Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. In the technical terms, Moodle is Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) which enables learning professionals (educators) to create engaging online learning courses. Moodle is the brainchild of Martin Dougiamas, who designed the program while working on his Ph.D. at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. He developed it as a tool for his dissertation which was on a Socio-constructivist approach to learning. Thus Moodle originally excelled in features which supported this approach to education, in particular through its very user-friendly discussion forum layout that includes mug shots of the participants as an aid towards "community building'. Dougiamas programmed Moodle in PHP, a programming (or more strictly, "scripting') language that can create web pages based on user input and data-based information. Moodle's Philosophy of learning  is that focuses on collaboration, activities and critical reflection. This social-constructivive approach involves a strong community of learning orientation rather than simply computting courses and exercises online. In general, a healthy amount of connected behaviour within a learning community is a very powerful stimulant for learning, not only bringing people closer together but promoting deeper reflection and re-examination of their existing beliefs.

In today's internet connected world, virtually every educational institution or corporation, one way or another, has by now adopted a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or CMS (Course Management System) for use either as an adjunct to its traditional courses (often called a "blended" or "hybrid" course system), or as a tool for its distance education program via some commercial platform, of which are expensive to license and which are rather rigid in the ways that they can be used. Moodle is different, rather than just publishing and assessing the information you think they need to know, it help you realize how each participant in a course can be an educator as well as a learner. Your job as an educator can change from being 'the source of knowledge' to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with learners in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.

With a user base situated around the world, it is common for moodle user to receive help within a matter of hours, regardless of the local time of day. There are times when a human response works better. People have not only given help, but have also created new computer code to help a user modify a current feature or create a new one. Some of Moodle?s virtues have been alluded to already. Now let us take a closer look at the top key items of Moodle for academic and software developer training community.

• Interface languages: When a user logs on, there is a drop down menu from which he can select an interface language. Once set, that language choice remains unless another language is selected. These language modules have all been created by volunteers.
• Multiple material type support: Moodle platform in well positioned to host different learning materials such as animation, case study, drill and practice, lecture/presentation, quiz/test, video, live chat, survey, simulation and virtual conference etc.
• WYSIWYG HTML editor: It is the embedded tool in Moodle for users to edit text entry areas like resources, forum postings and journal entries. Copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text, and lectronic assignment submissions.Instructors have various choices for course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focused social format. 
• Activity Report: It is the full logging and tracking report for each student with graphs and module details (Access/Number of time read) as well as details of each student involvement like postings and journal entries.The course activity in Moodle includes Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, and Workshops as well as virtual areas for group work. Instructor can easily get full reports of the activities of individual students, or of all students for a specific activity.
•  The quiz-making function:  Self-assessment quizzes and online testing.  Quiz types such as: Multiple choice, True/False, Numerical, Matching, Description, and Cloze.A wide range of options allows you to randomize the questions and multiple-choice items, specify a time frame for availability, choose whether the students receive feedback or not, decide if they are allowed to view the correct answers, and determine how many times they may take the quiz and how it is to be scored (first attempt, highest attempt, average of all attempts or last attempt).
• Modular design: Each functional feature of Moodle can be regarded as a module. Moodle is built in a very modular fashion. New functions can be created and activated merely by dropping them into the site's directory where all of the plug-in modules are stored. There are site management, user management and course management for different users with different access. In general, there is Assignment Module, Chat Module, Choice Module, Forum Module, Journal Module, Poll, Quiz Module, Resource Module, Survey Module and Workshop Module. Embedded Shockwave Flash (.swf) files

Entering "Moodle?, an open-source platform, which is not only free but also highly adaptable for computer science education, universities and corporation education organization are quickly discovering that they can save thousands of dollars or more by implementing Moodle, and then spending a small portion of the money saved to program it to work precisely the way they and their educators want it to. More and more universities  and professional training organization have finished their transition of traditional  education from  instructor lead class into moodle based dynamic online class or integrated type such as California Tech Computer Science Curriculum, Virginia Tech Computer Science Curriculum , Oregon Inst. of Tech. Curriculum for Computer Science and Tech and International ACM and IEEE sponsored conference such as Super Computing Education moodle . Where others universities have been systematically evaluating and piloting Moodle as the online learning management system. For example, at University of North Carolina at Charlotte (website: http://www.lmseval.uncc.edu/ ),  In 2008,  10 faculty participated the pilot and taught classes based on Moodle. Moodle pilot faculty also attended a focus group to discuss their Moodle experiences, and in earlier 2009, the pilot extended to 18 new faculty members selected based on a variety of criteria, including college representation, course types, experienced vs. new users, fully online vs. hybrid, and face to face courses  and concluded that moodle offers advantages include ease of use and mastery, minimal support, collaboration with the open source community, flexibility, and adaptability to the needs of faculty and students.

