[vaughany].com

Exactly one year ago I joined South Devon College’s Web Team, as their Senior Web Deveoper (with a Lead above me and an Assistant below). Back then we were a Technology Exemplar Network college, meaning we were outstanding in our field (not the exact terminology used, but you get the idea) in the use of ILT.

Today, one year after I joined, we are once again a Technology Exemplar college, and actually we are really good at what we do. No, honestly, we are.

Last week we hosted a TEN open day, in which we showcased what we were good at and how we got there, and invited other colleges to attend and share our good practice. While we had a lot of information to pass on, I personally had 3 lots of 15 minutes to show good practice in developing and managing the technical aspects of our VLE (virtual learning environment) Moodle.

Many of the ways in which I do my job have been inherited from the Lead Web Developer, as he was doing it before I was, however it doesn’t make it any less relevant, or less good. What struck me was how many questions I received and how many conversations I was involved in, where what I perceived as the simplest things weren’t being done, were being done badly, or were being overlooked.

For example, we have four people directly involved in the training and development of Moodle: two technical people (the Lead Web Developer and I (Senior Web Dev), as well as two front-of-house people (the Blended Learning Manager and e-Learning Coordinator). The technical people manage the servers, codebase, and do developent as required by the other two, who teach the teachers how to use Moodle to ensure effective teaching and learning are taking place.

The Moodle Development Team meets every two weeks, and to be honest, they are the best, most productive meetings I have ever attended. I think this is mostly because we are all peers with nobody dictating what is and is not done. (It is worth mentioning that the Blended Learning Manager has the final say as she is the business manager for Moodle, but as she responds to the needs of the teachers and the learners, we are not doing things for no reason or at someone’s whim. Everything we do is driven by the needs of the learners, as they are the reason we are here.)

At the open day, one chap we spoke to (in the context of a whole IT department, not just in terms of Moodle) said that his college’s IT Manager ran the IT aspects of the college as his own personal fiefdom, dictating what was allowed and what was not, regardless of the request or the reason behind it. Consequently the OFSTED report for this college showed that teaching and learning were being prevented from taking place.  Not just ineffective, but prevented. This is a very sad state of affairs indeed. (Please note that so far I’ve been unable to verify this via OFSTED’s website and I’m not naming names.)  Why the IT Manager is not puting the needs of the learners at the top of his list, or has been replaced by a more learner-centric IT Manager, is beyond me.

It surprised me, at our open day, how many colleges do not have a working link between the “front of house” (as I call them) teaching and learning people, and the technical people (whether they are Moodle-specific, as I am, or not). In one case, the people teaching and training the use of Moodle don’t have a channel to request new features be added, or even perform updates (quite vital as of the 1.9.7 release).

We use a code versioning system (called Git) to pull the very latest code from git.moodle.org (to keep on top of security updates, bug fixes and so on), and manage the changes we make to the code.  This way we can modify the core code to meet any needs that we have, and it won’t be overwritten when the next version of Moodle is released. Instead, changes from ‘upstream’ are merged with ours.

It’s simple to use, very effective, and I have trouble remembering how I used to develop code without it, however it strikes me as somewhat odd (maybe ‘unfortunate’ is a better choice of words) the sheer number of Moodle users who aren’t using version control.  Such was the short time I had and the number of questions directed at me that I didn’t have the chance to ask my own, but it would have been as simple as “Why aren’t you using version control?”

We also use the Ruby gem Capistrano to deploy our code to multiple web servers simultaneously and seamlessly.  I know very little about Ruby as a whole but the Lead has developed a number of bespoke in-house systems which use it, and it is simple enough to set up to deploy any code anywhere.

Possibly another example of many small things adding up to one big good thing, is our use of Linux. The Web Team (a small part of the IT department) use Ubuntu Linux on our desktops (three) as well as our servers (seven and counting).  The Moodle developers recommend a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) over all the other web and database server options, as do the Mahara people,  and our bespoke internal systems use the same but with the addition of Ruby on Rails.  We could use Microsoft products like every other server in the building, indeed there is a small yet constant pressure to do just that, to conform, what with all the Microsoft-specific knowledge and experience in our immediate team, but would it make our Moodle/teaching and learning/us “better”?  Just because something is popular, doesn’t necessarily make it right.  Likewise it’s not necessarily right because it’s less popular either, however the fact of the matter is that we use “non-standard” stuff and it works for us really well.

