User:Chris collman

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

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 to make it work for me.

We can see the next refinement in help for any "new" (or evolving) Moodler is to provide examples of uses. "What can Moodle do for you" - where people allow others to witness the essence of their Moodling.

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). Plus there are so many ways to use Moodle, All new users certainly do not all have the same goals for their course!

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 from my ruts to .

Recent projects

History at moodle.org: 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.

Feb 2010

I watch about 700 pages in MoodleDocs, very few are development pages. I am noticing fewer and fewer edits are showing each day and they are generally small ones. Big difference from 2006-2008. I make a point to find answers to forum posts in MoodleDocs. I look at special pages links if I have a few minutes. Moodle 2.0 is about to entered my MoodleDoc world and that will create a new round of thoughtful edits.

In Feb I worked with others on Metacourses and File upload pages. Want to clean up my Tracker entries and look at those for Lesson.

In Nov-Dec, one of regular job's F2F classes ended, then in December one of my outside compilation projects had a site failure. )At my salary job, I basically customized a Moodle server and populated it with old/new courses. Oh yes, we do have a little construction project going on in our house. Then there were the holidays. I seemed to have emerged and back to "normal" things by end of January.

Current Moodle work projects involve:

• NH Moodle User groups - side volunteer project to see if there is interest (yes there is).
• Waiting for the launch of my recompiled, re-themed of a clean install 1.9.7 Moodle Ubuntu server!
• Monitoring a site activity in a series of Lessons, to figure out where content or questions needs to be improved on unrelated 1.5.x and a 1.9.7 sites.
• Assisting customer service answering questions and fixing student issues on 2 24/7 courses.
• As part of a team, I am still looking at lesson plans and integrating 10 subjects that can be used by 2 different tracks of students, especially with Quiz and resources.
• Pre-planing to create another new Moodle site (Maybe 2.0) that will use 1.5.3 question categories. Estimate launch July 2010.

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.x and 1.9.7.

• 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. I keep summary info for each column for previous classes.`
• Quiz. I do the same with quiz scores. I wanted to have statistical information on a separate worksheet for each Quiz. Looking forward to 2.0 reports to replace my graphs.
• Logs. I want to know who has filled out a subject evaluation (25 questionnaire activities) and who has not.

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.x & 1.9.x 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. After hours, I also work for private trainers who supply certified on line training in other parts of the country. Outside of Moodle, 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 at the local community college.

I am constantly learning.

As a young adult, I lived and worked with Ibos, Effics (Nigeria), and Somali people during my 4 years in the Peace Corps doing Community/Rural Development. Served in the Army for 2 years. Lived with the Navajo for a year as a volunteer 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 walking my dog, genealogy, local histories, and encouraging wild flowers around my house near the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA.

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

• Chris collman/handyformats

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

• Chris collman/Workshop temp space to gather page info from help and other files
• Chris collman/sandbox1 showing template samples, template list of templates
• Chris collman/template1 sample template for creation
• Chris collman/LessonDemo1 or Chris collman/LessonDemo1/LessonPageList
• Chris collman/Tool list tool list
• Chris collman/TestingProcess
• Chris collman/version notes Things my site admin is interested in
• Chris collman/sandbox2 Another sandbox for Block temp, will delete later
• Don't forget the very handy [[template:update]] to ask for content help in the

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

Discovered David Scotson's David Scotson concerning MoodleDocs.

Moodle download stats [1]

Lesson Development pages

More notes to myself

• Development:Lesson_Specification
• Development:New lesson navigation
• Development:Adding question types to lesson 2.0
• Development:Adding blocks to lesson
• QA:Lesson Test Plan