A few weeks ago a faculty member noticed that there were extra people displaying in the Participants list of all their courses. Seems like not a big deal maybe the automatic course creation scripts had a minor issue and when rosters got updated things would be alright. Well, it turns out that the role assignments for the course were correct and didn’t match what was displaying in the Participants block. OK, so turn of the Participants block and stop displaying students and faculty on the course descriptions. Search Moodle.org for the issue and find nothing relevant. Make some posts on Moodle.org and the CLAMP Moodle Exchange and wait.

The Moodle.org thread got no action. Maybe the title wasn’t clear enough or maybe nobody had any more clue how to fix it than we did. The CLAMP folks make some suggestions to check for system-wide role assignments and a couple other things. Check everything that the CLAMP people suggest and everything looks fine. Bob Puffer suggests some queries to run against the database. We run:


SELECT a.*, u.username FROM mdl_role_assignments a
JOIN mdl_context con on con.id = a.contextid
JOIN mdl_user u on u.id = a.userid
WHERE con.contextlevel = 50
AND con.instanceid = yourcourseid


and it doesn’t return any of these phantom users. It just returns the people that should be enrolled.

We notice that the 63 (yeah 63 phantom users) all have some connection to the Music courses in the system. Some Music faculty are displaying as Faculty participants in all classes and some students enrolled in Music courses are displaying as student participants in all courses. Our systems admin looks at the code that generates the code to display participants, students in the gradebook, and users in the course description. He notes that all the code does something with contexts but we don’t know what that could have to do with anything.

Our system admin tries deleting all the Music course from our test clone of the production box. We check a few courses and the Participant lists and gradebook look fine. We don’t think to check anything else and decide to contact the chair of the Music department to ask if any Music faculty are actually using Moodle. Only one Music faculty member has put any content into a course and so we help her backup and export everything and then proceed to delete all the Music courses.

Since there isn’t an easy way to remove a bunch of courses at once, or because we don’t really know all the ins and outs of Moodle, we move all the Music courses into their own category and then delete the category. Do this deletes all the courses and the Participants lists look fine. The phone continues to ring but now faculty are saying that they see all courses in the system in their My Moodle list. What? We check a few user and sure enough all courses now show for all users in their My Moodle page. We scratch our heads (we should have tried logging in as one of the phantoms on the test).

At this point a member of the Math department drops by my office and says she is getting a strange error when she tries to update a quiz that had previously been working. I login and take a look and sure enough I get the same error “context () in print_context_name!”. This is the first error we have ever gotten while working on this issue (going on a month). So now we head over to Moodle.org with the error in hand and do a search and what do you know http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=93656 pops up. Hey, this talks about paths (something else the system admin was mumbling about) and the quiz issue. They suggest trying to create a fixcontexts.php that contains:


require_once('config.php');
require_login();
build_context_path(true, true);
echo 'Done';


We try this on the test box and things look to be normal. We check the Participant lists, gradebook, and login as some of the phantom users. Everything looks fine and so we run the fix on the production server and everything is as it should be. The phone is silent.

I’m not sure how anyone is supposed to have realized that all the strange issues we were seeing were related to contexts. In hindsight it is easy to see that having contexts messed up could affect all the areas where we were seeing problems, but we never got any error messages and wouldn’t have if we hadn’t moved the Music courses to their own category (creating a new context) and then deleted them, which caused the context of the Math professors quiz to get screwed up.

TL;DR
If you see strange issues and no errors then rebuild the contexts!

Being very interested in this issue, I was happy to see a session on Digital Scholarship and Interactive Publishing at the NMC conference held this past June. It turns out the session was not what I expected. This session focused on the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. This is the set of tools used to create magazines such as Martha Stewart’s Living for the iPad. I was a little disappointed but then I remembered that Instructional Technology had been asked to find a method for creating digital abstracts for the Independent Study projects completed by Wooster Seniors.

You can get a sense of how the suite is being used in education by taking a look at a post on Adobe’s site about Case Western Reserve University. Wendy was at the session and demonstrated a prototype for a scientific journal. The demonstration included interactive animations of one of the author’s experiments and video clips of the author explaining or demonstrating aspects of the article in more detail. It was a very interesting example of what exactly could be done with the digital publishing suite. The downside is that it requires students to use Illustrator which is not something most of our students have been trained to use and of which we only have about 20 licenses for on campus. In addition, it might require the college to use Adobe’s service for delivering the final products.

Fast forward to April and Apple’s announcement of iBooks Author. This is again a proprietary format and delivery system, but it is so much easier to use than Adobe’s digital publishing suite. Students also have much more access to iBooks Author since it is free to download and about 40-50% of students have some form of Apple computer. iBooks Author also has the ability to export to formats other than iBook format. While it is not perfect, I see it as a better solution for Wooster at this time.

