Moodling 2

I have now got Moodle running on my PC locally after installing it using a very useful Joomla standalone server set-up called JSAS.  Although I did manage to lock myself out of phpmyadmin for a while as a result of setting up a password!  I edited the config file, after I found the thing, and all is hunky dory once more.

Anyway, Moodle, which installed without a hitch, is up and running and I have been playing with the css files and creating a ‘corporate’ colour scheme using my handy stylesheet editor Style Master (very nice piece of kit).

I have also set myself up as an administrator, course creator, teacher and student for testing purposes, so I’m feeling wee bit schizophrenic at the moment.  I’ve sourced documentation from the exhaustive resources to be found all over the main Moodle site and have been toying with Moodle settings and have already set up an example listening exercise which has been added to a course.

At the moment I’m feeling similar to when I first installed and fired up Joomla, a little overawed, but, hey, that’s learning for you.  No pain, no gain.

Anyway, Moodle looks very promising and its very easy to understand how it has generated a worldwide following.  Now, ‘all’ I have to do is come up with a few concrete ideas for useful courses and have a few guinea pigs test them out for me.  There is lots to do, but this is stuff I love doing and if I end up with something which helps English language learners progress more quickly, then I will be happy.

Lunch time.  That’s all for the moment from this here webmaster, cum webdesigner, cum teacher, cum photographer, cum course planner, cum content designer, cum geek.  Over and out for a minute.

Moodling

Moodle, if you do not know, is a course management system or CMS (Joomla is a CMS too, but in Joomla’s case CMS stands for Content Management System). Moodle basically allows people to develop and run just about any course for just about any subject on-line.   It’s open source and its free.  The Open University in the UK is working on a Moodle based e-learning set-up for its students.  If it is good enough for the Open University, then it is more than good enough for me.  I intend to use Moodle to develop and manage learning materials.

At present, I link to various on-line exercises from my website, but, although these on-line exercises are OK, being a picky type of soul, I like the idea of being able to develop excercises myself and aim them at the specific needs of my students.  I’ve yet to decide just how I shall exploit Moodle, in fact, I’ve yet to install Moodle on my webserver due to the MySQL version not being the one I need.  I have spoken to my very efficient hosting service, HostingPlan who are willing to move my site over to a server which has an acceptable version of MySQL.  Thanks HostingPlan!

Once I have the right dbase stuff, I can proceed to install Moodle, which is not difficult if you have some familiarity with the web server administration system CPanel, which I do, luckily.  While I’m waiting for things to be transferred, I can install Moodle locally on my laptop and have a play to get myself familiar with what it can do and what you need to do to make it do what you want.  Once I know a little more, I can have a think about how to set things up and start creating courses and adding content.

My only gripe with on-line solutions for language learning is that it is not yet easy to practice that most essential of skills, speaking.  However, this is coming and with PHP5, CSS3 and Moodle 2.0,  something called “VoiceXML” will start to be implemented and developed and voice based interaction will become possible.  Yes, I know that this is not real conversation, but with a little imagination prompted conversations can be developed and should help non-native speakers of a language to deal with real-life situations more confidently.  The potential of this technology is without bounds in my opinion.  I find it fascinating.

I shall report on my progress.