bodmas blog

• BBC Maths Quiz page – 20 questions of increasing difficulty

A very nice flash animation is used to provide a compact quiz on a Web page – and anything that gets people talking about Maths in their teabreaks has to be good.

However, I think an opportunity has been missed for a bit of learning here – the feedback simply tells you that the answer is wrong and then gives the right answer. Perhaps if each distractor had a different feedback message that gave a possible error analysis, the quiz might be more useful. Hot Potatoes and the quiz generator in Moodle both provide facilities for different feedback messages with each distractor.

• Moodle installs fine under Mac OS X Apache, PHP and mySQL as configured to run WordPress
• See earlier post for details of setting up PHP and installing mySQL.
• Need to install the graphics library GD - which I hope I can do without re-compiling
• Moodle 1.52 is giving error messages about php memory again and suggesting 16 Mb php limit instead of the default 8 Mb usual on Web servers

I hope to be able to export courses from the main Moodle and import them into the local Moodle for demonstration purposes without worrying about Internet access.

A colleague wanted to support a wide range of classes (about 20) using a forum where students could ask questions and the local expert could answer them. Moodle can handle this but would have made it difficult for the expert to monitor the asking of questions and the ‘learning curve’ would have been high for students – especially as only a single function was needed.

We decided to use a forum running on some commercial Web server space with a blog on the front page for public announcements and so on. The requirements were as follows…

• Private discussions with no public read or posting and no facility to ‘sign up’
• Each broad group of classes have their own set of forums without having access to another group’s work – simply to keep things direct for the students
• Students can post new topics in each of the forums – asking a question as a new topic
• The forum administrator (and moderator on Discus Pro) can add new users and allocate them to groups
• Users can belong to more than one group
• Forums can be made available to more than one group (e.g. the chit chat forum can be seen by all students)

There is a lot of forum software out there – the Open Source phpBB being a popular one installed by default on many Web servers. Alas, many of these otherwise excellent forums do not appear to allow user creation by the admin – you have to allow people to ‘register’ and then use e-mail validation.

Two forums that do allow user creation by administrator ‘out of the box’ are

• Discus Pro – the Pro version allows private discussions, the free version allows control over posting but public reading
• The Gossamer Threads forum – free licence available for non-profit use

Discus Pro has a very polished user management system with the capability to upload CSV files derived from spreadsheets of user names and the ability to force new users to change their password on first log-in. Gossamer-Threads forum is less feature rich – users have to be created one by one unless you import a users table using phpMySQLadmin – but is cheaper for small projects.

A basic Web site using the Gossamer-Threads forum and WordPress as a front end blog can be put together over a weekend and will cost little enough to put on petty cash.

Wet pavement and some movement – cropped from centre of a 24mm frame.

• The Register report

The Regulation of investigatory Powers Act 2000 provides for employers to monitor e-mail and other communications by employees under certain circumstances and for certain reasons. – Employees often sign an employment contract that contains a clause stating that they give their consent to monitoring. The monitoring is for technical reasons or to prevent illegal activity.

Much to my suprise, Cliff Sanford – founder of Demon Internet – has received a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to charges brought under the RIPA legislation. Sanford intends to appeal, and claims that the interpretation of the act by the judge in the case made a guilty plea unavoidable.

The resulting clarification of the law may help cast light on a muddy field.

• The Mambo CMS runs fine on the Apache and PHP built into Mac OS X Panther with the addition of the mySQL database as detailed in the previous post on getting WordPress installed locally
• The only issue was the need to change permissions on the Mambo folder – you can do this through the apple-I info window – just set group and all permissions to read/write
• I’ll see if the ‘upload’ functions work in a bit
• A local install allows me to get to grips with the templating system

• Running WordPress on Mac OS X
• How to get PHP scripting running under Apache on Mac OS X Panther – wonderful site design as well, a little theme theft may occur soon
• Open Advantage is running short courses and seminars to raise awareness of Open Source alternatives. Case studies appear on the Web site – a development that inspires confidence!

Random fact : to remove an orphaned item from the System Preferences in Mac OS X, just go to Users :: You :: Library :: PreferencePanes and drag the offending addition to the waste basket

Context of random fact: Mac OS X Panther comes with Apache 1.x and php 4.3 ready to run. The Apache conf file just needs some tweaking as mentioned on the link above (the free TextWrangler text editor can be used in place of BBEdit). MySQL has to be installed – and MySQL 4.1 has a different authentication system compared to MySQL 4.0.2x, which won’t work with WordPress, PHPmyAdmin and so on. Guess who installed 4.1….. Time to use the rm -r command in earnest, but then had to remove the System Preferences item by hand.

Hoping that if WordPress will work locally, then so will Moodle and Mambo, thus allowing more rapid template development. We shall see…