This also seemed to be the view of a group of faculty and staff that attended a brown bag lunch in April on the state of digital publishing. The group considered Adobe’s solution to be too complicated for a first time user and thought significant training would be required. In contrast they thought someone could create a simple iBook in under an hour, but also noted that users were locked in to the templates supplied with iBooks Author. At least one faculty member left saying they will have two or three of their IS students create iBooks as part of their IS experience this spring.

I would say that there still isn’t a killer app for digital publishing, but developers are getting closer.

In March of this year I attended SXSW and tried to focus on presentations and panels with a higher ed focus. The first event and by far the most interesting was Using Twitter to Improve College Student Engagement by Rey Junco.You can listen to his presentation

or view the slides

The gist of Dr. Junco’s presentation was that students were more engaged, as long as it was clear that Twitter was an important aspect of the class. Dr. Junco presented the findings of a study conducted with colleagues to substantiate this statement. The study had faculty use Twitter for announcements, to have students organize study groups, to have students ask the professor questions, and discuss a class reading. The class had a twitter account and each student had an account. Ning was used as a control. The stats gathered from pre- and post-engagement surveys indicate that the students felt more engaged and actually were more engaged. Also of interest was the fact that the Twitter group had a .5 higher mean GPA.

Interestingly, in a larger class of 300 with no control and where students self-selected to use Twitter, were not encouraged, and where the instructor never really used Twitter or the class hashtag, the students claimed to feel more engaged but showed no statistical evidence of being more engaged.

The take aways for me were:

• Faculty should be interacting with students on Twitter.
• Course content must be integrated with Twitter for engagement to be increased.
• Faculty should encourage students to use Twitter to collaborate.

As with any technology, if the faculty member isn’t invested in using it then there is a very good chance that the technology will not benefit the students or help meet the learning goals.

I also struggled with just how one would produce content on the iPad. There are a few apps, such as Brushes, that seem to make great use of the multi-touch, but that list is pretty short when you focus on apps that could be used for education. Katie Stansberry gives a list of a few that she considers to have educational potential. Most of them seem to be geared toward K-12 and not undergrad. Maybe the best way for colleges and universities to use the iPad in their curriculums is to have faculty and students develop apps for the iPad. I think it would be of even greater benefit if the apps they develop were geared toward K-12.

I know Apple is selling them like mad, but I just have to shake my head at institutions giving them to all the incoming first-years. Stanford Medical School is on that list so maybe my former colleague, Joe Benfield, can shed a little light on how Stanford Medical School is using them in the curriculum. I guess for the moment I’d just like to try an understand why these schools think the iPad is important to their curricula. Am I completely off-base?

As I was describing it to my wife, she said she thought this would be great for one of her clients. Her client is in the recruiting business and collects information on up to six potential candidates for each position they are trying to fill. This information is currently typed up and then put together in a candidate book that is presented to the firm with which the recruiter is working. My wife wondered if it would be possible to do this using WordPress and Anthologize to automate the process and provide database storage of the candidates and digital output of the book. I told her I thought it could.

As I see it we need to create custom post types reflecting the information the recruiter collects and wishes to associate with each candidate. Once those custom post types are created the recruiter would prepare the candidate book using Anthologize. The bonus would be that the recruiter could run a multisite setup and create a new blog for each placement they were working on and give access just to the client who contracted with them to make the placement. Now the client can view the candidates online via a customized candidate site or via PDF, ePub, RTF, etc. With a rating plugin they could even allow other members of the hiring process to rate the candidates by rating their associated posts on the site. I think I’ll be working on this in my spare time, referencing Alan’s series about custom post types, and keeping notes on how it might relate back to eportfolios and other things I’m thinking about in relation to my day job.

The number of pipes available and the range of functionality is astounding. You can create pipes that allow for user input or pipes that operate on CSV and other data files available on the Web. The funny thing is I don’t hear about Pipes by the year and it worries me that such an awesome tool may just disappear one day. Maybe I just am not moving in the circles where Pipes are common place, or maybe people just take them for granted. But I think I’d like to get more faculty playing with Pipes and thinking about creative ways they could be used in education. What about digital storytelling with Pipes? Bryan? Alan?

Edit: Based on the related posts it looks like I rediscover Pipes about once a year. I find that amusing and sad.

This change should open up a world of plugins for MS installations that MU installs could not really count on. It also is a huge undertaking since we have been running 2.8.6 for the past year. I just want to document the steps I’m taking on the test server for upgrading from 2.8.6 to 3.0.

