See also: Archives
The following is a summary/reflection of Winn (1990), the abstract follows...more...
The following is at first a rambling diatribe outlining some of my reservations with instructional design as it is practiced. Then it is a summary/reflection on Winn (1990) - "Some implications of cognitive theory for instructional design". The abstract for Winn (199)...more...
Prior to BIM being installed and used at my current institution it had to be checked by folk at NetSpot. The following details what I've had to do in response to that....more...
As part of looking into a project around curriculum mapping I need to take a look at the current state of play around curriculum mapping in the Moodle community. This is a summary of what I can find at the moment....more...
The following is an attempt to make concrete various ideas that have been floating around about a project to take a very different approach to curriculum mapping. There's a small glimmer that these ideas may form the basis for an ALTC grant application...more...
It is with a significant sense of relief that I announce the release of version 1.0 alpha of BIM. You can see the code and what passes for documentation on this page. The main BIM page gives more background on the rationale and design of BIM....more...
Today is the day that BIM get's handed off to the folk of my institution's central IT division and from there onto Netspot who will be ensuring that it is "safe" for IT to install it on the institution's live Moodle instantiation. In preparation for the hand over, I've done one last test and identified some issues to fix. This post documents that work....more...
Today BIM was tested by an intelligent, but when it comes to BIM a clueless, user. I sat back and watched the assumptions and mistakes that were made because the system design was not well thought out enough or was missing some functionality. The following is a list of the ideas that arose from that session....more...
A few days ago Stephen Downes - a little unusually - made a sequence of comments/tweets on Twitter around the "sameness of meaning" and its impossibility. Since then I've had a number of experiences and discussions that suggest some of the problem associated with learning and teaching policy, process and structure within universities arises because too many people assume that there is sameness of meaning....more...
Currently testing BIM on the training/testing environment of my current institution. This is where I find all of the problems from the institution's non-vanilla implementation of Moodle....more...
BIM is essentially complete and about to go into user testing, however, initial testing suggests that an ability for staff to change the blog students have registered would be a significant benefit during the first couple of weeks. This post describes the design and implementation of this feature....more...
One of the bigger tasks left to do is to integrate BIM with the gradebook. Some initial exploration has been done, this post seeks to document the initial implementation....more...
Just about done with development of version 1.0 of the module. A couple of important, but hopefully straight forward tasks to do. One of these is adding the ability for BIM activities to be backed up and restored. That's the purpose of this post. The plan is to find out how it is meant to work and plan how it can be done for BIM....more...
The following is the start of a process for developing a paper that I plan to submit to Moodlemoot AU 2010 based on my recent experience in developing BIM. The plan is to:...more...
Continuing the tidying of BIM. This time the focus is on any and all steps necessary to get BIM ready to go up on a test server and have some real folk actually look and play with it. The structure of this will be based around users and actions. I'm going to do some of my own testing and then also add in anything that comes up from working with others....more...
The last tidy up of BIM resulted in some fairly major code changes as early design assumptions were over-turned in favour of more PHP/Moodle like approaches, not to mention general better design/structure. This tidy up turns to some of the more "housekeeping" types of tasks. This one seeks to ensure that BIM follows all of the security guidelines as suggested on the Moodle site...more...
What follows is an attempt to develop some of the foundations of what is driving the work I do in my current position/....more...
Next step in tidying up is to clean up the checking, calculation and setting of the blog and feed URLs as students register their blogs....more...
Just another test. Won't know it's worked for a bit....more...