A journal of fixes and testing of BIM. Aim here is to address some minor issues with integration with my current institution's Moodle instance thereby providing a minimum working version for installation. As per yesterday's planning the hope is to make further changes based on this foundation....more...
I have until the 21st of February to get BIM tested and ready for installation into the institutional Moodle instance. The following is some initial planning of what I'd like to get done in that time frame. A list that will then need to be further whittled away to what I can get done in that time frame. There are three categories of changes...more...
The following describes an attempt to develop a visualisation of the frequency with which students in the course I teach posted to their blogs during two offerings of the course in 2013. A few reasons for doing this...more...
In 2014 I am hoping to make some changes to BIM that will enhance the course I'll be teaching. The hope is to leverage various learning analytics to enhance student learning. The following is an attempt to use the IRAC framework to think about what might be done. Essentially a bit of brainstorming about possible future development....more...
BIM is a Moodle activity module that I developed and use. BIM evolved from an earlier system called Blog Aggregation Management (BAM). BIM's acronym is BAM Into Moodle. As the name suggests, BIM is essentially a port of all of BAM's functionality into Moodle. Both BAM and BIM are designed to help with the task of managing students in a course writing and reflecting on their own individual web blogs. In particular, it was designed to do this for courses with hundreds of students....more...
Earlier this week @sthcrft asked https://twitter.com/sthcrft/status/397143586178756608...more...
Read this piece - Why CIO's, IT and Faculty need to find common ground on technology - by David Wiley yesterday as it did the rounds. The article argues that the focus of the CIO/IT on highly reliable systems is a mismatch for the needs of innovation in learning and teaching. It brings up the tension between standard systems and rogue systems (aka shadow systems). The solution to this is a space - a policy space - that enables innovation....more...
Good news this week. BIM got into the institution's testing site for Moodle. One step close to going live. The bad news is that there were a couple of issues to resolve. This post is a record of the attempt to address the big one (successfully as well)....more...
Update: A student from last semester has shared her experiences from last semester using Feedly. The big limitation with Feedly is the absence of a search facility. But then it appears that this is a limitation of all the competitors as well (for now)....more...
The following is a summary and some thoughts on the following paper...more...
Update: Video now available showing evolution of links between student blogs over the course of the semester (HT: Nick Kelly) - see YouTube embed at the end of the post...more...
Time for a bit of coding. The following has gone on over a few weeks....more...
A question for those with experience of Moodle or other LMS tools/plugins/services etc...more...
The following provides the abstract and slides used in a presentation at Moodlemoot'AU 2013....more...
What's good for research, must surely be good for teaching?...more...
Next step in the development of bim v2.0 is to start the process of submitting it to CONTRIB. i.e. essentially getting out officially into the Moodle community....more...
The following is the first attempt to expand upon an idea that's been bubbling along for the last few weeks. It arises from a combination of recent experiences, including...more...
As a developer, you have to love it when someone using your code diagnoses and identifies their own problem with your code. Especially if they give you a clear and concise explanation you can use. That's what happened with the BIM2 problem I blogged about recently. It appears I was using Moodle 2.3.4 the problem was found on Moodle 2.3.2+ and there was a change in the Moodle code in-between. The following describes the bug and hopefully the fix/change I've made to the BIM code....more...
The following problem with using BIM has been reported the following is a record of my attempt to recreate and fix the problem. The problem...more...
In the course I'm currently teaching the students will be expected to keep a learning journal. They'll be keeping this on a personal blog that they register on the course Moodle site (but not with BIMM, the institutional process to get BIM installed is underway). The following floats some initial ideas about how the "assessment" of the learning journal will be automated....more...
Another step in getting BIM 2.0 ready for release. Addressing the current two outstanding issues prior to exploration of submitting BIM to Moodle CONTRIB (??appropriate terminology)...more...
The third in a series of posts documenting necessary cleaning up of issues with BIM. Getting closer and closer to release of 2.0b...more...
Building on that last bit of issue cleanup this aims to reduce the list of open BIM issues a bit more. The focus in this part will be...more...
While BIM 2.0 is largely working there remains a list of 30 open issues to be addressed. 19 of these are "future" issues. i.e. changes that would be really nice but aren't necessary for the immediate release of BIM 2.0. The following is the first part of working on the 11 that are of immediate interest....more...
The following reports on the process to complete the backup/restore functionality for BIM 2.0. Backup is currently working. Time to add the ability to restore those backups. It draws on the process described in this documentation - "Restore 2.0 for developers". Which doesn't appear anywhere as detailed/sequential as the backup 2.0 documentation....more...
What follows is a journal of the attempt to bring BIM 2.0's backup functionality into line with the new approach in Moodle 2.x....more...
