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MOD THE PARENTS UP!

The correct links are:
Ubund Spirals:
http://www.henshall.com/blog/archives/001056.html
Moddle:
http://moodle.org/login/index.php

Why did shashark ebmed the links to Unbound Spiral and Moodle (defanged here) in dw.com.com SPYWARE links? Is this the sleaziest submission scam yet, which actually forces us to install spyware to follow a frontpage Slashdot link? Are all those jokes about soulsucking NYT registrations really true about shashark? This should be the abuse that finally forces Slashdot editors to check the links on submissions.

"dw.com.com is advertising-oriented spyware (adware) that downloads and displays new advertisements in a popup window while a user is browsing the Web. dw.com.com is difficult to remove, as it does not provide an uninstaller."

And it's already translated into Australian (heck it's even translated into US for us 'mericans:-)!

All the pupils at my school are fine with computers; we've set up an installation of moodle, and it works great -- the biggest problem with computers damaging productivity is when the teachers can't get them to work, and the pupils have to spend the first half of the lesson sorting them out. (Only to spend the second half of the lesson sitting through a horridly designed powerpoint presentation, because after fiddling with the computer trying to get it to work, there was no time left to plan a proper lesson)

In the world of educational CMSes, Moodle is pretty much king of the roost. Not only has Martin Dougiamas helped build and direct a quality system that has a presence in over 100 countries (nearly 3000 registered sites), but he is successfully parlaying his expertise in service and support, providing the opportunity for others to become support "partners."

I have never been one to believe that's it's criminal to make a living off F/OSS. I think you can have it both ways, and Martin does a great job at proving this to be the case.

We at the Department of Communication, University of Aalborg, Denmark use Moodle as the primary communications channel for one of our study programs in multimedia. It works extremely well for us -- our students and lecturers love the simplicity of the interface, while also relishing its power. Teachers speak well of Moodle's didactically enabling features, and the ease with which they can structure the time-flow of their teaching using Moodle.

I am the administrator/help desk guy for our Moodle site, and I must say, it is easy as pie. I very rarely hear from anyone, and when I do, it's usually fixed in 15 minutes or less. I've been running our site for almost a year and a half now, and I've only spent something like 20 man-hours on it, all told. That includes spending time upgrading Moodle, fixing bugs in Moodle, AND supporting users. Moodle has a very active and very helpful user community at the Moodle site, which provides lots of help both to newbies and to seasoned Moodle veterans.

I've recommended Moodle for another Danish educational institution, and they've also been running it for a year and a half now, with very good results. The praise lavished on Moodle from their users -- teachers and students -- falls along the same lines as what I said above.

I can highly recommend Moodle as a Course Management System.

Ulrik Petersen

We at the Department of Communication, University of Aalborg, Denmark use Moodle as the primary communications channel for one of our study programs in multimedia. It works extremely well for us -- our students and lecturers love the simplicity of the interface, while also relishing its power. Teachers speak well of Moodle's didactically enabling features, and the ease with which they can structure the time-flow of their teaching using Moodle.

I am the administrator/help desk guy for our Moodle site, and I must say, it is easy as pie. I very rarely hear from anyone, and when I do, it's usually fixed in 15 minutes or less. I've been running our site for almost a year and a half now, and I've only spent something like 20 man-hours on it, all told. That includes spending time upgrading Moodle, fixing bugs in Moodle, AND supporting users. Moodle has a very active and very helpful user community at the Moodle site, which provides lots of help both to newbies and to seasoned Moodle veterans.

I've recommended Moodle for another Danish educational institution, and they've also been running it for a year and a half now, with very good results. The praise lavished on Moodle from their users -- teachers and students -- falls along the same lines as what I said above.

I can highly recommend Moodle as a Course Management System.

Ulrik Petersen

On an unrelated note, Moodle is a quite nice bit of lesson management software; we've started testing it in our school, and it seems fine so far :)

I'm guessing you're suffering from googleitis and meant moodle instead of moogle.

