User:Colin Fraser

The plastic guy

Yep - me...

I started using Moodle and was enthralled by the essential ease with which I was able to pick up on things. I was creating courses and soon downloaded a copy of Moodle for home. I bungled the installation, then retried it, and it worked. I built it, wrecked it, rebuilt it, wrecked it again, and each time, I learned more about what I did not know.

The major problem for me is that I am just not technically literate, that is - a spade and a shovel are the same. Trying to interpret the hidden meanings of a lot of the highly jargonistic approaches taken by far too many techies was just too much hard work.

I started to seriously administer Moodle as an intranet for a school. I moved schools, then created a new Moodle. Hopefully, I have left behind people to want to make those Moodles work and be useful learning tools.

In the meantime, I have discovered I know less than I thought, so I have scoured the documentation available and found I understood less and less. For this reason, I sent an email to Mary Cooch about trying to set up an administration FAQ, (which quickly became Beginning Administration 1 FAQ then grew into Beginning Moodle 2.0 Administration in plain (well, OK, plainer) language. She recommended I actually talk to Helen Foster about it. Helen must have thought "Give him what he wants, that will keep him quiet!" - and that idea failed miserably. Now I find I have gotten so involved in writing Moodle DOCS, my name crops up in the strangest places as adding an edit here and there.

My problem now is that I am starting to learn a little about Moodle, but I know nothing about networks, less about PHP, and what I thought I knew about databases and SQL is so rusty as to be nearly useless. This could all be a bit of a handicap in future.