Re: [Server-devel] volunteer for offline Moodle
So the Google Gears rpm is finished (good lesson for me on how to package for Fedora) and we are working on the final obstacle for Browse, which is finding where in God's name the chrome subdirs are supposed to go... when thats done, we can create the browse rpm too... So I have a slightly different plan :-) This is great, but we should look for an interim solution to full blown Offline Moodle, something we can start using soonish... But maybe what you outline below is an interim solution... I guess we'll know when we start coding... First of all - you will need a good familiarity with Moodle, how it is used, and how it works internally. I don't know how much you know Moodle - my notes below assume a reasonable knowledge of the internal APIs. The first stage of the plan is to work on the main course page - look into the topics course format. The first step is to make that course format AJAXy/Gears-y -- there is an AJAX version of it but I am not sure if it is any good. The goal is to make it cacheable -- this is the lesson plan that Bryan was talking about a few days ago. Other good things may come with it (better ajaxy editing for teachers for example) but that is candy on the side. The main thing that *must* work well is being able to load that page when disconnected. Remember that the Jolongo people have already done a lot of this work, so if we can get a hold of what they've done, it might help. That said, they've not responded to my mails in a while now... [I am not sure how to trigger that with GG - to hook into the browser and say if host X doesn't seem present, load up this HTML+JS we cached here, under the privilege scope of the site..] Together with the course format, we will want to make mod/resource gears-cacheable. From all the Gears demos I've looked at, this has been the main focus of it so far... showing cached data locally and storing that into a sqlite database where necessary. The API seems straight forward enough, and even I can understand most of it (I'm not a born programmer...) That will give us 80% of the benefits for 20% of the effort - give or take some % there :-) We will want to be extra careful to make it in non-intrusive ways, so it is easy to incorporate upstream. 20% of the effort is still quite a bit of work - there are lots of details to work through. Once the above is done - we can tackle other modules, and perhaps some blocks, with better knowledge of what works well with GG and what doesn't. Some Moodle modules are a really bad fit for GG (mod/quiz), others will take some effort, but work great (mod/forum). The general model - as you can see - is one of caching locally, which simplifies things a lot. As you note, this will be a large long term effort, so we want to make sure that our work is not OLPC-specific. We might do things earlier than moodle.org but we sure want to have them helping with it mid-to-long term. Maybe we should talk to Moodle and make this official with them somehow? That might get some of the other projects to join our efforts.. It seems silly to have 3 forks of offline moodle, and from what I've seen so far the Gears method by far outweighs the benefits of the other methods... As we are caching stuff, and will only have small amounts of local data we need to push up to the server (like action logs), the storage economy is quite simple - we discard old stuff as we have to - we might define a quota there, but I think GG sets that for us anyway. For authentication, I am not sure at the moment - we'll cross that bridge when we get to it :-) but for OLPC it is an easy bridge due to the 1:1 and the related auto-login assumptions. Authentication is one of the first things that need looking at, since a Moodle user must login in order to download anything... Some of the first course material should probably be related on how to use Moodle and Offline Moodle... we could use that to create some skeleton courses that work both online and offline... How do we split the next workload? Kind Regards, David m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] volunteer for offline Moodle
On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 5:53 PM, David Van Assche [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So the Google Gears rpm is finished (good lesson for me on how to package for Fedora) and we are working on the final obstacle for Browse, which is finding where in God's name the chrome subdirs are supposed to go... when thats done, we can create the browse rpm too... Excellent - is the srpm or the makefiles available anywhere? Might be a good idea to post to Fedora-devel about it, it is sure to get a review, and perhaps some help with its long-term maintenance... So I have a slightly different plan :-) This is great, but we should look for an interim solution to full blown Offline Moodle, something we can start using soonish... But maybe what you outline below is an interim solution... I guess we'll know when we start coding... It is. I am not sure how familiar you are with Moodle, but this is the clearest practical plan I can think of that gives us working code ASAP and also gives us a long-term maintainable codebase approach. I have been working with the goriest parts of Moodle internals for more than 4 years, and the offline moodle problem has been in the back of my mind for at least 2. Maybe that helps :-) Maybe we should talk to Moodle and make this official with them somehow? I am in touch with the moodle.org crowd quite a bit, and they know my offline moodle plans - in a vague outline as I have described in this email. I weighted mentioning it on moodle.org when Tony posted, but I rather wait until we have things a bit more organised and fleshed out. If we can flesh out the plan above with you and Tony, and see what time you guys can put into it, we can probably move the disucssion to either general developer forum or the offline moodle forum. But we need to have our plans a bit more polished :-) That might get some of the other projects to join our efforts.. It seems silly to have 3 forks of offline moodle, and from what I've seen so far the Gears method by far outweighs the benefits of the other methods... The