Dokeos’ first steps in mobile learning

Last week we started our first baby steps in mobile learning, thanks to our long preparations, an edition of PHPArchitect, and the efforts of one of Dokeos Latinoamérica’s employees (Christian), who wanted to try it out.

The very first result was something like this

Dokeos' users list appears on cell phone

Then I suugested he got a little deeper and got a list of courses-related events and we got this

Dokeos events on a cellphone

This feature, along with a whole range of additional features, will probably make it into the corporate version first, and then move to the free version, once the costs of development have been covered by corporate customers.

All in all, this is a very exciting feature to have and, although it doesn’t get into the classic expectations of an m-learning system, it certainly opens the door very wide for it. Now the next steps are to

• allow a student to send comments in the forum
• allow a student to take simple tests
• allow a student to reply to surveys
• allow teachers to check the reports of their students’ progress

These little features, that will get Dokeos right into the m-learning market, will all make it to the corporate version first, then be applied to the free version.

Average prices for LMS systems

Richard Nantel, of Brandon Hall, recently published a few summary results of the last edition of e-learning management systems comparisons, the expensive (but we imagine of high quality) Low-Cost Learning Management Systems 2009

Data shows that solutions for 500 users go from US$499 to as high as US$111,630 (in SaaS). Mean values for low-cost solutions are around US$68K (per year).

Get current PHP API

One method to know if the script being executed has been started through cli, apache or any other API is to use PHP_SAPI:

if (PHP_SAPI != ‘cli’) { … }

will ensure that the script is executed in a command-line context before doing what’s inside the brackets.

Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and the outcomes for geocaches/cistes

Firefox 3.5 just came out and, within a bunch of improvements and new stuff, we can find a geolocation implementation. What’s that? Che Hodgins explains that on his blog with an example. If I had to define it in a few words, my definition would be “it’s a feature that makes it possible for a website to ask your location to your browser”. Now, the thing is that, obviously, many new great cell-phones have both a GPS and a browser integrated. And this means… that you could develop your website to react to your users navigating it by identifying their location and adapting what they see to where they are right now.

Like…

• changing the background of the page to show a picture of this place
• invite the user to comment on the view (in Google Maps, as an obvious example)
• tell him who’s living close by and is also a user of the site (who published his location)
• give information of how many people are already at a specific place at a specific time (if they’re using their device there)
• give relative indications to get to an event (”Now you’re very close, turn left”, like a normal GPS but tuned to your event)
• give hints on how to get to a geocache/ciste

Sounds very exciting to me. The future is full of surprises.

Summary of changes in PHP 5.3

A brief summary of the things that might change (slightly) the way we develop in PHP to use features from the new version. In particular, fileinfo would be great to start detecting character encodings and viruses…

http://phparch.com/main/news/view/8/GOTO_in_PHP_5_3__is_it_Really_That_Evil_

Howto setup a 301 redirect

A few links to setup 301 Permanent Redirect (302 follows the same logic but is for Temporary Redirect):

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_add_a_301_redirect_to_my_apache_httpdconf.html

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

BPC – Blackboard to be replaced by Moodle in one institution

The LMS Evaluation Commitee of the University of North Carolina at Charlorte just published the results of a 5 quarters survey about the implementation of Moodle to replace their current BlackBoard Vista.

Although I don’t particularly like Moodle (mostly because our users find it much more complicated to use than Dokeos), there are two things that I really liked in the results from this report (and I’m sure there are loads of other interesting data in there if you keep your eyes opened):

• 80% of the 10 teachers having used BlackBoard Vista *and* Moodle fin Moodle more reliable and stable when accessing a course
• 100% find Moodle easy to use

And here I was, thinking that a huge company like BlackBoard would at least provide some value for their products by ensuring there was almost no bug… seems like I’ve been very wrong.

And to think about the fact that most people find Dokeos much easier to use than Moodle… BlackBoard Vista must be a big piece of ununderstandable software!

One more for the Blackboard Popularity Chronicles :-)

I’m glad we’re on our way to cover 50% of the Dokeos code with unit tests by the end of July (thanks to BeezNest, Dokeos Latinoamérica and particularly Arthur and Ricardo here, who are having a lot of fun making this a reality).

Dokeos event for Americas

DOKUDA - Dokeos Users Days America

If you’re a fan of Dokeos and plan to head to South America during the next few days, then you definitely want to get to DOKUDA, the 25th and 26th of June 2009.

We’ve been preparing the event for about a month now, and should get about 500 different people every day, over a two-days period. All the conferences are in Spanish, so you’d better understand it a little bit, but we are really welcoming warmly any North American or Canadian wanting to pay a visit to this international event.

All the information is on the afore-mentioned website, really, but there are a few things I’d like to point out:

• the event will be free and non-for-profit (possible benefits will go into development of educational projects here in Peru)
• the event has been advertised in an incredible amount of external websites, thanks to an amount just as incredible of people just motivated by Dokeos
• the event is divided into two days of talks: one technical day and one business/institution day
• we’re going to have the honor of having two speakers from Spain (+ one in videoconference) and two speakers from Uruguay, who will join the fun and talk about their experiences with Dokeos and the future of e-learning in America (Central and South, mostly)
• a technological fair has been organized at the same time, so companies can show off their products
• we’re going to have talks about new Dokeos 1.8.6 features and the plans for the future
• we have invited national ministers to get to know how e-learning can help their institutions
• we have over 16 talks in total, with topics all centered on Dokeos
• some OLPC XO will be there, to show what can be done with Dokeos

In conclusion… this is going to be a GREAT event. Don’t miss it. Any doubt, just comment here or fill the contact form on the website!

Drupal memory consumption

This link certainly saved me some time in evaluating the memory cost of modules and the core of Drupal 5 and 6. Although this is a specific case, I think the fact the core of D6 weights half the core of D5 is a considerable improvement and means that you can potentially serve a lot more users simultaneously on a high-load server:

http://2bits.com/articles/measuring-memory-consumption-by-drupal-bootstrap-and-modules.html

At the moment, I have 3 portals in mind that use more than 30MB of memory per execution and am figuring out how to improve this.

A new bad one from Microsoft – Linux on Netbooks

Basically, I’m not going to write all this again, but this is one more of these ugly things Microsoft does that makes me sick about them. I hope we get rid of them in the next 10 years, because obviously there’s something really wrong happening every time they’re involved in progress…

This one is about the sneaky actions they are now taking to try and eradicate Linux from the Netbook playfield (where it had been *really* useful until now)

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090619161307529

All of this just makes me love the following fan-art (not taking it literally, of course)…

Linux Kill Bill