learnandteachonline.com

Brent Schlenker muses on a Facebook TV show trivia quiz and how it might be a step closer to a Facebook LMS. (Facebook login required for that quiz link.)

He wonders why and ends up thinking why not. I'm not sure either, but I still think an assignments widget might be a good place to start with marrying the two related but conflicting types of applications.

Still noodling with this online sexual harassment compliance course.

The California lawmakers did a smart thing by not allowing me to just write up some content and call it a qualifying course. They require that a lawyer or trainer experienced in discrimination be on hand to answer questions within two days. That's a good thing. I think a lot of times online courses are seen as the easy way out for trainees -- and for the corporate types contracting for it. Buy it, forget about it, and maybe it's all too easy to be worth much.

So... what if, instead of hiring or partnering with qualified trainers to enable this kind of hand-it-off thinking, I made an online course with which the organization's HR folks remained involved, and acted as the question answerers?

On larger HR staffs, there would be a qualified expert in discrimination. They could even do it as a team with a training specialist and an employment law specialist. It even seems like having the staff remain involved would be a plus if it came down to proving the company really tried to inform an employee who caused a harassment suit, wouldn't you think?

The social constructionist learning philosophy behind Moodle would lend itself perfectly to interaction in the built-in forums. I'd set up a section for each organization, and maybe think how to allow some interaction among the groups, or at least aggregate the fruits of previous discussions somehow.

I don't see any courses like this. Google searches are jammed with competing offerings (with all those California employees to train), but on a cursory review they look quite similar and not too inventive. What do you think? Would HR folks go for staying involved?

I've been researching this idea to make an ad-supported free compliance course in sexual harassment. I wonder if there would be a tiny market for organizations who actually want to teach the right thing do -- not just teach supervisors what to do to avoid liability. Nah. But a feminist orientation might be a unique differentiator!

I might try it. Goodness knows in California, mandated training can take some wild twists. If you have to go to traffic school you can go to one taught by a comedian, or one that serves a 5-course dinner. At least that's how it was when I live in L.A. in the 80s.

I've also set up a new Moodle installation, my first experience with version 1.8. Three or four years on, having used CSS a lot more than I had when I first played around with Moodle, I'm finding the new CSS setup not nearly so confounding, and see how sensible it is for themes. I'm modifying Urs Hunkler's Chameleon theme.

While reminding myself this afternoon how Moodle's glossary module works I noticed it has its own RSS feed. It could be the feed is mainly intended so instructors can be notified when a student submits a new term. But it struck me it could also be output in a different way to make a little word-of-the-day widget.

I'm messing around with the glossary with an eye toward putting some textbook glossaries online for work, and possibly trying to make it work as an English-Spanish safety dictionary.

When Dave mentioned finding more ways for the backchannel to participate in conferences, it reminded me of an abandoned experiment to use Moodle, the open source LMS, to encourage conference discussions to continue after the fact. It would be for both virtual attendees and people who were there, but want to continue on with an important topic or two after the conference has ended.

I may get back to the project, because:

1) I'm kind of a hermit myself and would like a way to get more involved in conferences I don't want to show up for or can't afford to attend.

2) It seems to me if you're attending a conference virtually, there isn't a huge need to participate in real time (though I do see the draw of the togetherness aspect, and the new cheap or free video streaming makes the real time participation more feasible than it's ever been). Attending later is a little like the timeshifting media.

3) Most important, in our online ADD-world, some key ideas tend to be forgotten too quickly. There's so much info to take in that you tend to move on to the next thing the next day or next hour. I'd like to see conference-goers choose one or more topics they think are worthy of exploring in more depth, then take them online.

It's a kind of a hybrid of conferences and online learning. I suppose for some industry-oriented conferences you could even make them formal enough to qualify for continuing ed credits. Why not?

Yahoo for Teachers, demoed yesterday at Techcrunch 40, has been labeled a "yawner." It isn't much more than a bookmarking service, allowing teachers to drag resources from the web into an online app. The networking aspect of it, where teachers all over the world can see what other teachers have saved on a particular topic and share it with their own students, seems like the real value. So let the techies yawn. The web has always been about bringing people together around common interests more than it's about the zeros and ones that make that happen.

Ever since I read the thread on the Moodle forums about integration with Facebook, I've been thinking how the two species just don't want to meet in the wild.

But what about something like this? Build a Facebook app that's a simple output of an assignments feed from a learning management system. Give it a name like "Here's what I'm supposed to be doing; tell me to get back to work."

I think most kids -- heck, most humans -- like the idea of a nudge if they've asked for it. Think of diet groups or the dissertation support group I started 10 years ago, run for years now, and more ably, by Tom Tom Jankowski (PhinisheD). That kind of help can be quite motivating.

A discussion of Facebook and Moodle integration is going on in the Moodle forums. The thread. Registration is required, but painless. Then I think you have to join the "Moodle Lounge" course to read or post on the board.

I'll read it more carefully later and may have something to say.

I ended up doing a Fantastico install of Moodle 1.7 on a hobby server for the dev stage. Just lazy. Something was preventing the CSS from getting applied and I didn't feel like searching the forums to solve it.

Since I have quite a bit of time, I'm taking it slow, playing around with a few things as I have time between my regular duties at work. We're trying to convert an old book that shows the right and wrong ways to practice safety in a particular vertical.

It doesn't look like Moodle's built-in quiz module will work without modifications, since many of the examples have only two choices and the modules requires three. I might ask for advice on hacking it, but I keep thinking I'd like to do it in Flash anyway. Only trouble with that is we don't have the budget for Captivate at the moment, I've lost my old Captivate media, and Adobe doesn't have the old version available anymore.

I think Captivate would be the easy way to do it. I only have Swish at home, and don't even have regular Flash at work. I think there's a third-party quiz plugin for Swish, but I'm also thinking it's doubtful it supports SCORM. Might not be important. I'll take a look around.

Maybe I'll narrate my progress with it here.