OU crowd has a product with users out there, and can't jump ship immediately. The AIR guys may be too far down their path. I am confident that I have a solid plan and as soon as we can get working code done people will slowly start to play with it and eventually join us. But it is always like that in any project - more visitbie with FOSS but ever present - _you_ have to crack the nut, show a viable path with working code. And only then others will follow. My main concern is that I don't have any time to work on this for a few months. I will be doing ancillary stuff (moodle authentication, etc) but cannot work on this. Authentication is one of the first things that need looking at, since a Moodle user must login in order to download anything... Not for our use case -- the user on the laptop is always the same user on moodle, and gets auto-login. That simplifies things - so let's not worry about it for now. Yes, we will have to solve it, and I have a couple of plans there.but not on the first day :-) Some of the first course material should probably be related on how to use Moodle and Offline Moodle... we could use that to create some skeleton courses that work both online and offline... Don't worry - if we do something nice, the moodle crowd will help us write that in _no time_. How do we split the next workload? We should have a chat (phone, skype, irc) about this if possible. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Moodle: File upload question
On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Tarun Pondicherry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I posted this question on the Moodle forums a while ago, but got no response. I was thinking you might know the answer. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=100822#p445265 I replied right there. if you mention the project you are working on, I am sure people with take an interest :-) m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Puppet -- looks like a neat tool for managing school servers
On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 8:45 PM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetIntroduction I will probably play w/ it tomorrow. could be a neat tool for keeping xs's up-to-date I am familiar with Puppet. We might steal a few ideas and tools from it, but unfortunately, it does not pass muster - the whole scheme is not very scalable and depends on reliable connectivity. The guys that work on it have server rooms to manage, not faraway schools. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] EduBlog Question
Hi Walter, I lost the context of your comment. I assume you are talking about the request for a workflow that passes the edit focus from one kid to the next to the teacher. Let me know if this doesn't answer your question. We did evaluate the Journalism activity. You can see early Edublog ideas on the talk page at that URL which were put there after an exchange with some Journalism people. The original idea for the project came from Pablo who envisioned it as part of the journalism project. He wrote a Knights Challenge document which is available at the link Original requirements definition: Blogs Knight Challenge from: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_Educativo_Plan_del_Proyecto When I noted that they are already blogging from Uruguay (e.g. http://cardal-ceibal.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2007-10-25T09%3A47%3A00-07%3A00max-results=7) and asked why that or Wikis aren't sufficient. He mentioned these things: * The need for good connectivity * Children getting confused with some options * The number of steps involved in creating a post * Difficulty in collaborating on a post * Difficulty with monitoring and viewing posts before being published from: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_Blogger_Project#Problems_with_Current_Blogging_Systems (Spanish original with more detail at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_Educativo#Desaf.C3.ADos_para_un_sistema_educativo_de_blogging) So it was clear that we wanted to make blogging easier and include the ability of the teacher to review before posting. We evaluated Drupal, Moodle, Wikis, Wordpress and other options. None quite fit or it would take to long to implement modify them for our purposes and we weren't sure of good community support. So we decided to create a simple web interface with some basic teacher review options. Add to that end APIs that post to many tools, starting with Moodle and blogger.com and you have EduBlog! In the end it was easier to create the simple front end inside Moodle as we knew we would get great support from Martin :-) The details of the work flow for multiple editors and review cycles is not done yet. I'm not sure if that will happen w/XO and collaboration or if we are close enough or if we need to build a more complete workflow into EduBlog in the future. That's all tbd. For now I hope we solve 4 out of 5 of the top problems mentioned and maybe we can solve the collaborating on post problem too, depending on what the beta test results. The other goals of the project are: - See what it takes to build an educational/XO specific web app that runs on the XS - See if we could build a relationship between real teachers and volunteer programmers by addressing specific requests from the teachers - See what we can learn from running a bi-lingual and bi-cultural (in many senses) project HTHs. There's more history and background at the links of above if you dig deep enough. Thanks, Greg S Walter Bender wrote: Maybe I am missing some subtly here, but isn't the functionality you are describing just as readily accomplished with a wiki? Also, in case you haven't seen it, I recommend Jack Driscoll's discussion in the OLPC wiki on journalism (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_activities/Journalism). Most of it is applicable to any public writing exercise and is generally agnostic about the details of the tool itself. The important thing is to have a structure that affords editing: peer-to-peer and teacher-to-student (editor-to-journalist). -walter ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
[Server-devel] OLPC/Sugar related MIME Types...
