Dokkeos

As I was in Cusco the other week to hold a few speeches at a 3 days conference, I took the opportunity to go to Machu Picchu. This time, I managed to walk to the Intipunku (la Puerta del Sol, The Sun Gate) and take a picture from there, wearing my wonderful - but old now - Dokeos t-shirt from the 2005 User's Day.

It's been ages since I first thought I should publish a quick reference sheet for Dokeos developers. It's now done. It's a first version but I think it will be really useful to new Dokeos developers. It is already useful for me (particularly for $httpHeadXtra and $htmlHeadXtra), so I don't doubt that bit. Dokeos 1.8.5 Quick Reference Sheet It is published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license (Paternity, Share-Alike) and I have the SVG format locally, so just ask me for it if you want to extend it.

I'll be having two speeches at a free software event in Cusco these 24, 25 and 26th of September 2008. If you would like to meet us there, please get in touch beforehand by e-mail or a comment over here. See the official announcement for more details

One of the terrible things that happen for users, from time to time, is that their usual actions are suddendly made completely unusual by a change of version, because the name (nothing else) of their favourite feature has been changed. We understand that, and we do everything we can to avoid it, but the truth is that some of our naming conventions don't really make sense. For example, a "learning path" is something only a guy with a degree in e-learning understands.

I forgot to mention that in the past, but the free campus (http://campus.dokeos.com) now integrates OpenID recognition. To use it (if you already have an account on the free campus and an OpenID), just log into the campus, go to your My Profile page and add your OpenID in the apropriate field. [caption id="attachment_220" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Campus' profile page"]

Herodoto is joining the Dokeos development team as an independent (and distant) developer today. He will be in charge of integrating the wiki tool, under my coaching.

Today I had a phone chat with Eric Marguin, my french counterpart, and we ended up scheduling more or less a fixed week for the release of Dokeos 1.8.6. This will be week 41 if all goes according to plan, which is between the 6th and the 10th of October 2008. Although we won't be able to do the complete quiz tool revamp we wanted, we have been adding quite a lot to that and completing our developments on other tools. It's still too soon to talk about all that, but I'll be back around mid-September to make it all clear.

A few weeks ago, I explained how to change the Dokeos footer to make it "float". Today, in the context of an indirect contract with the Ministry of Education in Peru, I have to change the style a little bit more. The idea is to [1] have a left bar showing large tools icons in the course homepage, and [2] have an alternative portal homepage for users, showing an introductory screen of the main general tools. This must all work on a 800x600 screen (which is a real challenge).

[1] Left toolbar showing course tools

This is not as tricky as it sounds (although it's very close to it).

Following my article on SCORM 2.0 White Paper call, and the kind personal invitation to contribute from Mike Rustici, I decided to go ahead and submit my list of suggestions to the SCORM 2.0 thinking process team just before the deadline (I've been quite busy on other stuff, including urgent personal matters). This is the first time ever that Dokeos contributes somehow (even though it's a very little piece of the enormous puzzle) to the design of an e-learning standard.

I just finished debugging one client's portal. For some reason, he couldn't see his SCORM content although he could see them in other LMS (Moodle, Claroline, ...). After spending 2 minutes checking the files and directories names, I realised he had stuff like this:

Act_Positive%20and%20negative[1]/.

as root SCORM path.