Example One

Recently we had a bit of snow.  You may have seen it on the news? The college was shut for one afternoon and the whole of the next day.  Despite this, learning was able to continue due to the college strategy of having (two weeks’ worth of) resources available on each and every Moodle course for just such an occasion.  Using Google Analytics we could see that although total ‘hits’ (logged-in page and resource accesses) on Moodle had dropped off to a quarter of what could be considered normal, the number of external ‘hits’ was up by 30%, proving that despite the snow being immense fun, some learners were going home, logging in and getting on with some learning.

Example Two

Did you know that even Technology Exemplar colleges get viruses?  Well, if you logged into Moodle when we had our virus, you wouldn’t have noticed, because like most viruses, it was targetted at computers and servers running Microsoft operating systems and software. We were, however, affected in two ways.

1. The account Moodle uses internally to log into LDAP to authenticate users was deactivated by the virus, meaning that for a minute or two, anyone trying to log in was unable to. A pain, but out of the control of the Web Team who have no authority to administer user accounts.
2. Our e-portfolio software Mahara runs on Ubuntu Linux, just like all the other servers, but this one  is running virtually via Microsoft’s Hyper-V on a host computer running Server 2008, which, you guessed it, fell victim to the virus and had to be (literally) switched off, killing one physical server and quite a few virtual ones. Mahara was off for quite some time (will leave out the actual time to spare some blushes) and it is a good job we are trialling it and it is not considered mission-critical.

Conclusion?

I’m less concerned that we’re exemplar now, but more concerned interested in how to do my part to ensure we’re exemplar this time next year, and one year is a very long time in technology.

After my last post I don’t care if the VLE dies or not (which was my purposefully leading perspective on the “is the VLE dead or not?” debate which Steve Wheeler lit the blue touch paper on this week) I read around on the comments and posts which are still coming in to the key players’ blogs.

Daniel Kennedy blogged his general agreement with James Clay about finding a middle ground between institutional control and the learner’s ‘personal web’.  Adapt and survive, in a sense (not that in my opinion the VLE is in any way dead or dying). But what caught my attention about Daniel’s post was that his institution is using Microsoft’s SharePoint as a VLE.

Now, VLE stands for Virtual Learning Environment, and this is usually used to describe one piece of software / web application, such as (to name but a few) SharePoint, Blackboard and Moodle. Other phrases exist, such as ‘personal web’ which has been used to describe the various web 2.0 tools which exist (and they do, en masse) used for educational purposes.

As James points out the VLE could be the start of the ‘personal web’ if more learning professionals were willing to embrace them:

From my experience, most e-learning professionals aren’t engaging with the Web 2.0 tools and services out there let alone learning professionals. At ALT-C 2008 for example, six hundred delegates who were coming to a learning technology conference, and of those less than 8% were using Twitter!

Is it a case of the educators being out of date? (By the way: twitter.com/vaughany.)

When I was at school we didn’t have computers or the internet, we had chalk boards and ‘copy this into your workbooks’. Thank goodness, teaching has come a long way (and hopefully, so has learning). Since then, as a teacher I have used the internet and VLE products to teach, I am reasonably certain, very effectively. So if today’s learners are web-aware (or whatever phrase you wish to use to convey a reasonable degree of IT awareness) and the educators are not, isn’t that the first most serious problem which needs addressing?

I was a teacher, but I am not currently. I’d like to make this clear. Steve works in the Faculty of Education at a university. I’m not going to argue with his wisdom which must greatly exceed my own. Other ‘heavyweights’ such as James (and others, just read the comments on the various blogs and follow the links back) are also professionals and have lots more experience than I do. But one point I would like to make, as a former teacher but as someone who now works to support the development of a VLE, is that your VLE may not be a VLE.

‘The right tool for the right job’ is an important phrase to remember. Steve and Daniel’s university uses MS SharePoint as their VLE. Wait… what? SharePoint being used as a (let’s expand the acronym here so we have a full understanding) virtual learning environment? I’ve seen SharePoint used as a VLE elsewhere, albeit briefly, and I was not impressed. I personally see it as a high-quality extension to MS Office: it has collaborative editing of documents, version control of same, the ability to group users into departments/sections/hair colour as required with varying levels of permissions and a ton of other useful features besides. But none of the features of SharePoint actually strike me as facilitating teaching or learning, simply as facilitating better document management and control, and to a point, presentation of said documents.