Moodle can run on virtually any machine, Windows, Macintosh OSX or Unix, as long as the following are installed: 1) an Apache web server, 2) the page generation freeware, PHP, and 3) a database application, usually, but not limited to MySQL. Applications exist for all platforms and are listed under "Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP" at http://moodle.org/doc/. Some basic data about moodle is listed in the following table:

Title:             

Moodle

Author:

Martin Dougiamas

Contact Information:

http://moodle.org

Product type:

Course management system

Platform:

Any platform with Apache, PHP and a database system such as MySQL installed

Price:

Free

Best Features

Can easily have every feature you want as long as there is someone around willing to program it

Registered community member (Moodle.org)

672,965 ( as of 4/24/09 and growing)

It is not yet to know how long Moodle can keep its exponential growth. For sure, it will help academic or corporate educators connect with learners, but in the larger scope, perhaps it will organize and network the fragmented and vast knowledge we can all explain in so many different and fascinating ways, especially in the United States, where people expect more from universities and employer, while at the same time the available tax dollars are dropping.

I am a Moodler since 2009 and building a Moodle platform for Intel academic community and actively working on every details of the project, if you have any suggestion or comments that you want to share with me, I would love to hear from you at tao.b.wang@intel.com

 

 

 

 

 

It is also likely that Windows Server 2008 R2 RC, also build 7100, will be available to download from MSDN and TechNet on April 30th.

O Intel© vPro? em essência é uma plataforma e não um componente que se pode instalar em um computador já existente, ou seja, ou o computador nasce Intel© vPro? ou nunca será um, pois é necessário que integrado a placa mãe, esteja o chipset Intel© Q45, uma placa de rede Intel© 82566, uma processador Core 2 Duo/Quad E8xxx/Q9xxx e o AMT (Active Management Technology), que é o protagonista e orquestra o funcionamento de todas essas funcionalidades de gerenciamento e segurança.

Se olharmos com uma lupa cada um destes componentes, fica mais fácil entender porque cada um deles é importante para que a máquina tenha essa inteligência embarcada:

Intel© Core 2 Duo ou Core 2 Quad: Esses processadores além de possuírem os melhores índices de desempenho, são também os que mantêm a melhor relação desempenho/watt, mas não é só por isso que eles foram selecionados para compor a plataforma. Eles também possuem instruções de virtualização Intel-VT que habilitam diversos modalidades de uso destes equipamentos, como OS Streaming por exemplo, além de vierem equipados com outra instrução importantíssima de segurança, que é o TXT (Trusted Execution Technology), conforme já havia comentado em outro post;

Intel© AMT (Active Management Technology): Este é o sistema operacional que roda embarcado em uma máquina Intel© vPro, nele temos uma pilha TCP/IP, já que precisaremos ser capazes de acessar essa máquina mesmo sem o sistema operacional ativo (Linux ou Windows, por exemplo), autenticar e autorizar qualquer solicitação remota, sendo que ainda pode estar integrado ao Microsoft Active Directory, ou seja, usando autenticação kerberos, fornecer os serviços para a console de gerenciamento de redirecionamento de IDE (IDE-R) para a console de gerencia (iniciar a máquina a partir de uma imagem que esteja localizada em qualquer ponto da rede) e também o redirecionamento da tela do equipamentos para o administrador poder operar a máquina remotamente (SoL - Serial over LAN), além de permitir a virtualização de dispositivos de I/O (Intel-VTd) entre outros recursos necessários em redes corporativas, como controles de auditoria, autenticação em redes protegidas (eg. 802.1x, NAC, NAP, etc…), etc.