More work on bim2, this one starting work on the previously identified tasks. Find out what BIM is here....more...
More detail on what BIM is can be found here...more...
In case you're wondering, BIM is a Moodle activity module that helps teaching staff manage individual student blogs. This post is one of a number of posts documenting the development of a version of BIM that will work with Moodle 2.x. More detail on BIM here...more...
Some more work on bim2, carrying on from last night. Aim here is to attack some of these tasks:...more...
So it appears that bim2.0 is increasingly needed (if you don't know what bim is, check this out). University of Canberra have gone to Moodle 2 and CQU are about to, the only two places I know that bim is being used. Most importantly, I'm now teaching at a Moodle Uni and am seriously thinking about using bim, and my Uni is about to move to Moodle 2....more...
Disclaimer: I started this post in November 2011 and never posted it. It is essentially a development diary for some initial steps in development BIM for Moodle 2.x....more...
The wife's out for some culture so I find myself late on a Saturday night taking the initial steps in the second attempt to port BIM to Moodle 2. Started reading Mike Churchward's blog series on porting modules to Moodle 2....more...
Earlier this year, as the assignments mounted with my Graduate Diploma of Learning and Teaching, I put the development of BIM on the back burner. As my study to become a teacher winds down (stops for good on November 11 at the end of a 6 week internship) I'm thinking of re-starting work on BIM. Before I do that, I'm have a couple of questions...more...
The purpose of this post is to make formal what many people have already assumed. Work on BIM and BIM for Moodle 2.0 is not really happening at the moment. I've already missed the "early 2011" release of BIM for Moodle 2 I was aiming for and have been incredibly slack in solving an issue with BIM for Moodle 1.9 and Yahoo Pipes....more...
Time to continue the implementation of support services for manage marking started in the last post. Services left to be implemented are...more...
As per the last post time to complete some support services for manage marking....more...
The next step in bim2 development is implementation of the manage marking tab....more...
The last work on bim2 ended up with the first 2 of 5 tabs for the coordinator interface completed. This post continues on with that development....more...
The last bit of work on bim2 set up the structure for the coordinator interface and operations. This post documents the work of implementing the models, i.e. starting the process by which the coordinator interface actually starts actually working. Most of this should be a reasonably straight translation/update of bim into the OO structure of bim2....more...
This tells the story of the conversion of the bim coordinator code into the new OO design being used for bim2....more...
The purpose of this post is to make concrete the status and future plans around bim2. The update of bim for Moodle 2.0....more...
The following continues the coding of the bim2 process for registering and processing a new student feed. It's taken a couple of weeks, but it is working with only a few minor tweaks and nudges remaining....more...
Apart from the many todos, the last post covering bim2 development left off at the task of registering a new student feed. Summarising/recording the development of bim2 to complete that task is the purpose of this post....more...
The following floats/records some initial ideas for connection two of my current projects, BIM and lak11. The ideas arise out of some discussion with my better half who is currently using BIM in one of the courses she is teaching....more...
The last post ended up with the basics of the student controller and views functioning to produce some simple output. The aim here is to get the entire student interface up and actually reading data from the database. It won't be completely finished. There will be some additional extra features to add. The aim here is to iron our the design of the whole model/view/controller set of classes....more...
I'm currently programming up bim2, a new version of BIM to work with Moodle 2.0. I'm wondering whether a version of BIM for Wordpress might be an idea....more...
bim2 now has a working controller structure, but it doesn't do anything. This post summarises initial attempts to implement the student controller so that it actually implements the state machine for the student interactions. It's also the first attempt to implement some models and views with the MVC structure for bim2. This is liable to raise a range of questions about design, testing and other tasks....more...
So, bim2 is up and going, at least in terms of being able to create an instance of the activity within a course. The trouble is that it can't do anything. This post starts the process of implementing the design of the user interactions with bim2. The intent is to go with a Model-View-Controller type structure in the hope that this will improve flexibility and reuse....more...
Okay, so after fixing up the naming problems with bim2 etc, it's time to actually get the code going....more...
The last post covered the initial steps in starting bim2. Including the choice of the name bim2. But there is a problem....more...
The following records some of the initial steps in actually coding bim2. It includes...more...
The main long term issue in the use of BIM has been student's creating blog posts that contain "special" characters. This is typically done when they create their post in Word and then copy and paste it into their blog. The interaction between BIM, SimplePie and database engines has not been a good one. It results in blog posts either not being stored in the Moodle database or being cut off at the special character....more...
This might seem like a bit of procrastination preventing progress on BIM 2.0, but it's part of the whole Moodle 2 familiarisation process and also checking out the work of a friend. What follows is an attempt to install the universite theme for Moodle 2 onto a local instance....more...