Free Technology Tutorials

WordPress 3.0.2 was just released with an important security update. Everyone should upgrade, but it’s particularly important if you have other authors on your blog. See details at the link below. Notice this was fixed on the same day it was reported and the new release was sent out to all users with an automatic notification in the admin area of every WP blog in use.  That’s effective and responsible open source security practice in action. Are you paying attention Moodle devs?

http://wordpress.org/news/2010/11/wordpress-3-0-2/

The wait is finally over for everyone holding their breath in anticipation of the release of Moodle 2.0…its was officially released as stable today. Moodle 2.0 has been hyped-up and billed as the release to revolutionize the LMS. To paraphrase a famous line from Napoleon Dynamite, for the past 3+ years, disciples over in Moodle-Land have been chanting the phrase “Wait for Moodle 2.0 and your wildest dreams will come true.”

Well, it’s here and my first thought is — where’s the 2.0 part?

I see a clunky, significantly slower system, with a much more complex and confusing navigation structure and a far less user-friendly teacher management/admin interface.  Read more... (244 words, 1 image, estimated 59 secs reading time)

FlexBooks is a site where you can create custom free textbooks under a creative commons licenses. Interesting…selection is a little limited, but may be of use to some…

http://www.ck12.org/flexr/

Assisted Learning for All is a website published by Saddleback College with over 150 short nursing videos…could be a good resource for those involved in nursing education.

http://www.saddleback.edu/alfa/vid_index.aspx

The link below is to the Khan Academy website where you will find hundreds of short video tutorials on various subjects. If you are a math teacher, you will want to check this out. All videos are made available under a creative commons license.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

A Dutch security company called Online 24 released a “research” study claiming to have found 84 security vulnerabilities in the Blackboard LMS. You can download the paper from Webwereld.

Research? Strikes me as simply a load of unsupported, extremely vague ramblings. Why would I say that? Maybe it’s due to their liberal use of “Imagine this” support in their “study”:

Imagine this situation:
“An attacker is able to gain access to files outside Blackboard’s document directory.
The attacker includes Blackboard’s access logs. These logs can be influenced by
the attacker, so exploitation would lead to a new highly dangerous vulnerability
that allows the attacker to execute custom commands on the Blackboard server.”  Read more... (270 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

I was helping a real estate agent move and clean up some problems with his WordPress site this week. He also wanted a better way of listing properties. After looking around a bit at different themes, I stumbled across the WP-Property plugin…in a word…very nice. Okay, two words

If you’re looking for a nice, easy way to list properties, check it out…with a little creativity you could probably think of lots of other uses for this cool plugin as well.

http://twincitiestech.com/plugins/wp-property/

Moodle released the following security vulnerability notice today following the irresponsible notification process they have used for years now that puts your moodle site at risk. Moodle.org touts the fact that they have over 1 million registered users however, this notice didn’t go out to them. Surely the devs are smart enough to at least send an email to the million email addresses they have in their moodle.org database?  Read more... (498 words, estimated 2:0 mins reading time)

The first WordCamp Louisville will be held on Saturday, December 4th. Can’t beat the price at $20 a ticket. I’ll be there and may even conduct a session or two. If you’re in the local area and are interested in WP, then it may be a good way to spend a Saturday.

http://www.wordcamplouisville.org/

BALTIMORE — According to an SEC filing, Moodlerooms, Inc. has raised $7.15 million in equity investment.Founded in 2005, Moodlerooms provides an e-learning platform- using moodle, a free, Web-based Learning Management System–for K-12, higher education, corporations, government agencies, and non-profit organizations.

Named in the filing were Stephen Hoffman, chairman; Martin Knott, chief executive officer; Thomas Murdock, founder and chief architect; Louis Pugliese, president; James Miceli; Mark Leuba, chief technology officer; and directors and investors James Savage, Waltham, Mass.-based Longworth Venture Partners; Jason Palmer, New York-based Kaplan Ventures; and Mark Grovic, College Park, Md.-based New Markets Growth Fund.

