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.

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.

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.

I’m not going to be selling any valuable things on eBay for a while thanks to this info from the Guardian.

i’ve been trrying to explain this to a few friends and family for a while now. these guys do it very well:

Click To Play

(thanks to Conor and Donncha for finding it)

superb free screen capture software and also image viewer for windows from faststone. all run as portable applications too.

the screen capture tool also has a colour picker and screen magnifier.

the image viewer has a good camera card import option. and for a real treat - go to full screen view and move the mouse to the edge of the screen to get one of four useful menus to pop up - try all four edges of the screen.

all with no installation, no dll’s etc. great stuff.

This research from Google on hard disk failure rates really surprised me:

The report said that there was a clear trend showing “that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates”.

a few people have mentioned recently that they can’t play certain video’s or audio files on their computer. (mpeg4 video files and certain avi files seem to be a problem for people using windows media player.)

if you need a multi purpose player for virtually any platform that will play most file types, then get the excellent free open source vlc player. there’s a portable version too.

(or Command + F for Mac users).

Many years of daily computer use often makes one forget that other’s don’t necessarily make the most of the electronic paradigm. Recently I’ve sat looking over the shoulders of friends and family as they slowly scroll through a long Word document or web page trying to find the bit of text they want to show me or edit. This makes sense in a paper world - you scan through the pages, hoping your eye lands on the words you’re after. It seems it’s a well ingrained habit!

If you’re looking for a word of phrase on your computer you don’t need to do this!. Get into the habit of holding down Ctrl and pressing F (for ‘Find’). This works in most programs.

Go on - make a new habit before New Year.