham all the way! Thanks for making the effort to to do all the writing Graham.