• Disable BP Events plugin (breaks when upgrading to 2.9.2 with white screen)
• Disable Incsub Support, Wibstats, RA BP Author Link, RA Featured Posts in mu-plugins (move to retired-mu-plugins)
• Switch themes to a generic theme
• Rename our modified BP Corporate theme to Wooster BP Corporate
• Enable Wooster BP Corporate theme for main site
• Activate Wooster BP Corporate theme
• Upgrade BP Corporate Theme (download from WPMU Dev Premium)
• Rename BP Corporate Child theme to BP Corporate Wooster Child
• Copy header.php from BP Corporate theme to the Wooster Child and add the modifications to allow rotating header images
• Upgrade from 2.8.6 to 2.9.2
• Disable Ahjira Recent Site-wide Posts (broken with newer BuddyPress versions)
• Upgrade any plugins that indicate they need it (BuddyPress and BP Groupblogs excluded)
• Disable BuddyPress and BP Groupblogs
• Upgrade BuddyPress
• Upgrade BP Groupblogs
• Switch the theme to BP Corporate Wooster Child (our old modified version of BP Corporate doesn’t work with new BuddyPress)
• Run the Upgrade script to update all the blogs (takes a long time, maybe 2 hours)
• Click the Update to 3.0 button in the Dashboard
• Click Upgrade Automatically
• Follow the instructions in the Dashboard header
• Click on Update Network (and wait 2 hours for it to finish)

After this lengthy process Voices should be upgraded to WordPress 3.0 with the latest BuddyPress. One item of note is that any changes that were supposed to be made to .htaccess need to be made to the wpmu-rewrite.conf file of the Apache2 install. Our SysAdmin does not use .htaccess and has those directives in this special Apache2 config file. This means an Apache restart will be required for images to work after the upgrade from 2.9.2 to 3.0.

I came back to thinking about this again yesterday when I saw a post in my RSS feeds saying Apple had approved some app and that Jobs had said people who wanted to watch porn could get an Android phone. Do you find this alarming? As I thought about it I sure did. Basically I’m letting a third party tell me what I can and can’t do on my device. Then I wondered how that is any different than network television. I don’t think I’m completely off base with my concerns and I’m sure others have voiced similar concerns and so the question becomes what can I do about it? I’m sure the Android app store has some sort of approval process and policies governing what can be in the Market. Until you can add apps to the device without going through a store you are stuck.

This is why I’m not sure I’ll ever own an iPad. To me it is a giant media consumption device and I can consume media on my HDTV, laptop, and iPhone just fine. In fact the laptop even lets me create things for others to consume and that is the rub. Without a way to create meaningful content the iPad will always be useless to me. I think the only way this changes is if everything is in the cloud and the iPad just becomes a means to interface with it. But for now I can’t develop a WordPress template in the cloud (maybe someone will enlighten me). Maybe Chrome OS will be where we are in 5-7 years, but for today I am left pondering whether I agree with the closed universe Apple seems to be developing.

It was only a few months later I think that I heard about QuickSilver the perpetual beta quicklauncher. I don’t remember why I switched but I switched from Launchbar to Quicksilver. It was probably the nice bezel look I could get on Quicksilver that made me switch. I was still in heaven and able to fly around my computer without taking my hands off the keyboard. Maybe I wasn’t flying since I type so slowly, but it was faster then mousing around. Then a few months ago Boone Gorges wrote a post about how he was using Quicksilver and I realized I had been missing so much. I tried to follow some of Boone’s tips but encountered little success. To top it off Quicksilver started crashing and just generally acting sluggish since upgrading to 10.6.

So today I happened to read a tweet that mentioned a new quicklauncher, Alfred. The name is not as sexy as Quicksilver, but I downloaded it anyway. Initially it didn’t work. I wrote the nice folks at Alfred and they hooked me up with a version that would run on my old non 64 bit laptop (someone should really get me a new one). Let me say I love the design of their site and so far Alfred feels a lot faster than Quicksilver. I’m not sure Alfred can do all the crazy things Boone has Quicksilver doing, that is why I’m hoping he downloaded it and can try to push it. For now I’ll try Alfred and keep my hands on the keyboard. Yahooooo!

Tungle makes it super simple to allow people to schedule meetings with me. In the first four weeks of class, I’ve already had half of my class use the link I give them in our course site to setup a meeting. So far it has been a joy to use and I can’t think of anything I’d need to change. I’ve enjoyed it so much that I recommended it to the other members of the Instructional Technology department. And they must be doing something right because my boss has started using it. I’m not sure how you’d find it via Google as a search for “web based scheduling” and “web based appointments” didn’t turn up Tungle in the first page of results. Hopefully people reading this spread the word.