If that's the case, then yeah, moodle might be a good choice. It's pretty modular, but be warned that it really wants to stick with the social constructionist philosophy. This might actually be quite good for your needs, as I'm guessing acquiring a language is an activity that can certainly benefit from this type of learning--it's just that I ended up on a project that was trying to adapt it to the California DMV requirements and it got pretty hairy.

It works with a bunch of DBs, it's PHP so everybody and their uncle can mess around and customize it, its got nice UIs for students and teachers, and you can even force your advanced students to use it in Nihonji (using the Japanese language pack).

Give it a spin, it's GPLed and everything :)

I'm guessing you're suffering from googleitis and meant moodle instead of moogle.

If that's the case, then yeah, moodle might be a good choice. It's pretty modular, but be warned that it really wants to stick with the social constructionist philosophy. This might actually be quite good for your needs, as I'm guessing acquiring a language is an activity that can certainly benefit from this type of learning--it's just that I ended up on a project that was trying to adapt it to the California DMV requirements and it got pretty hairy.

It works with a bunch of DBs, it's PHP so everybody and their uncle can mess around and customize it, its got nice UIs for students and teachers, and you can even force your advanced students to use it in Nihonji (using the Japanese language pack).

Give it a spin, it's GPLed and everything :)

I'm guessing you're suffering from googleitis and meant moodle instead of moogle.

If that's the case, then yeah, moodle might be a good choice. It's pretty modular, but be warned that it really wants to stick with the social constructionist philosophy. This might actually be quite good for your needs, as I'm guessing acquiring a language is an activity that can certainly benefit from this type of learning--it's just that I ended up on a project that was trying to adapt it to the California DMV requirements and it got pretty hairy.

It works with a bunch of DBs, it's PHP so everybody and their uncle can mess around and customize it, its got nice UIs for students and teachers, and you can even force your advanced students to use it in Nihonji (using the Japanese language pack).

Give it a spin, it's GPLed and everything :)

Has anyone used Moogle?

That would be Moodle. The section on Moodle for Language Teaching has some interesting ideas and shows it is widely used for this purpose.

An essay on using Moodle has this comment:

The e-mail and archiving system in Moodle is one of its greatest features. Students post their messages on the Moodle web page, but the messages are sent out to all subscribers as regular e-mail after a teacher-determined delay, of say, 15 or 30 minutes. This gives the writer a chance to review the message and revise it if necessary

All messages appear with a tiny mugshot of the sender, with a smiley face for those who haven't uploaded a digital version of themselves yet. This small feature goes a long way towards building 'community' since it allows students to place a face with a name.

The fact that Moodle has given some thought to email as an education tool is probably an indicator of the thought that has gone into other components.

Has anyone used Moogle?

That would be Moodle. The section on Moodle for Language Teaching has some interesting ideas and shows it is widely used for this purpose.

An essay on using Moodle has this comment:

The e-mail and archiving system in Moodle is one of its greatest features. Students post their messages on the Moodle web page, but the messages are sent out to all subscribers as regular e-mail after a teacher-determined delay, of say, 15 or 30 minutes. This gives the writer a chance to review the message and revise it if necessary

All messages appear with a tiny mugshot of the sender, with a smiley face for those who haven't uploaded a digital version of themselves yet. This small feature goes a long way towards building 'community' since it allows students to place a face with a name.

The fact that Moodle has given some thought to email as an education tool is probably an indicator of the thought that has gone into other components.

Has anyone used Moogle?

That would be Moodle. The section on Moodle for Language Teaching has some interesting ideas and shows it is widely used for this purpose.

An essay on using Moodle has this comment:

The e-mail and archiving system in Moodle is one of its greatest features. Students post their messages on the Moodle web page, but the messages are sent out to all subscribers as regular e-mail after a teacher-determined delay, of say, 15 or 30 minutes. This gives the writer a chance to review the message and revise it if necessary

All messages appear with a tiny mugshot of the sender, with a smiley face for those who haven't uploaded a digital version of themselves yet. This small feature goes a long way towards building 'community' since it allows students to place a face with a name.

The fact that Moodle has given some thought to email as an education tool is probably an indicator of the thought that has gone into other components.

