Social network membership life cycle schema from ZDNet

Found on ZDNet…

Social network in Dokeos 1.8.6.1 to include RSS feeds

I just commited to the Dokeos SVN a little feature to allow for the inclusion of your RSS feed in your profile. This is a little guide on how to enable this (there’s no other guide available at this point and the interface will not suggest you to do something you don’t even know is possible in Dokeos).

First, get to the admin panel (as admin, obviously) and go to the profile link under the users section.

Once you get on the new screen, click “Add new field” and define a new text field of which the ID *must be* “rssfeeds” (plural)

Submit the form (leave the two last fields empty). Make sure you change the new field to “visible” and “Changeable”.

Now make sure the social tool is enabled. Return to the admin panel and go to the “Configuration settings” under the “Portal” section.

Click the “Tools” section and scroll right until the bottom of the page.

Enable the messaging and the social tools (you could enable just the social tool if you wanted but it is a whole lot more interesting with internal messaging).

Now save these settings changes and go to your profile page (using the profile tab)

Click the “Edit profile” link to edit your profile and enter your blog’s URL in the “RSS feeds” field.

Note that you can provide *more* than one feed if you want to: just separate them with the semi-column character (;), without spaces.

Now everything is configured, go to your “Shared profile” page. You will see that the feeds that you have added now appear at the bottom of the central column. There is currently a fixed limit at 5 posts per feed.

Development notes:

This integration was highly simplified by the Magpie RSS reader, a GPL library written in PHP that allows reading RSS and Atom formats and parsing the results into a simple PHP array.

There is an included caching mechanism (which stores cached pages into the archive/ directory) that refreshes pages only every 60 minutes (see rss_cache.inc).

Just ask! Thesis, PhD, etc

Today I heard that yet another university study was going to be started about Dokeos. This time, the person that is going to do it is a acquaintance. We have chatted a few times and participated in events together. However, he didn’t ask me anything so far…

Let me be clear, I’m not pretending to push my ideas into somebody’s thesis, but talking about the kind of topic before doing it, at the very least, would allow me to support them so that, if I can, this study can get more interest and more help, and so that its results are made more useful to the community.

It’s been 4 years now that I’m hearing about studies of Dokeos, of comparisons between Dokeos, Moodle, Claroline, Blackboard and others, but although these studies are generally favourable to Dokeos (not all of them, but a considerable amount), I have yet to see results before they are “expired”, and I never  get the opportunity to help in the process. In the best cases, sometimes, I’m aware that a study about Dokeos has just been submitted inside a university, studying a version of Dokeos older than 2 years… We then find unfavourable comparisons between version 1.8.2 of Dokeos (one year old) and a current version of Moodle. Unfair, isn’t it?

A little e-mail, a call, a chat conversation is all we need to check if there is a common interest for both parts over a specific study topic. Dokeos (and myself personally) can offer support, statistical data, test systems and work visibility, so that a study of *possibly* little reach can be much more publicized as a good proof that Dokeos helps in the introduction of distant learning in whichever environment.

Thinking about it for a while, I figured maybe people didn’t realize that and thought I am unavailable to them. They are wrong, and this is the idea of this post. I want to state it loud and clear that I’m interested. I would alost love to organize events where people can show the results of their work or just their unacheived work to open it to constructive comments.

Only by talking with people on the field can we improve the tool, learn things that I couldn’t imagin by myself, and then give it back to the community. Speak, mate! I’m listening. We are developers, not teachers (most of us). We build the tool, you make it successful.

So, all of you starting studies about e-learning or b-learning… just ask! I’m offering you, at the very least, a little of my time and, in the best case, a success and publicity  by far superior to what you could get by yourself.

Yannick Warnier – Developmnt and Research Director – Dokeos

* Who would have though the soon-to-come social network tool’s idea would come from a geography and history teacher in the south of Spain, which I never met? Or that we didn’t figure out that IMS/QTI export of quiz was much more useful with an import feature around there as well?