Dept requested that the course listings be updated. I thought this information was derived automatically from the uvic calendar site, but upon investigation it appears that the information (which is contained in a file called hist.js) is manually copied and pasted from the calendar site, rather than extracted automatically. I made the required edits
January 19, 2007
Ali ran out of staff and had to do a demo, so I filled in on the CALL counter for a while. Does no harm to re-learn CALL procedures and how wicket works once in a while.
Scott Woodcock prefers flat list to indented list, so reset that, also uploaded new pdf file containing same information.
January 18, 2007
Spent quite a while trying to figure out why UTF-8 strings were being rendered wrongly in response to a PHP query to a mySQL db. It turned out that PHP was working with the strings as 8859-1, rather than UTF-8, and that's what it was spitting out at the end. For characters which are in the 8859-1 range, a call to utf8_encode() on any string being echoed into a page works OK, but it's not a proper solution because anything not in that range (such as a Japanese character) isn't handled. The solution may lie in explicit settings in the php.ini file.
Met with John Lutz on various issues regarding conventions for dealing with missing dates, and what to do with special pieces of data embedded in the text such as dates, cemetary plots and subject codes.
Task list arising from meeting coming shortly.
John Price and Neil Burton came in to discuss best way to implement site in Japanese and English on E Herbert Norman.
Need to get separate netlink account for project - John will take care of that.
Neil will write to xhtml standard and validate. Development site will be his netlink account. Production site will be in new account.
Later we may implement a small php and sql database of metadata and abstract for each of many pdf files to be included in the collection.
I've set up Mathie Ritchie on moodle so she can operate an online discussion group that will generate data for her PhD. The basics follow (pasted from an email):
The title of the study is entitled "Online Discussions and the Development of Sociolinguistic Competence" and is under the supervision of Kathy Sanford and Catherine Caws.
1) The purpose of the study is to examine CMC as a pedagogical tool for the development of the sociolinguistic competence of second language learners interacting online with native speakers. Given the difficulty to teach this competence in the regular classroom and the important contribution of CMC to L2 pedagogy, it is critical to explore furthermore the pedagogical potential of CMC in the learning of a second language.
2) The objective of the research is to give opportunities to students in a French as a second language course and students in a French course to interact in French using modern technology. For this project, students in an university in Vancouver will discuss online with students in a college in Montreal using chat and a discussion forum. The learning outcomes for students participating in this study are: to create bounds between both communities; discover their
own and the other’s culture; discuss culture in general and expand their horizons; improve their oral, written and cultural competence; and familiarize themselves with the different tools for online discussions.
Basically, there will two groups of students involved (about 25 students in each group), both instructors and me. Students will use chat-rooms and a discussion board. I would also like a place where I could add links to articles.
The project is planned to begin on January 29th and to last for about 10 weeks (until the end of the semester).
January 17, 2007
Logged into Moodle, set up a new course in the Miscellaneous category, assigned roles (teacher, admin, etc.) and then experimented with uploading a SCORM package created by JMatch. Works a treat.
Moodle is by no means perfect, though. Long lists of participants show up not in alphabetical order; changing language in your profile has no effect (you can change it in the home screen, though); and the GUI for uploading activities is a bit puzzling to the first-time user.
Create list of search and replaces in Transformer for use on the Times Colonist data files.
Report a couple of issues to Martin, who fixed them and created a new release.
Discovered compound topic codes, which I hadn't expected to find.
Updated documentation on how to do process.
Scanned the front and back covers of Marc Lapprand's new book.
Greg scaled the images.
I took the scaled images, uploaded them to Marc's site and rewrote a few lines of code on his page to point to them etc.