Has anyone used Moogle?

Don't you mean Moodle, the online educational tool similar to Blackboard or WebCT? Moodle can be a great tool to assist the classroom experience; we're testing it out in my department and will hopefully deploy it throughout our private prep school for the next academic year.

(Thought I'd follow up the 'death-to-Blackboard' rants with a constructive suggestion...)

If you want to ditch Blackboard, take a look at Moodle. It's a dang good PHP-based courseware system that's open source, free (in both senses), very actively developed, and (important for administration types) you can buy support and various other services via Moodle.com. You could set it up in your personal webspace as a sandbox for people to look at and play with.

Plus, you could have CS students write modules or otherwise contribute to development - everybody wins!

You can take a look at how other schools are using Moodle at their site list.

Enjoy!

(Thought I'd follow up the 'death-to-Blackboard' rants with a constructive suggestion...)

If you want to ditch Blackboard, take a look at Moodle. It's a dang good PHP-based courseware system that's open source, free (in both senses), very actively developed, and (important for administration types) you can buy support and various other services via Moodle.com. You could set it up in your personal webspace as a sandbox for people to look at and play with.

Plus, you could have CS students write modules or otherwise contribute to development - everybody wins!

You can take a look at how other schools are using Moodle at their site list.

Enjoy!

With an educational discount, Windows 2003 server costs my department $142 (sure, it's more in a commercial environment), I can install it, set it up, run updates on it once in a while, run the baseline security analyzer on it, and forget about it. Give me a linux that does all this in an easy to use manner, and I'll switch. Sure, I could use apt and the others, but it just takes too much time, and you have to worry about various dependencies and what not.

At $142, that's $142 more you have to spend compared to FOSS solutions. What you've described, proved either that your educational institution is filthy rich and caters only for the rich and snobs, or you're just plain lazy.

Most educational institutions, whether state-run or even privately operated (esp. private with visions of education rather than for profit), are almost always tight budget! This is especially true in third world countries! That is why various bodies such as SchoolForge (and their Case Studies), K12OS, Moodle, OpenSourceSchools, KDE Edutainment Project and a lot more others are being founded and.. surprise! Thrives!

Personally, I love the K12LTSP Project. A branch out of the K12OS Project, which when deployed properly throughout the campus, can provide access to all students to high-grade apps in a very stable environment. Access from any terminal in any labs, authenticating via NIS, LDAP or whatever you prefer and access your mail accounts, website or whatever. With backend support tools available such as MySQL or PgSQL and PHP/Perl (okay, maybe that's a bit far out, but I've met 12 year olds who can code!)

Software cost? $0

Have a look at moodle. Its cross platform/open source designed for the education community and comes with optional comercial assistance.

and computers can't fix them.

So the latest thing to blame the failures of a coercive education system designed on the factory model that serves only a few of the many learning styles and punishes the others is: (taadaaa) technology!

Woo hoo. Take all the computers out of the schools, put all the abstract basket weaving back in, and then sit back and read how that was a dismal failure too (and not only can Johhny not read, but now he can't even punch the right little pictures on the McD's register).

Our schools will continue to fail most kids, most of the time, until we find the political will to re-design them for the modern era.

Can't wait for that, homeschool. Online homeschooling is growing by leaps and bounds. But do it via the social constructivist model that actually works:-).

Moodle.org is an open source package that allows several features of what everyone has been mentioning here. A neat feature is the journal that allows the teacher to critique their writings privately. It also has forums, online quizes, etc.

Visit moodle.org.
It covers the weblog part of what you want and allows the addition of Journals, Surveys and Quizzes.

Check out Moodle (http://moodle.org) it is the best open source LMS available right now and does an awesome job of facilitating discussions. Discussion should be the center piece of any type of online learning. Moodle is easy to setup, easy to configure and easy to use.

The correct link:
http://moodle.org/

the system looked nice... but the institution i work for probably wouldnt use it... they use blackboard. I did however find something similar and opensource...

it was moodle. it works nice and even has some extra cool features

Edventure

Moodle

cbd.