Calling something a VLE when it is not is a sure-fire way of undermining the whole concept of what a VLE is and does. I could call Notepad a word processor or Paint (sorry for picking on Microsoft) a graphics design package. I would be wrong. If there’s no learning inherent in the system then don’t use that word.

There is no reason why the acronym VLE could not be used to encompass all non-physical tools which could be used to facilitate learning, itself containing the Managed Learning Environment (SharePoint, Blackboard, Moodle) as well as the personal web), or maybe it is the other way around, with the PLE containing the personal web as well as the VLE… Too many acronyms spoil the learning.

My (further) 2¢: give the learners a structure which fits the institution’s way of working, within a framework of tools the learners can use, or not, at their own discretion.

–

This, below, is the essence of what I want to write, but know that my experience and understanding of teaching using (VLE/PLE/Web 2.0/all the many and various methods available to us) is considerably less than that of most of the people involved in this debate, and therefore my opinion is based on same, but I still want to write it:

If you think the VLE is dead, you’re not doing it right.

Actually, I would, as I specifically applied for the job I am now doing (Moodle Developer) because it was working with Moodle. So I would at least care if that VLE died.

Enough of the purposefully facetious and leading comment.

I’m not a teacher any more. Most of the comments being made about the VLE/PLE debate focus on the teachers and the teaching, but that doesn’t concern me.  I’m a developer, a techie. I’m currently working with Moodle as my main focus but things change. I may soon be getting invlolved in Mahara development, or Drupal, or Joomla, or goodness knows what else may come along.

I’m currently lucky and thankful that there are employers out there who have enough presense of mind to employ people to develop open-source software for the benifit of not just themselves but for the community too.

As long as there is technology out there which needs developing, I’ll be happy (and employed, that’s the critical one). As for the teachers, I’ll let the debate continue.

At work, for Moodle,  I recently created a QR code (often called a 2D or mobile  barcode) block based on something similar I had seen at City of Bath College’s Moodle (not that I can find it now). What it does is to encode the current page’s URL and some optional information (such as course title)  into a pattern of black and white areas which can then be ‘read’ and interpreted by lots of mobile devices, linking that device to the web page in question.

The block I created was very simple and it did the job it was supposed to do. Yay me. But then I left it on my PC instead of adding it to the Modules and Plugins database on Moodle.org. I was, after all, busy enough with other Moodle-related tasks.

Then: Block: Mobile Barcodes (QRCode). Damn! Bother! Arse!

It remembers to check for https connections but that’s the only major difference between their block and mine. It even uses the same Google Charts API to generate the image. I really should have got my finger out and promoted my work sooner. I suppose I could have even saved this block’s creators a little bit of work.

I honestly want to like Internet Explorer. I used it for a long time and it has varying degrees of the market share depending on who you talk to, certainly it varies from two-thirds to three-quarters for the sites I see the Google Analytics for (probably as it is installed as default and the masses don’t know/don’t care that other web broswers are available, but whatever).

I just cannot bring myself to like something (or the company which produces something) which causes me to have to write the following code:

<!--[if IE]>
    <div style="position:relative; width:460px; height:84px;
    filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='<?php echo $path; ?>/image.png');"></div>
<![endif]-->
<!--[if !IE]>-->
    <img src="<?php echo $path; ?>/image.png" />
<!--<![endif]-->

It’s just not right, is it? (PHP simplified somewhat for presentation purposes.)

I’m a Linux user these days, by choice. My day job requires interaction with Linux servers so it seems logical to use Linux as my OS of choice (and I’m lucky enough to have an open-minded IT department and a boss who appears to be an actual l337 h4xx0r) and I have found desktop-server interaction a lot easier than using Windows XP. (I stilll have XP though: my PC is dual-booted but defaulted to Ubuntu.)

Consequently, I don’t have quick and easy access to IE. I use Firefox as my primary browser and have the other main three (Opera, Safari, Chrome) available for testing, so imagine my surprise and dismay when I saw the Moodle theme I have been lovingly working on for the last two weeks look like a complete pile of kak in IE.

