Glad to have the final assignment for the course posted.

It has been a great course, as the folks in 4H say, learn to do by doing.

The course site and blog page are done. It has been quite a learning experience. Now on to the final reflection.

Working in reverse order –  the html portion of week one is complete. Now I will need to set up the forums and week 1 quiz in MOODLE and make sure the groups are set up and that the selective release is set up. Hopefully that will go smoothly.

My week 2 learning module is done, at least the part I need to do in html. I have the workflow down. It is actually generating the content that takes time.

Since this course and 512 are the only courses I have taken online, I keep finding myself trying to adapt activities from these courses to work in my course. Not a bad thing, I just keep having to ask myself if this is the best way to do things.

After several misadventures, the digital story is up on the Story page. I think it was a valuable lesson for me – give yourself a project to work on if you really want to understand the limitations of an application!

My Moodle site is working! I got rid of the pages I did with NVu and redid them in Dreamweaver.  Now the links are working as expected and the photos show up. I think there problems with the links the first time round. I will know what to look for next time.

I used Word to compose the splash page image and icons and then used Jing to convert them to png files. There is probably a more elegant way to do this, but I was using the tools I was familiar with.

The differences between the wiki and the Blackboard discussion that jumped out for me were the anonymity of the contributions to the Wiki. I am accustomed to having all of our contributions identified.

The other wiki I have used was WYSIWYG, so I was a little surprised to see the html tags. Fortunately ? I have spent a fair amount of time with Nvu and Dreamweaver tutorials that I am beginning to recognize the simple tags.

A frustrating couple of days with html and NVu. I created a couple of web pages with links and photos and got them uploaded into Moodle and they work – except the photos are not there and it isn’t obvious to me why. NVu is misbehaving and not letting me change fonts. I have downloaded a trial version Dreamweaver and I am going to start from scratch. Now that I have a better sense of what is possible and what things will look like inside Moodle it should be smoother and hopefully the photos will work this time round. Dreamweaver has links to Lynda.com help videos so I have been watching those. Good fun.

I worked through the wiki suggestions for logging in and setting up my Moodle site. I was surprised that when I tried to set up the Welcome page the formatting I saw in the editor page was lost once it got published, but not when I set up the discussion posting. Perhaps it was because I tried to paste out of a Word documet in the first case.

I also learned the hard way – I posted the discussion topic for the Icebreaker discussion and then started to reply to it. I noticed an omission in the discussion topic, so I went back to fix it and lost the incomplete reply in the process. Such is life.

It took about 45 minutes so far and the biggest challenge is that I have only worked within Blackboard, so it isn’t clear to me how much of the organization is “standard” for MOODLE and how much I could potentially have control over.

My first experience with 565a was a nice message telling me that to many people were trying to log in. Not a cool way to start a course. This doesn’t create a good first impression and meant the first week was short. I would suggest that the institution needs to address this either by technical means (servers) or administrative (staggered start times/dates).