I pushed the Moodle 2 / SITS Vision integration modules up onto GitHub.

https://github.com/eatbath/SITS-Moodle-2-Integration-Module

Untested in the wild as yet, but looking good.

It all integrates much more thoroughly and nicely than the 1.9 stuff.  Major differences in that area is that is coloured by the Moodle theming engine and it is a proper enrol plugin.  

Tesco ruins Christmas

Tesco, I hate you.

Which among you sanctioned that horror muzakal assassination of Fairytale of New York?

You've ruined everything.

I'm going to hunt you down, you vacuous dog.

Moodle 2 SITS Enrolment Plugin

Earlier this year I re-wrote the University of Bath's integration between their learning environment, Moodle 1.9, and their Student Information System, SITS. This went live in August, and is happily mapping and enrolling SITS student cohorts to Moodle courses without complaining at all, bless its little cotton socks.

Next summer the University is moving to Moodle 2, and I've reached a milestone in the porting of the SITS integration to this version - I've completed the first automated full sync via the Moodle cron.

This did what it should - it created the thousands of relevant courses and their respective Default Mappings and synced all of them (Default mappings come automatically from SITS, as distinct from User mappings, which are created by Teachers or Admins through the interface).

There are three distinct components comprise the integration:

1) SITS communication component
2) Moodle business logic component
3) Moodle user interface

Naturally, the Moodle logic component has changed quite significantly.  I've re-factored it as a library of classes which are utilised by my all-new Moodle Enrolment plugin.  It could (and really should) have been this way in 1.9, but, due to architecture changes, has to be in 2.  Those libraries will then also be utilised by the GradeOut module (which sends grades back to SITS), and probably others besides.

The SITS component remains identical to that which we use for 1.9, moved from the Block to the library I mention above - this demonstrates the major advantage of this component based structure.

Similarly, the user interface remains unchanged - it is now the only component left in the Block.

So, that side of things is now fully operational.  I am going to run side by side comparisons of the 1.9 and 2 syncs to see the difference; as the Moodle 2 integration has to do a lot more work, I expect it to be significantly slower, but you never know, there might be a pleasant surprise :).

Still, there is a lot of work to do before it's ready.

Digging

The back of our garden started off looking like this:

Following an epic battle, it now looks like this:

And the middle of it looks like this:

Enough digging.  Build.

The Studio of Paradise

I have set about swinging a pick axe into the walls of the dead flower bed at the back of my new garden, excavating to level the ground for the Studio of Paradise #14, The Shed of Paradise.

I take pause to review the studio's history.

After many, many years of lurking in the corner of bedrooms and kitchens the SoP #11, The Library of N'LoRC, finally found it's own niche in the box room of a North London flat. The God of N'LoRC, Ganesha, is pictured above.

SoP #11 produced the album Nu Seedy.

A move West required some improvisation to create the SoP #13, The Studio in Two Cupboards.  The cupboards are pictured above (SoP #12 was a short lived interim measure).

SoP #13 produced the album Lost.

Now onwards, and downwards.  Dig, dig, dig!

Buddhism and Quantum Mechanics

I'm down deep with quantum mechanics.

I've got a buddy, much more qualified to speak on the subject than I, who considers the whole shebang a complete red herring, but I'm feeling it, for sure. And I'll tell you why.

I spent many years trying to impress girls with the pretense that I dug the Eastern religions. Naturally I had no tangible success using this strategy, but I did end up reading a bunch of interesting stuff about how these philosophies, in particular Buddhism, view the nature of reality. I ended up marrying a Buddhist, as it goes, probably because I couldn't try to impress her in this suicidal manner.

Anyhoo, there is a serious link up with this Eastern thinking and this Western science, and I intend to find out more.

There are many various and sometimes conflicting schools of thought in Buddhism, just as there are conflicting schools of thought within science, but common to them all is the idea of our percieved reality being considered illusionary, either literally or figuratively. Those schools that would figuratively consider our percieved reality to be illusionary propose that our human condition prevents us from understanding the true nature of existence - that it compels us to believe that we are somehow apart from the elements of which we are composed. The schools that literally consider our perceived reality illusionary tell us that our world, our universe, simply is not there; it is a construct of our collective perceptions.

Both of these ideas strike a chord with the theories of quantum mechanics, in which, at a sub atomic level, each element of which we consist has properties which exist in innummerate positions simultaneously, or not at all. The vastly greater proportion of our volume is absolute nothingness, and the actual matter of the entire human race could be comfortably contained in a table tennis ball. Even this minute matter, the entire human race, might have more in common with the transience of wingbeat, the energy of a wave, than with our imagined dust.

If the ideas within quantum mechanics hold true then, as with Schrodinger's cat, the nature of the existence of all things requires an observer. It requires perception, without which there is nothing. This is the literal perception of reality. However, it is the consolidation this science lends to the idea of our figurative perception of reality which soothes me, that in understanding what in truth we are, at an elemental level, we can find our escape.

Here's an interesting story of a meeting of two fine minds: Deepest UberSpod Anton Zeilinger, he who realised quantum teleportation, and the Dalai Lama, in 1998

Big Blue Button

A number of my colleagues from the University of Bath and I, plus some very welcome surprise guests including Fred Dixon from the Big Blue Button team, had a good session on the BigBlueButton demo server at http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/. Many thanks to Fred for dropping in; his input was very useful and greatly appreciated.

BigBlueButton is an open source project which aims to enable the delivery of a real-time, high quality learning experience to remote students.

It is a very interesting project; one that in light of the purchase of competitors Elluminate and Wimba by Blackboard could become very relevant to any institution that utilises Moodle. At the current time it's quite a way from being a service that could be considered for any mission-critical application, chief amongst them being:

• The user interface, though it shows really great promise, is clearly not the finished article. There was too much confusion amongst us as to which button to press and when, who is talking, managing the windows, and so on (although, it has to be said, nothing new to us who have had some misfortune in experiences with other web conferencing platforms).


• The reliance on a particular (and now outmoded) version of Ubuntu is not reassuring - I have been through the technology stack, and it is a varied and exotic cocktail of packages, the applecart of which might be upset with any given update. Ubuntu likes updates, many and often.

Whilst meditating on the technologies involved I wonder about the use of Flash. Though the best tool at present, if I was thinking of getting an exciting open source machine together I might be be thinking HTML5, to which has recently been added a device to enable video conferencing. HTML5 is going to start gaining a vast amount of traction, and with it Flash will loose some traction; lots of traction, I suspect, in the context of the open source community.

You might be able read about that at the WHATWG site ... though, with their recent trend towards things being what they call a 'living standard' the document is subject to change at any time. Not particularly helpful, really, in a standard, and part of the reason HTML5 is not gaining too much traction right now. So, as I've said, Flash is the best tool at present, and it is the present with which we are dealing, not the ever-elongating future as inhabited by HTML5.

On top of which:

• The low-level gears of BigBlueButton seem to work very well on the demo server.


• I admire the clean approach to the user interface design.


• It is browser based, and being Flash quite nicely uniform across them

These are all good things. Big Blue Button is one perhaps to watch for the future, though I think I might well ruminate on the idea of video conferencing in HTML right here in the Blog of Spod some time soon.

My colleague Nitin Parmar was playing about with Big Blue Button in the very same meeting, and has these interesting things to say.