Migrating Moodle

The last couple of weeks including the usual half term have certainly been busy given that we took the opportunity to move a Moodle vle from a Linux to Windows platform. I can now say that apart from a couple of misplaced course units and what appears to be an issue with the odd mime type the whole exercise has run very smoothly. Being a merged college as we are, we now have two instances of the Moodle running on a single server and it all seems to be holding up extremely well. Of course if you are running Moodle yourselves then you will no doubt also be running other integrated applications and in our case that’s LAMS and Mahara. While there had to be a short-term workaround in order to resolve a Mahara Instruction issue, the systems are there and used as before.


I did have an unexpected and interesting call from JISC Collections today, if you have not heard if this branch of JISC, then do take a look at their website, but basically they were established by the UK Higher and Further Education funding councils, to support the procurement of digital content for education and research in the UK. They wanted to talk about they and come to hear about the work that I been involved with here at the college in recent times using OpenSim and Games. If you have a look back on this blog then you find some postings but you can also view and download some pdf reports on our review of these from my Second Life sim at Star Beach. During the conversation, especially as the subject of games and games development was very on the table, I mentioned that we had introduced Greenfoot, this is a great little and drag and drop development type of environment for teaching games written in Java, ideal for our level 3 student, so if you have yet to see the application then I recommend that you give it try, I feel certain that you will not be disappointed.

Though I always try to avoid cross-posting, which is why I am only providing a link to my OpenSim blog here, this week saw my HE students begin their adventures on a virtual field trip to Isidis Planitia, that’s on the surface of Mars, and not by coincidence landing point of the Beagle spacecraft well it is in OpenSim anyway. If are interested in putting yet another ‘e’ version of eLearning into operation, then why consider emmersiveLearning.




Providing advice for and presenting information on eSafety is basic requirement these day and so I was pleased to come across a website http://www.gcflearnfree.org/internetsafety that includes tutorials called Internet Safety Interactive that cover the following

1: Introduction to Internet Safety
2: Protecting Your Computer from Internet Threats
3: Email Tips for Scams and Spam
4: Staying Safe While Browsing
5: Protecting Your Financial Transactions
6: Smart Social Networking and Communication Tips
7: Cyber-Harassment, Stalking and Addiction
8: Wireless and Mobile Device Safety

I think these materials have a really nice presentation style, they are short and well worth a visit.

Please feel free to comment on these postings, regards Barrys