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Harding University is just one of the droves of colleges and universities beginning to realize that Moodle’s 1990′s technology and pathetic security record is simply not meeting the demands for today’s learners or educators.

Harding dropping Moodle for Canvas: http://www.harding.edu/elearning/  Read more... (201 words, estimated 48 secs reading time)

Saw a trackback to one of my posts when I was moderating comments on my site this morning and thought I would share. When it comes to self-hosting WordPress, it’s always the simple stuff that will trip you up and cause you hours of frustration…I’ve been working with WP since its beginning and have learned many of these lessons the hard way myself. Glad to see one of my videos helped recover the site over at Sited and Blogged.

Never go with the first opinion

WordPress 3.5 was just released and it looks like they have made some nice enhancements. I’ve updated this blog and all went well–as usual. The retina-ready improvement is a nice touch showing that WP is keeping pace with pupular technologies. It has a new 2012 theme–probably blah, but I’m seeing a trend here–2010, 2011, 2012…humm, wonder what will be next . Also the new image management interface should be pretty nice.

See the video on this site about how to properly upgrade your WordPress blog–remember, don’t just press the “update now” button.

In this video I demonstrate how to unzip a backup file created in Cpanel and locate your WordPress files and database, then re-create your blog on a live site.

Five of the top 25 business schools are moving to Canvas by Instructure for their learning management system. They join more than 275 colleges, universities and school districts that have chosen Canvas as their technology platform for teaching and learning. School administrators say they chose Canvas because it complements their emphasis on educational innovation.

http://www.instructure.com/press-releases/five-of-the-top-25-business-schools-move-to-canvas/

The movement to a real, 21st century LMS, vs 1990′s systems like Moodle is catching on. Of course, now that Moodle is owned by Blackboard there really aren’t many independent competitors out there–you either go with Blackboard, it’s newest acquisition “MoodleBoard”, with Canvas, or you build your own…not much else left.

This video demonstrates a very cool app that allows you to project, or mirror, your iphone or ipad screen on your computer screen. It does not require jailbreaking your iPhone and works very well. The app is not available through the app store–you will need to download it from http://reflectionapp.com 

Canvas enters the open course arena with the Canvas network. Connecting students, teachers and institutions, through an open, online course network. https://www.canvas.net/

I’m giving away a blog containing the complete new testament–7,957 posts–one per verse.

See here for details….

Pearson, a publishing and education company whose products include books, newspapers, and online services, announced a major acquisition on Tuesday that will deepen its commitment to becoming a major player in online education.

The company, which owns the Financial Times and the Penguin Group book publisher, shelled out $650-million in cash to buy EmbanetCompass, a business that provides support services to colleges and universities that are moving their programs online.

View complete article…

Online education startups such as the Khan Academy, as well as new efforts by MIT, Stanford, and Harvard have helped spur interest and add legitimacy to the notion of remote learning. Now Google is lending its brainpower to the rapidly growing space by releasing a tool called Course Builder, open source software that is designed to let anyone create online education courses.

The Course Builder project came by way of another program Google ran earlier this year called Power Searching With Google. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which attracted about 155,000 students from 196 countries, allowed Google to marry some of the practices now common to online instruction with the company’s robust array of collaboration and communication tools. A new Power Searching session begins in two weeks.  Read more... (132 words, estimated 32 secs reading time)

The iPhone may get a lot of attention, but smartphones operating on Google’s Android operating system currently are outpacing Apple Inc.’s smartphone sales.

See article here…

Apple Inc. (AAPL) said Google Inc. (GOOG)’s YouTube won’t be included in the next version of the software used in the iPhone and iPad, the latest evidence of escalating competition between the two companies.

Apple has featured YouTube as a core application since the iPhone debuted in 2007. As Google has pushed into the market with its Android software — now the most-used smartphone operating system — the relationship between the two companies frayed. Apple also plans to replace Google’s maps application with its own in the next iOS release.

See article here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-06/apple-says-google-s-youtube-won-t-be-in-next-version-of-ios.html

It seems people are still having a lot of issues with the default theme height in the WordPress Twenty-Eleven and Twenty-Ten themes as evidence by the following post in the WP forums today…just one of many that seems to be a common issue for people.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/twenty-eleven-header-height-yet-again

Whoever created the headers in those themes must be from another planet when it comes to web-design. With the new theme editing and preview feature in WordPress 3.4, I thought making it easy to reduce the header height would be an obvious area that would be addressed for improvement, but looks like I was wrong. So, for all those wanting to reduce the ridiculously large header area in Twenty-Eleven and Twenty-Ten, see my video here.

Have you ever needed to download an older version of WordPress but wasn’t sure where to find it? A little known location of the wordpress.org site contains all WordPress versions from the initial release of 0.71 to the latest stable (3.4 as of this post). It also contains all Beta releases as well as the older WordPress MU (Multi-User) version that was incorporated into WordPress 3.0. Every now and then I have need for an older version…when I do, I go here:

http://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/

Below are some of the key findings by the University of Texas LMS committee–the complete report is linked below. Bottom line: Of the 5 LMS’s they evaluated, Canvas came out on top, and Moodle was a distant last place. Page 5, user testing, has some sobering statistics for Moodle with nearly 88% of the students, staff, and faculty indicating they would not recommend Moodle as a replacement for Blackboard and Moodle scored far below all others on the usability survey.

Moodle = “1990′s technology in 2012″  Read more... (263 words, estimated 1:03 mins reading time)

WordPress 3.4 was just released and as always you should upgrade, if for nothing else, just to ensure you have the security fixes. As for functionality improvements, there is nothing really exciting about this release. You can preview theme changes before publishing them and change the size of the header in the default theme now–although you are still stuck with the massive amount of wasted space above the header unless you make code changes like demonstrated here. You can also create nice looking Twitter embeds by pasting the tweet permalink on a line in the editor–been doing that for a while now with the Blackbird Pie plugin.  Read more... (134 words, estimated 32 secs reading time)

Three years of egg on their face and the disciples over in moodle-land are still pushing the big Moodle security lie. Maybe they need to refresh their memories.

Good thing Blackboard bought Moodle…at least there is one secure LMS in the company to choose from and it isnt Moodle

Moodle Security = Oxymoron

WordPress 3.3.2 is a security release and everyone should upgrade. Looks like the SWF uploader is being replaced…good, since it didn’t work that well anyway. No added features, but for security sake you do need to upgrade. Remember…don’t just push the upgrade button…do it right to avoid Murphy’s Law.

Now that Blackboard has effectively bought out Moodle, they are wasting no time making their presence noticed. Just look at the #Moodle hashtag on Twitter today and it’s right in your face. Moodle sells out and Blackboard takes over…of course, I still don’t see Blackboard in the Official Moodle Partner list over at Moodle.com

MoodleBoard