Monday, February 5, 2007

Moodle Pilot Report from Idaho State University. http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/ ISU_IDUS/I061227I.pdf Via Jim Farmer comes a link to this Pilot Report from the Instructional Technology Resource Center at Idaho State University, a current WebCT 4 customer. On the basis of this small (20 instructor) pilot, they are going expand it to 50 users. What I thought was interesting (and maybe the Moodle folks will notice this too) is that the only functionality that both students and faculty seemed not totally thrilled about were the assessment and grading capabilities in Moodle. That seems about right. Especially if you[base ']ve used WebCT 6/Vista, which I have to admit seems pretty decent in this capacity. And you can tut-tut all you like about how those are such [OE]administrative[base '] tools, but time and again the surveys come back that grading/gradebook management is actually one of the most used aspects of the CMS, ignored at CMS developers[base '] own peril. - SWL Tags: CMS Moodle [EdTechPost] 8:19:24 PM      Google It!.

Canadian Movie Piracy Claims Mostly Fiction?. Justin Primus writes "Michael Geist's weekly column dismantles recent claims that Canada is the world's leading movie piracy haven. The article uses the industry's own data to demonstrate that the assertions about movie bootlegging and its economic impact are greatly exaggerated and that the MPAA's arguments about Canadian copyright law are misleading. I particularly liked how Geist dug up the fact that the MPAA itself says that there have only been 179 movies recorded with a camcorder over the past three years out of the 1,400 that the Hollywood studios released." [Slashdot] 11:25:54 AM      Google It!.

Dance Copyright Enforced by DMCA. goombah99 writes "The "creator" of the Dance move known as the electric slide has filed a DMCA based takedown notice for videos he deems to infringe and because they show "bad dancing". He is also seeking compensation from the use of the dance move at a wedding celebration shown on the Ellen Degeneres Show. Next up, the Funky Chicken, the moonwalk, and the Hustle? More seriously, does the DMCA have any limit on it's scope?"[Slashdot] 8:55:36 AM      Google It!.

Finding New Code. tabandmountaindew writes "Too much time is wasted re-implementing code that someone else has already done, for the sole reason it's faster than finding the other code. Previous source code search engines, such as google codesearch and krugle, only considered individual files on their own, leading to poor quality results, making them only useful when the amount of time to re-implement was extremely high. According to a recent newsforge article a fledgling source-code search engine All The Code is aiming to change all of this. By looking at code, not just on its own, but also how it is used, it is able to return more relevant results. This seems like just what we need to unify the open-source community, leading to an actual common repository of unique code, and ending the cycle of unnecessary reimplementing."[Slashdot] 8:46:51 AM      Google It!.