Read more here…  Read more... (228 words, estimated 55 secs reading time)

The exchange below regarding the way files are handled in Moodle 2.0 is…let’s just say, interesting. The way file management is handled in Moodle has changed drastically in 2.0 and most people liken it to fixing something that wasn’t broken. In fact, file management in Moodle was one of the few things that was simple and actually quite useful — aside from the annoying technical issue of them being attached to courses and not users requiring you to duplicate files every time you duplicated a course.  Read more... (271 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

Last week I had a server crash — hardware problems — and have spent the past week recovering. I had several php apps running on the server along with a lot of static content–including a couple thousand videos. So I spent a day rebuilding the server on a new box and restoring the static content was a breeze–really drove home the point for me about the value of keeping things simple. 500+ videos were just uploaded into a directory and were not part of a php app–very simple to restore. However, the vast majority of my content was tied to a couple Moodle LMS installs, several WordPress installs including one WordPress Mu install, and five MedaiWiki installs.  Read more... (580 words, estimated 2:19 mins reading time)

The foundation behind the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, a popular and free courseware-management and group-cooperation system, has announced that it intends to pursue a merger with another open-software group active in higher education, the Jasig organization. Jasig is known for uPortal, a general online gateway for college and university services. The two groups say they will craft a merger proposal to be submitted to both boards of directors in the coming months.

See original post here…

Sakai following Blackboard’s lead and integrating student management systems into their LMS…smart move.

Over three years in the making and finally, moodle.org is in the process of upgrading to Moodle 2.0 — The version that promises to revolutionize  the LMS industry and solve all the many moodle problems once and for all. I’m sitting on the edge of my seat just waiting for a glance of what the site will look like. I can’t wait to try out all the cutting-edge features. I’m so excited, I made a video…

SunGard and Blackboard have largely kept out of each other’s turf, with Blackboard dominating the market for course-management systems and SunGard focusing on administrative software for student records and other tasks.

Now SunGard is crossing that line. For the first time, the administrative software company will directly sell a course-management system to colleges and universities.

SunGard is making the play through a deal with rSmart, a for-profit company that packages, supports, and hosts freely available software that has been produced through a collaborative “open source” process. Under the partnership, SunGard will sell subscriptions to rSmart’s version of Sakai, an open-source course-management system developed by universities.  Read more... (109 words, estimated 26 secs reading time)

Ever have someone ask a seemingly simple question and when its answered, you ask yourself…WOW, where did that come from? See the answer from a Moodle disciple below to a one sentence question posted to the Moodle forums…WOW, where did that come from?

For a different answer to this 3+ year project, see below:

http://educhalk.org/blog/moodle-2-0-vaporware/

That kind of thinking is why many traditional colleges will be extinct in the near future. One reason why faculty are not the best decision makers when it comes to ensuring the longevity of an institution…

Lots of colleges are experimenting with e-book readers. St. John’s College is fighting them. At a recent meeting, the faculty of the liberal-arts college’s Annapolis campus voted “to discourage students from loading up Homer or Aristotle on their Kindles or iPads and bringing them to seminar,” said Rosemary Harty, the college’s communications director.

Read more…

Kudos to Matt Mullenweg for leading by example when it comes to open source.

Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress’s identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.

This is a really big deal.

http://ma.tt/2010/09/wordpress-trademark/  Read more... (207 words, estimated 50 secs reading time)

I haven’t been reading the threads over in Moodleland for a couple of months now, so I decided to check in today and see what I had missed. In a word…nothing! Same old disciples spewing the same old propaganda. I noticed the “hot topic” is still, when will Moodle 2.0 be released…calling that a broken record is a huge understatement. It seems the 3+ year development is still at least 6 months away from a true beta…that should be directly after Moodle 2.0 Preview 36

Question: What do all of the following phrases have in common?  Read more... (366 words, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)

Now that Elluminate and Wimba are owned by the evil empire I wonder if all the Moodle disciples will stop using them? It’s going to be real funny watching the all those BB haters using Elluminate at their next Moodle developers meeting…and it will be even funnier when Moodle finally realizes it can’t keep up and BB owns them within the next couple of years

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In a fact sheet about the purchases, Blackboard officials promised to continue to support both products, including their compatibility with rival course-management systems and open-source systems. “We’ll honor all existing contracts for Elluminate and Wimba clients,” the company adds in the fact sheet.  Read more... (140 words, estimated 34 secs reading time)