syamsul's domain

It’s amazing just how far Moodle, an open source Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) project, has come. Several polytechnics in Australia have embarked on the largest deployment of Moodle to date. Four universities are likely to migrate to Moodle (probably from WebCT or Blackboard?) by July, and 10 secondary schools are already using it.  While it is good to read about how money is being saved for channeling towards other educational needs too, I do wish that a "blueprint" for such…

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Drupal’s installation process wasn’t as newbie-friendly as Mambo’s – you’d have to manually edit a configuration file, but once the install wizard got started, it was otherwise straightforward to complete. Immediately upon a successful install however, I was getting some strange messages about QUERY LOCK TABLES write. The Drupal Handbook suggests that I should ask my host provider to grant global loack tables privilege to my account; alas, my host simply said that was not possible. 🙁 Thankfully this post…

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As it turned out, a new release of Drupal had just been released when I took a second look. This came as a stroke of good luck for me as I would not have liked to go through the hassle of upgrading from 4.5.x to the current 4.6 etc after building a siyr. As I browsed the features page, some tings screamed “Hey, I could use that!” to me : Collaborative Book – this ought to make indexing of content…

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When I checked out the leading CMS packages on OpensourceCMS a few months ago, I settled on Mambo for my own website because of its active user/developer community, and most importantly, because it’s also incredibly simple to use. Eventually I even recommended Mambo as a CMS for my school, and it now powers my school’s website. But when I started working on a project to develop my department’s portal, it soon became clear to me that Mambo isn’t the best…

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Although I did try out blogging on Blogger with my English class last year, I’m still far from comfortable claiming myself to be an “expert” on the subject of blogs among my colleagues. The use of blogs in education is a very new thing, so there is much to be learnt. Alas, no thanks to the never-ending stacks of papers to be graded (among other things), it’s difficult to even find the time to try out new ways to use…

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The University of South California recently deployed WordPress in its blog portal, blog@USF. It’s more than just multiple stock installations though, with its integration with Menalto Gallery, Flickr, the de.li.cious bookmark manager and others. At present, it’s based on WordPress 1.2.2 but the developer’s planning to move to WordPress 1.5 in version 2 of blog@USF. He even has the source code available on his blog. I’m glad that I dropped by there, because I got to know about the MetaPlanet…

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