I am going to add some MIME types for Apache on the XO - application/vnd.olpc-sugar xo - application/vnd.olpc-content xol - application/vnd.olpc-journal-entry xoj The above list comes from a bit of Googling about. Are there any other mime types that we care about? cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
[Server-devel] Missing theme for Moodle
From: Myles Carrick [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tony, re item 2: the Moodle site is not set up correctly - and it's not a Postgres issue. Viewing the source you'll see that you're not displaying valid html... in fact the header and footer files (displayed from the chosen theme) aren't present... and therefore no CSS either. Have you perhaps chosen a theme then subsequently deleted it from the /themes directory? What are the current contents of that directory? Myles Myles, Here is my theme directory. [XS-tony theme]$ pwd /var/www/html/EduBlog/moodle/theme [XS-tony theme]$ ls -al total 36 drwxr-xr-x 4 apache nobody 4096 2008-07-12 18:02 . drwxr-xr-x 36 apache nobody 4096 2008-07-13 05:47 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 apache nobody 5161 2008-07-12 18:02 index.php -rw-r--r-- 1 apache nobody 1335 2008-07-12 18:02 preview.php drwxr-xr-x 3 apache nobody 4096 2008-07-12 18:02 standard -rw-r--r-- 1 apache nobody 4918 2008-07-12 18:02 UPGRADE.txt drwxr-xr-x 3 apache nobody 4096 2008-07-12 18:02 xo [XS-tony theme]$ I saved all 10 screens from the unattended operations and the only place theme shows up is in the first page, as fields on four databases. (postgres7): CREATE TABLE mdl_course ( id BIGSERIAL, category BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, sortorder BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, password VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', fullname VARCHAR(254) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', shortname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', idnumber VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', summary TEXT, format VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'topics', showgrades SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 1, modinfo TEXT, newsitems INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT 1, teacher VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Teacher', teachers VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Teachers', student VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Student', students VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Students', guest SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, startdate BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, enrolperiod BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, numsections INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT 1, marker BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, maxbytes BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, showreports SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, visible SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 1, hiddensections SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, groupmode SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, groupmodeforce SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, defaultgroupingid BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, lang VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', theme VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', cost VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', currency VARCHAR(3) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'USD', timecreated BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, timemodified BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, metacourse SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, requested SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, restrictmodules SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, expirynotify SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, expirythreshold BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, notifystudents SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, enrollable SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 1, enrolstartdate BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, enrolenddate BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, enrol VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', defaultrole BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, CONSTRAINT mdl_cour_id_pk PRIMARY KEY (id) ) Success (postgres7): CREATE TABLE mdl_course_categories ( id BIGSERIAL, name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', description TEXT, parent BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, sortorder BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, coursecount BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, visible SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 1, timemodified BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, depth BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, path VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', theme VARCHAR(50), CONSTRAINT mdl_courcate_id_pk PRIMARY KEY (id) ) Success (postgres7): CREATE TABLE mdl_user ( id BIGSERIAL, auth VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'manual', confirmed SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, policyagreed SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, deleted SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, mnethostid BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, username VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', password VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', idnumber VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', firstname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', lastname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', email VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', emailstop SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, icq VARCHAR(15) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', skype VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', yahoo VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', aim VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', msn VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', phone1 VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', phone2 VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', institution VARCHAR(40) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', department VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', address VARCHAR(70) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', city VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', country VARCHAR(2) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', lang VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'en', theme VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', timezone VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '99', firstaccess BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, lastaccess BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, lastlogin BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, currentlogin BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, lastip VARCHAR(15) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', secret VARCHAR(15) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', picture SMALLINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, url VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
Re: [Server-devel] EduBlog Beta Server
Hi Tony, You are King (or Raja :-) Thanks a lot! BTW a teacher in Uruguay created some art work for us. I attached them here (let me know if they don't come through). You can put them on the home page or where ever they seem to fit, if you have time. I can't wait to try out the new implementation once Tarun gets (gits :-) it installed. Really great work. Thanks, Greg S Tony Pearson wrote: Greg, The EduBlog beta server is up and running. I created a home page here: http://edublog.venango.org/ I used some royalty-free icons from iStockPhoto. On the upper left, I have the following links Launch Moodle with EduBlog -- links to http://edublog.venango.org/ EduBlog/moodle Learn more about Educational Blogger Project -- links to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_Blogger_Porject On right center, I display the current release levels: Server Details: XS-163 (2.6.23.1-21.fc7) Apache 2.2.6 PHP 5.2.4 PostgreSQL 8.2.5 Moodle 1.9.1+ More info -- links to phpinfo.php which gives out all the PHP values On the bottom right, I have: Moodle Administration -- links to http://edublog.venango.org/ EduBlog/moodle/admin Item 1: Currently, I am the only admin, and it is in manual accounts mode, so only the eight of us on the EduBlog team have moodle accounts created for us. I could not figure out how to change this to email self-registration and not sure at this stage if we want to open it up for others? I have registered the site with moodle.org and reCaptcha, so we have the private/public keys ready for self-registration if you know how to activate that. Please advise. Item 2: The moodle screens are sparese text only and do not seem to be using any css style sheets or graphics. I am not sure if this is from Tarun's customization of 1.9.1+ version, or this is the new look of Moodle, or if something is wrong with Moodle's interaction with PostgreSQL. If PostgreSQL is the problem we can switch over to MySQL. Item 3: If you want the main page to point to some of Tarun's mock-up screens, we can certainly do that. Item 4: I have cron.php running every 10 minutes. Thanks Tony Pearson http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Az990tony inline: ninios_compu.jpginline: maestra_5.jpginline: ninias_compu.jpg___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] EduBlog Beta Server
BTW a teacher in Uruguay created some art work for us. I attached them here (let me know if they don't come through). You can put them on the home page or where ever they seem to fit, if you have time. Greg, Teacher artwork incorporated into the home page. Tony Pearson (az990tony)___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