Chipset Intel© Q45: Este é chipset onde fica armazenado o Intel AMT, fazendo a analogia com os sistemas tradicionais, ele é o hardware do sistema operacional “Intel AMT”, pois nele temos área para armazenamento do próprio código do sistema operacional como também uma NVRAM para armazenamento de dados permanente, tem um processador dedicado e embarcado, além das tradicionais E/S;

Controladora de rede Intel© 82566: Se pensarmos em deixar o chipset ligado e funcionando 24h do dia, não estaríamos ajudando muito as empresas a reduzirem custos com consumo de energia elétrica, por isso quando a máquina é desligada colocamos o AMT em standby e somente a placa de rede fica parcialmente energizada, como já é feito hoje com o Wake on LAN (WoL), porém neste caso, ao invés de ligar a máquina toda, ligamos apenas o AMT para permitir o seu gerenciamento.

Portanto todos estes componentes juntos, harmonizados, podem levar o selo Intel© vPro?, tanto para notebooks quanto para desktops.

As I scan the horizon lately, I see an interesting pattern has emerged.  Tools such as Threading Building Blocks, the new OpenMP 3.0 spec and the Executor interface from the Java.util.concurrent package, to name a few, are providing ways for developers to specify tasks to a library or runtime and allowing the library to manage the assignment of execution agents (threads) to these tasks.  The central concept now: Tasks!

What are tasks?  Tasks are logical units of work.  A task may be a function call, it may be an iteration of a loop, or it may be a block of code encased in curly braces.  Tasks are the job assignments, in code, the developer wants to accomplish.

The trick to parallel programming is finding as many independent tasks within an application as possible and then in finding as many dependent tasks as possible that can either be ordered or provided with some synchronization constructs that effectively make even these tasks conditionally independent.

So training for parallel programming going forward, I would argue, should focus more and more on tasks and less on threads; more on teaching developers how to identify independent tasks, and less on how specific explicit threading implementations. I believe we are reaching the point where we can grapple with the higher level abstraction of tasks and have some confidence that I can rely on a library or package to handle the thread assignment and thread management activities automatically.

Does this mean I can forget about Threads?  No.  At this point, knowledge of threads is still required to know how to deal with tasks that are not completely independent.  A basic knowledge of threads, in so far as knowing that threads can run in any arbitrary order, is at least required to understand the possible side effects to threading such as race conditions or dead lock conditions.  Proper synchronization of threads to data is key to eliminating these traps and synchronization on a shared memory system requires a knowledge of some threading API to create mutex or critical sections, or what-have-you.

At least, that?s my take.  What is yours?

Ellie got her first WiMAX experience at the Consumer Electronics Show. But seeing the WiMAX’d Smart car parked inside the Intel booth was really a teaser. (Link to video)

Rocketboom Tech is an offspring segment from the pioneering online video show Rocketboom, that debuted in 2004. Intel began teaming up with Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron a few months ago to learn the craft of video storytelling and to support more resources on covering inspiring technology stories. It’s not a segment about gadgets, rather it’s a weekly look at people doing interesting things with technology that may have a impact on our daily lives.

WiMAX is one of those technologies — like Wi-Fi — that Intel is helping bring to the masses. Here is a narrated animation that shows the difference between smaller Wi-Fi hotspots and WiMAX wide area-spanning broadband wireless Internet that equipped laptops and mobile devices can access while on-the-move.

Ellie hopped inside the WiMAX-fitted Smart car and took it for a spin around the Intel Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro. Later, she got to ride shotgun so she could surf the Internet using an Intel Centrino 2, WiMAX-equipped laptop. While the car was going 65 miles an hour down the road, Ellie got to stream Internet videos using the same Clear WiMAX service people are using today in the Portland area.

This is a service that can feed broadband Internet to your home — inside you turn WiMAX into Wi-Fi to connect other devices — and to your laptop or mobile devices that either have WiMAX built in or can take the WiMAX dongle.

This is something I got to experience first-hand last week. It’s awesome! I’ll share more videos and photos in the coming days.

Overall, the competition resulted in 17,000 new pledges toward the mission of Climate Savers Computing, which result in 3,000 tons of carbon per year averted and 4.2 million kilowatt-hours of energy saved across the 19 campuses. Every university did a great job, and our planet is the big winner. More details are at http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/news/press-releases/april-22-2009

However, there’s one more set of prizes to be awarded, for the video contest that ran in parallel with the Climate Savers Computing pledge contest. On May 4, check back here or at http://www.powerdownfortheplanet.org/video/ for the results of the video competition and a link to the winning videos!

