Brief summary of Moodle Moot 2005 and my paper about the integration of Bodington and Moodle VLEs.

As keen observers probably know (!) I attended the Moodle Moot here in Oxford the other day and presented a paper about getting Moodle and Bodington to work together.

The Moot was well attended about 100 people; 75% teachers (school and university) 20% techies and 5% management. It's amazing to see what an open source community looks like in the flesh. Lots of enthusiasm, fundraising and the like.

The first talk was a 'videolink' from Martin Moodleman in Austrailia. He spoke about the up and coming additions to Moodle, He basically read through the document located at http://moodle.org/doc/?file=future.html.

The highlights are Blogs and web services and DB module in 1.6. IMS LD (A), SCORM 2004 and integration with Harvest Road Hive and Merlot repositories in 1.7. Full IMS LD, in 2.0.

The morning's talks were mainly by teachers: "we did this with Moodle and everybody thought it was great", but there was an interesting session about using Hot Potatoes and JCloze and JQuiz for doing 'assessments' (or quizzes)

My talk on the second day went down well - the PPT presentation and paper will be on the moot site and the paper will also be on the newly redesigned and up-coming Bodington.org site.

There were 3 main thrusts of my talk and paper

1. Oxford staff like Moodle and are setting up systems in their departments, this means that content is being 'locked away' in systems not accessible to most staff and students, therefore, why not use Bodington (and eventually ASK) as a centrally accessible store.
   
2. To get the above to work we need a single sign on for Bodington and Moodle. We 'WebAuthed' Moodle; this involved writing a new 'auth' method. This type of authentication has probably been superseded already by Shibboleth. Moodle 1.5 is a SP, Bodington 2.4 an IdP.
   
3. We can make Moodle better by making Bodington tools available. We wrote a new 'module' called BodingtonLogbook. The logbook appears as an option on the Moodle 'activities' menu, when selected you get a page which looks very like the Bodington 'create a logbook page'. Moodle gathers data and sends to Bodington which then creates a new logbook and displays a screen with Moodle navigation and an embedded Bodington logbook. This was slightly troublesome due to Bodington's security mechanisms. (We didn’t modify Bodington at all.) In the end the value of the BODINGTON_ORG_SESSIONID cookie has to be pasted into Moodle in order to get the creation to work. This indicates that if we were going to do this exercise 'properly' then we'd need to develop a REST web service interface to Bodington with Authentication and authorization handled by Shibboleth (Guan Xi).
   

People were genuinely interested in tools integration and especially Shibboleth, but (I think) not that interested in using Bodington! Ho hum! Mind you I think Bodington made a few friends and was mentioned by other presenters a couple of times as being the OS alternative to Moodle.

The final session of the moot was a slot where punter could ask for new features. The main points were

• edit lock or CVS-like facilities on wiki pages to prevent clashes
  
• easy duplication (copying) of a resource
  
• import of data in iCAL format (which is underway)
  

I must admit that I really enjoyed the event but was jealous that Bodington doesn't yet have such an active community.