A Twitter conversation that reveals what open source is all about

Yesterday I tweeted a very minor complaint about exporting data from Moodle. Then this happened:

In case you didn't know, Martin is the founder of Moodle and the lead developer. Moodle is easily one of the world's most popular online learning platforms, with millions of registered installations.

When was the last time your comment about a trivial problem with something so big was picked up by the person who originally made that thing and nudged you to do something to help fix it?

THIS is what open source is all about. Any major open source software application is built by and for a community for people, who can - among many things - report bugs and suggest ideas, all of which are catalogued in an open, conversational space.

Of course, the software code being openly available under an open source license like GNU GPL is the defining aspect of any open source application, and I cringe whenever I hear people referring to free web-based tools as 'open source'. But open source is also about a community of people who share a passion, and it's about everyone in the community having a voice and the means to make a difference.

PS. I've reported this bug in the Moodle Tracker.

Coming full circle: Medium of instruction from colonial to post-colonial times in Tamil Nadu

This post is not about Moodle but about something else I'm passionate about: language. I work with people in different countries, and sometimes I get asked if I studied English at school in India. I used to find this question funny until I began to consider it in a post-colonial context.

My mother's parents were born in the 1920s in the Madras Presidency of British India, and they went to schools where the medium of instruction was English (that is, the language in which all subjects are taught). By the time India gained independence in 1947, they were young adults with high fluency in English. They had their first child - my mother - a few years later, and many others followed. None of them studied in English. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, my mother's generation in this part of the country went to schools where the medium of instruction was usually Tamil, the dominant language of the post-independence Madras state (which later became Tamil Nadu in a further division of Indian states along linguistic lines). English was simply a subject at school with not much relevance to daily life. It was however still the medium of instruction at university, and my parents, like most people at that time, struggled to adapt to the change from Tamil to English.

Why wasn't university education offered in Tamil? Some courses were, but I suppose it would have been an impractical project to translate entire bodies of knowledge into Tamil. With the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965, the importance of English as a 'link language' in the nation was strengthened. Indians have always been migrants to lands abroad, and it must have been obvious all the while that any international prospects for one's life and career hinged on English skills.

So it was perhaps natural that English would re-enter schools in a big way. My brother and I studied in English-medium schools in the 80s and 90, and this was completely normal for a middle-class Indian family. There was no question of studying in a Tamil-medium school. Such schools were considered to be rundown places of education run by the government for the poor, who aspired to send their children to English schools.

But Tamil is in no danger. It is a language with a long written history spanning 2,000 years. The Tamils are fiercely proud of their linguistic identity to the point of offending people from other parts of India, even if they can only use English to make their point.

XML template for creating entries to import into Moodle Glossary

Let's say you want to write a bunch of entries for a Glossary on your Moodle and you want to do this offline -- not directly on your Moodle. In that case the best course of action is to create an XML file with all the entries and import it into a Glossary.

Here's an XML template that you might like to use. It also contains an example of an entry including hyperlinks (you have to use &lt, &gt and &quot in place of <, > and ", respectively).

To create your own entries, copy the lines between <ENTRY> and </ENTRY>. The tags after </DEFINITION> need a binary input: 0 or 1. I'm not sure what <FORMAT> means but I don't think there's any harm keeping this and the last one - <TEACHERENTRY> - as 1. The other three tags match the below settings which you'll see when you try to add a new Glossary entry in Moodle. If they're not self-explanatory see this page.

PS. This post has been featured in Moodlenews!

List of emoticons in Moodle

Depending on the cultural and digital literacy context in which you work, you may find that people use emoticons very well, awkwardly, or not at all. If you'd like to promote the use of emoticons in your Moodle courses, here's a handy reference:

Emoticon	Meaning	Characters to type

Hitler reacts to MOOCs

I've just made a "Hitler reacts" video using this tool. Check it out:

User count in the Online Users block in Moodle

In Moodle 2.6 the number of online users is not displayed in the Online Users block until you have at least 50 online users. Until that point you see only their names. Turns out the Online Users block can accommodate a maximum of 50 names. Names beyond the first 50 online users are not displayed, and the online user count magically appears at the top of the block. Sensible -- it's a lot to see the names of even 50 online users! There doesn't seem to be a way of changing this setting, at least in Moodle 2.6.

I discovered this just now -- it's the first day of the AuthorAID MOOC, which I'm facilitating, and we have more than 2000 participants! 

Efficiency tip for Moodlers dealing with many Moodle assets

So you're a super-active Moodle admin or teacher who has to dip in and out of many courses and perhaps even many Moodle sites. On your admin homepage you can use the Admin Bookmarks block to bookmark settings pages within your Moodle site, and of course all the courses you're enrolled in will appear in the Course Overview block. But these aren't enough for me. So I use a simple bookmarking scheme on Firefox. This is what my bookmarks toolbar looks like:

In the "Active spaces" bookmark folder I have links to all the active learning spaces (not all are formal courses so I prefer to say "spaces") on the main Moodle site I work on. Some links point to settings pages within courses, eg, the enrolment page for the ongoing AuthorAID MOOC so that I can quickly check how many people have enrolled. "Old spaces" has links to spaces where courses or interactions have ended but which I still need to refer to now and then. And "More Moodles" is well, a collection of links to other Moodle sites where I help out as an administrator -- these are mostly Moodle sites managed by developing countries universities that are connected to the charity I work for, INASP.