I arrived a few days early with my spouse (also attending from her institution) to do some touristy things. Man, the International Drive area is a strange place. Everything is big, artificial, and tourist-centered. There seemed to be a repating theme of not level buildings (1, 2). Our hotel was not the best Educause hotel we’ve been to. First the advertised wireless barely reached our room and second it wouldn’t connect to any site (DNS errors). It was fixed by Wednesday but was frustrating nonetheless. We wound up sneaking into an adjacent hotel’s patio to use their wireless one night. Also, on the first day our room door wouldn’t lock. We called the desk and they sent a technician over — a guy with WD-40. He sprayed the lock and it worked. The next day the lock wouldn’t open. The same guy came with the same can of WD-40. A few sprays and it worked! After that the lock worked fine for the rest of our stay.
We spent an afternoon at Universal Studios Florida. The movie attractions were rather fun. Unfortunately Jaws was not open and I had wanted to see that one most (I remember Jaws from Universal Studios California when I was a child and was looking to relive that experience). After the conference we went to Epcot since my spouse visited that when she was a child. This was Friday and the rain was starting (probably a precursor to Wilma). We managed to really mess ourselves up on Mission: SPACE. Heed the warnings on that ride. The warnings at Universal were largely overstated. This one left us feeling like we went through a wringer.
I’m off to Educause 2005 next week. I hope to connect with some other moodlers there. I’ll be wearing my moodle button so say “hi” if you see me! I’ll also be convening the best moodle session there – “Closer to the Dream: Letting Pedagogy Transform Learning Management Systems” — so be sure to attend!
I’ve rewritten my contact_inactive_students_log function in the Augsburg moodle library. This is a function that will email instructors a message with a list of students who have not been active in X days (including ones who have never logged into the course). In addition
This function is best called by command-line php in a nightly cron job. The included active.php file shows how to call the function.
I’ve also posted a more standard group-aware version of Quickmail. My other version was hacked up a bit. This one should be cleaner.
In addition I’ve added a hack to make login as a little more restrictive.
As we’ve gotten ready to deploy moodle 1.5.2+ this fall, we’ve done a few tweaks and additions to moodle. Since posting the PHP code seems to not work well in WordPress I’ll just link to some off-site HTML pages. Use any at your own risk!
Thanks to Sean who pointed out that edublogs is meant for educators rather than students. I had better read those FAQs!
I also wanted to link to my annotated bibliography version of the articles in my previous post. The annotations will give you an idea of what was studied in some of the articles.
Blogging has taken a real hit with fall semester looming. I will return!