You are here

User:chris collman

From MoodleDocs

Jump to: navigation, search

Hi, I am still a new user, been working with Moodle since Jan 2006. Yes, I keep changing my photo at Moodle.org My Moodle profile tells a different version of the story.

"We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit"
~~Aristotle

Contents



Moodler interests

New users and learning curves

As a Moodler, I am interested in presentations to the so called "Newbie" perspective: The KISS, "what are the basic things I need to know" kinds of things about Course Lessons or a few other Moodle subjects. I want to assist someone in presenting their content, in their way. That is a challenge because everybody "sees what they want to see, hears what they want to hear, you dig?" (says the Rockman in The Point) and there are so many ways to use Moodle, All new users certainly do not all have the same goals for their course!

I am in the basic areas of MoodleDocs because I have the time and want to flatten the new Moodler's learning curve from Confuzzled to happy learner. I appreciate all those who improve upon my work and Helen Foster for the alignments with the big picture.

Examining other people's questions, helps me learn and jump out of my ruts.

Recent projects

History: Started Moodling Jan '06, in 2008 was asked to help moderate the Lesson forum helped develop a new Lesson topic in demo.moodle.org, given some additional Admin rights in MoodleDocs and in the Modules and Plugin database. In Moodle.org, most of my time is spent editing words and looking at user comments.

June 2009

I watch about 600 pages in MoodleDocs, very few are development pages. I like to think that my edits are not changing content but are about language/logic changes for the Newbie or non-native speaker of English. For example, I think it is a best practice to have a 1 or 2 line introduction on a page before the first heading.

One of my hobbies involves various special pages. Recently I have been looking at Special:UnwatchedPages . Before that reviewed Special:Longpages. Worked on and watch a few menu templates and look over old Special:ImageList and Special:NewImages files from time to time.

Current work projects involve:

  • planning/recommending how to bring a 1.5 site content to a new 1.9.5 site, including AL,Certificate and Questionnaire, playing flash from a Lesson page and translating our old theme to one for 1.9.5.
  • loading hours of content into a series of lessons and working with a webmaster, programmer, content writer to bring another site on line.
  • I am done with providing Helen with material for her flexible "Moodle Stories" presentation, now coming to your favorite MoodleMoot. That was fun and I got to here her voice for the first time! :-)

Reports and Excel

I have a created several spreadsheets that are used to track student progress. All these use the "download" features found in Quiz, Grades and Questionaire (contributed code) in 1.5. I do not have permissions or the ability to run a MySQL query or use ODBC on the Moodle site.

  • Grades. I download uncategorized Grades in Excel for a course and paste everything into another spreadsheet's worksheet of the same name. I then have Excel tell us everything we wanted to know about the class and each individual in a series of worksheets that uses that data.
  • Quiz. I do the same with quiz scores. I wanted to have statistical information on a separate worksheet for each Quiz. I have a standard Page I use for printing where I manually enter test name, question category and other specific information. It has a pivot table which shows how many students received a specific score. I can see at a glance the average score, # and % that passed/failed, then the 25, 50, 75 percentile levels. I am currently playing around with a meaningful standard graph of scores that also appears on the page.
  • Logs, specifically for questionnaires. We ask that every student fill out a subject evaluation and these are anonymous but administrations values them. By using the course logs, I can download a CSV file of everyone who has started a questionnaire activity. Put those into Excel and now we can draw up a table showing who has done what and more importantly, who has NOT completed specific questionnaires.

Courses are Rooms for my wife

My wife was tired of not being able to share files, communicate and keep information up to date with her school counselor association via their web site. Why not Moodle? So I have been having fun changing courses into committee rooms and translating Moodle into language that ironically is all about the social constructionist point of view, for this group of adults that just wants to communicate (or not). I call this applied anthropology (big grin).

Here is a brief bio.

As a support person, I work with Moodle 1.5 & 1.6 & 1.7 & 1.8 & 1.9 within a very specific learning environment: 'certified training'. My primary job is to assist state agency trainers. Most Moodlers are trying to be fantastic educators and interact with students for weeks or months. Our goals are similar but the interaction is very different. Due to over all budget cuts, I am also working for private trainers who supply specialized certified on line training in other parts of the country. I have developed several spreadsheets that use exported Quiz score and item analysis and a more elaborate one that uses exported Grades for administrative reports. 600 hours a year will find me multitasking as a site adjunct for training being presented via video conference technology between 4 sites. And just to keep me aware of new users, I like to teach introduction to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Computer courses, along with on line genealogy research workshops at the local community college.

I am constantly learning.

Lived and worked with Ibos, Effics (Nigeria), Somalis during my 4 years in the Peace Corps doing Community/Rural Development. Served in the Army for 2 years. Live with the Navajo for a year as a jack of all trades at a boarding school for special students in New Mexico, while I did historical research. I have a BA in Anthropology from Franconia College. My wife and I ran a small manufacturing company in rural New England for 20 years before my current job. Beside Moodle, my hobbies include genealogy, local histories, and encouraging wild flowers around my house near the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA.

Transclusion

Test of this MediaWiki advanced feature.

Text I do not want to include in the MoodleDocs:Transclusion talk page

Image:Tip2.gif TIPs:

  • Tip 1. KISS This is all very new! so proceed slowly Chris

Test

This is the Text section from chris collman's user page. Can I bring it into another page?

Fun of course

Need I add that Life Should be Fun!

Frank Ralf tells me:

"Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit."
Aristotle

Cheers to all

Chris


Footnotes and links

After I learned about subpages on userpages in wikipedia, I decided to put my handy formats for MoodleDocs here

I am thinking that a page with documentation that is already indexed might be useful

Category:Pages requiring updating. Or {{Update_section}}

Discovered David Scotson's Things I've realized-learned-brought to my attention concerning MoodleDocs.

Moodle download stats [1]

Lesson Development pages

More notes to myself

Retrieved from "http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:chris_collman"