Granted, this was IE6. I don’t know how old it is in terms of years but it’s two versions old, which in IT terms is an epoch. Thankfully we’re upgrading en masse over the summer to IE 7. Which does an only slightly better version of rendering my fairly standard CSS.

Can’t we all just agree on how things like margins, collapsing, padding, borders, the box model and all that jazz work? Does the phrase ‘web standards’ get filtered out of all emails inbound to MS IE developers?

I’m not anti-Microsoft, honestly. I have never written M$ when I meant MS. In fact after installing Ubuntu three times and then using it  for a week I had a new-found respect for the nice people at MS and the work they put in to ‘making things just work’, it’s just that I’m not entirely sure they’re going about things the right way. (Maybe they aren’t on purpose? I’m sure they have their own agenda. Like 100% market share of eveything, same as Google.)

They seem to get away with things (for example, the lack of PNG support) simply because they are the market leader: it has to work with IE or you are excluding 67-75% of your customers (my percentages, based on the Analytics figures I mentioned earlier). So if I create a site which uses PNGs (specifically the alpha transparency), it will look kak to 67-75% of the people who see it. That is obviously something I don’t want to happen. Therefore I have to compromise, using GIFs with index (?) transparency, or JPEGs with none and getting the gradients all matched up, which could be a problem.

The only answer (at the moment) is to feed different code to IE than the other browsers, such as the solution above, by which I mean ‘working’ code to the other browsers and ‘IE fixes’ type code to IE.

I can’t say I’ve used IE 8 yet (I will have to for testing purposes: we only have IE 7 internally but our Moodle is of course available externally too) but I hope it works more like Firefox 1.0 than IE 6.

#mmuk09 is the hashtag which marks tweets on Twitter as belonging to a specific topic. That particular tag belongs to MoodleMoot UK 2009, which was held yesterday and today at Loughborough University here in the UK. I learned a lot:

1. I learned how to pronounce Dougiamas.
2. I also learned how to pronounce Lafuente.
3. Moodle actually has a community. You’ve probably heard it has (you’d be right) and you may have seen a lot of activity on the forums and on the tracker, but you don’t realise what that means ’til you go to a Moot. I’m not sure of the numbers but the lecture theatre we used (which held exactly 256 people!) was packed to standing room only.
4. People on Twitter sound very unlike what you’d expect when you meet them in person.
5. It’s great to hang out in person with people you hang out with on Twitter, Facebook et al, even if only for a day or two. Roll on the next (relevant) RSC-SW event!
6. I now like Zane Lowe on Radio 1 and have to listen to something/someone called Deadmaus Deadmau5 (yes, that’s a five, thanks @powdermonkeydan) as the drive home was long and I don’t have a CD changer.
7. Moodle 2 is due to be released at Christmas 2009, but some people close to the project think this is a little optimistic. There is, however, an incredible buzz about Moodle 2 and the community is being encouraged to bug-hunt and where possible, bug-fix.
8. There will shortly be a competition on Moodle.org to create a course which promotes best practice in Moodle course creation…! Prize is yet to be determined but the point is to get exemplar courses on demo.moodle.org to show the world what Moodle can do.
9. Mahara may be the single most important piece of software you can link Moodle to, and link to Moodle.
10. Having followed a Mood via Twitter, it makes a little more sense having tweeted from one, alongside goodness only knows mow many others. What at first seems disjointed starts to make sense, but you need to be following a number of peope (who you can find via hashtags (if it works) or via yout Twitter client’s search function).
11. I need to be running (K)Ubuntu or get a Mac, not only for the kudos of it: fewer problems all round for those attendees using those systems than those using Windows systems (me).
12. Sean Keogh, organiser of the UK Moot (the very first Moot anywhere, ever) doesn’t want the full responsibility of the job next year, so is looking to share the responsibility with others. Contact him via moodlemoot.org.

I had a great time, learned a lot, and got a much greater sense about what Moodle is about, even though I thought I had a pretty good idea in the first place. The phrase ‘you don’t buy the software for the software, you buy the software for the community’ has never been more true.

Edit: Something I missed of the post above is that I enjoyed hearing about the early days of Moodle, for example, the near-daily code releases from Martin, the organiser Sean emailing Martin and asking about LDAP authentication (I think it was) and receiving a LDAP authentication plugin via email the next day… From such humble beginnings so much has been achieved and so much more to be done!!

Lastly, how does ‘Dr. Dougiamas’ sound?