Have a great Earth Day 2009 everyone!

On April 14th the 2009 Lang.NET Symposium took place on the Microsoft Corporate campus in Redmond, WA and the session videos from the symposium are now online here.

In this years languages symposium you'll find some interesting discussions on the C# programming language version 4.0, safe concurrency using the Axum language, and concurrency using F#.

So I started by calling professors I know and building a list of ?new professors? I want to contact. I tend to think of picking up the phone first and e-mailing second.  I would love to know how you like to communicate.  It is funny how doing something that I naturally find effortless becomes an effort when it is my job.  Fear not though, I have taken those first steps and I am off and running. I will be contacting many of you to find out how I can help you THINK PARALLEL

Establishing a new relationship is often started with awkward gestures and some fumbling.  Having been an instructor for over 20 years, it is that feeling of a new class being taught to freshman. They are looking to you to instruct them and you are looking to them for signs that they understand. Inevitability there is those moments of crushing silence, where both sides are looking for clues from the other.    In some ways that is how I feel right now.  I want to help you; I need you to help me. 

I guess I need to just pick up the phone and call.

This is actually very surprising to me since all I ever hear is how hard it is to develop code for AMT. We thought for sure our developers would want to chime in on what features they would want to see simplified. Needless to say, we won't be able to take this to our AMT engineering teams for input - there is simply not enough data. Recently, Lance Atencio wrote a blog highlighting our last poll. In the comments area, one of our SDK developers commented the following:

As a member of one of those product development teams you refer to, I just wanted to emphasize again how important this feedback really is to us. It helps us decide how to allocate our resources and prioritize our projects. So, thanks to you for the poll, thanks to everyone who answered. I especially want to encourage everyone working with Intel AMT to take the time to give us your input: it really does make a difference!

It's too bad that this is not how Social Networks work. Lately I have been reading the "Groundswell" book and I'm beginning to understand why we get very little feedback from our users. Here are some stats from our Manageability Community and our Discussion Forum: In March, our Discussion Forum had 30 new threads (discussions) started with almost 19,000 views. There were 42 new blogs created in the Manageability topic and they had almost 25,000 views. Yet only 4 people have chosen to answer our Poll. Again... Wow.

We know you are out there, so why do we, at best, get 30 responses on our Polls? Well, the "Groundswell" Book covers this topic pretty well. The book segments the Social Media World using a "Social Technographics Profile" (the groups of people who make up the ecosystem that forms the "groundswell.")

1. Creators (21%): they make social content - blogs, webpages, upload videos.
2. Critics (37%): respond to content from others - post reviews, comment on blogs, participate in forums, edit WIKI articles.
3. Collectors (19%): organize content for themselves or others, use RSS feeds, tags, and voting sites
4. Joiners (35%): maitain profiles on social network sites and visit them
5. Spectators (69%): consumers of the social content such as blogs, videos, podcasts, forums and reviews. This group does not comment but many will look at every single post that a forum gets and may even find great benefit. They are silent; I call them "Lurkers."
6. Inactives(25%): neither create nor consume

This profile explains a lot, although I think that for some Forums/Communities, the percentages my vary depending on how exciting the topic is. I think that for our Community, there must be fewer Creators and Critics (those who are creating the most (like me) are being paid to do it, for example.) And judging from how many new threads vs. how many views, it might be reasonable to suspect that we have quite a few more Spectators than 69%.

I have had to explain to a number of my Intel Colleagues why their content did not get any comments (it is really strange to put something out there that you find to be great stuff and it is met with silence - one wonders if they should even bother.) My response is always: "Look at the number of views and look at the number of downloads - looking at the data is the only way to tell that your content is being consumed."

So, even though Polls aren't seeming to work (because the bulk of our audience are "Lurkers") we will continue to post them! Our next steps is to try to figure out what our audience needs from Intel AMT and we'll let you all know. And those who object will certainly let us know (if you are in the right category, that is.)

My colleagues and I will now attempt to form the future of Intel AMT by telling "you" our audience, what you need and correcting that should someone tell us otherwise. (Big Grin!)