Readymade and free Moodle badges

1. You want to award badges to your learners on your Moodle site.
2. You know how to do this and let students link their badges to Open Badges.
3. You're stuck. How are you going to create the images that represent the badges?

Why you should blog about Moodle

The Moodle community forums are vast. Every day hundreds of questions and answers are posted. It's really the best place to go to if you have a Moodle-related question or for any of the below reasons:

Promote Open Badges when you award Moodle badges

Badges have been a feature of Moodle since version 2.5.

What's a badge? It's something you can award to your students. It's a small image with metadata. When you award it to a student on your Moodle site, they can see it in their profile page. Other students can too, if people can view each other's profiles. Good stuff, but is that it? No! These badges can be published on Mozilla Open Badges. Take a look at my Open Badges page. The badge data is also published (issuer details, badge details). I can't change any of that, so it lends the badge authenticity.

Change text alignment of glossary entries from center to left

You have set up a glossary with auto-linking. You include the title of a glossary entry somewhere in your course, and ta-da, there's an automatic link to the entry. One problem though. When you click the link, the text of the glossary entry is center-aligned in the pop-up window. Not a bad thing if your entry is just a couple of lines long, but what if it's a fairly lengthy entry? It can be quite hard to read.

To left-align the glossary tip that pops up, add this line to the CSS section in the Clean theme settings or any other theme that lets you customise CSS easily.

.moodle-dialogue-confirm .confirmation-dialogue {text-align:left;}

How to get Alpine working with Exchange or Outlook email

Linux user? Need to access email on an Exchange server? Fed up of Outlook or Outlook Web Access? Not happy with Thunderbird?

Yes? Then hello reader. I just managed to get Alpine to work with my company's Exchange 2010 server after badgering my IT admin and looking up several websites. Maybe I'll be able to save you some of the trouble.

First, why bother with Alpine? If you have a Gmail or other free email address wouldn't it connect to an Exchange server and isn't that the modern thing to do? Well free email addresses are not your property. You sort of rent them from a company like Google, who hold your data on their servers. You might be fine with that but your company might not want official stuff to be passing through and held in Google's servers.

Alpine is an email client: a software application that's on your computer. You could consider Thunderbird or Evolution but those to me are poorer cousins of Outlook. Alpine is totally different. It's for people who like the command line!
So here we go...

Install alpine  

> sudo apt-get install alpine
Open .pinerc, the configuration file:  

> gedit .pinerc

Spot these lines:

user-domain= This is the domain where your email is hosted.
Example intranet.example.com

smtp-server= The server address (often a port number is needed as well) for sending email.
Example intranet.example.com:587/tls/user=jdoe

For the above two it is absolutely essential that you consult your IT admin. You don't want to be knocking at the wrong port or using the wrong authentication method. Even if the IT admin gives you the magic lines you might not be able to send email. My admin had to set up a new SMTP receive connector. Not sure what that means but try using that jargon with your admin if you're lost for words.

Moving on...

inbox-path= The path to your inbox in your mailbox in your company's server for receiving email. Example {intranet.example.com/user=jdoe/tls}INBOX

default-fcc= The path to your sent items in your mailbox in your company's server. Example {intranet.example.com/user=jdoe/tls}Sent Items

Want to archive messages within a folder on your server mailbox called, say, 'archive'?

default-saved-msg-folder={intranet.example.com/user=jdoe/tls/}Inbox/archive

Scroll down. Find customized-hdrs. I had to add my name and email address here to fix an annoying error that prevented emails from going out:

50 5.7.1 Client does not have permissions to send as this sender

You don't want to see that. So...

customized-hdrs=From: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>

Scroll down. Way down. Find alt-addresses. Enter the email address from which you're going to send email. Example jdoe@example.com

This 'hack' is to tell Alpine that you are you. Without doing this thing in alt-addresses your sent-items will show your name with every message, not the sender's name.

Scroll down. Way down. Find disable-these-authenticators=. Add GSSAPI to it. This seems to be necessary to avoid getting some kerberos warning at the start of an Alpine session.

Now close .pinerc and open up Alpine.

> alpine

You can do all of what you have just done from Setup -> Config. But editing the source file is quicker I think.

Now what you need to do is add a collection list so that your existing Exchange mailbox (with all mails) maps to Alpine. Otherwise you will be starting with a clean mailbox, which you probably don't want to do.

Setup -> collectionLists

Add a new collection list for your Exchange mailbox. Type A for add.
You'll see a very simple form and you just need to fill it two fields:

Nickname Anything you want

Server Same as the inbox-path field, e.g., intranet.example.com/user=jdoe/tls
Exit the setup (look at the bottom for keyboard shortcuts), exit Alpine, and restart it.

Go to Folder List. You'll see your Exchange folder there under the nickname you used. Open it. See all the folders there? They've got past mail? Can you send email? Yes? Congratulations! No? I guess you have to go about this the hard way then -- looking up help pages and forums online. But that should work. It did for me.

And of course once you get Alpine working there is loads you can do to configure and tune it to make it work just the way you want it to. As with a lot of free software there's really no limit for customization.

Wondering about your calendar? Hmm. Not sure how to get that working with Alpine. Let me know if you do!

Response to "MOOCs as neocolonialism – Who controls knowledge?"

A colleague from INASP sent me a link to this article:

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2013120517525882

The author asks if students around the world are concerned about the American nature of MOOCs. He asks this because he is an academic whose field of research is education. Generally speaking, students are not like him: they don't get philosophical about education. They want to learn. They want skills, knowledge, jobs. And many students from the South want to go to the North.

MOOCs offer unprecedented opportunities for students in the South who want to make something of themselves and not be oppressed in a dull local education environment, which is unfortunately common (I'm speaking as an Indian). Telling them that MOOCs are not appropriate for them would be another kind of oppression. And anyway they won't listen!

I think the real issue is how universities in the South will respond to MOOCs. I don't think I've come across any positive or progressive responses such as integration of MOOCs in the curricula, providing local technological support for students to take MOOCs alongside classes, developing their own online courses inspired by MOOCs, etc.

I don't think MOOCs were created as part of a neocolonialist agenda. The author says as much near the end of his essay. But with essays such as this, I wonder if universities in the South are getting convinced, without good enough reason, that MOOCs are a form of neocolonialism and therefore consider them with apathy or scorn. I think this is already happening.

My interview with SciDev.Net

Last month I was at the World Social Science Forum in Montreal to speak about AuthorAID online courses in research writing for academics in developing countries.

Brian Owens, a reporter from SciDev.Net, attended my talk and interviewed me about our plans. His article has recently been published: http://www.scidev.net/global/education/news/authoraid-to-add-online-courses-for-social-scientists.html