Unfortunately, the “availability” setting can be a bit hard to find in Moodle settings. To make this important setting easier to change and its current state more visible, you can now set its value from right in the Course Hub when creating or editing the Moodle Resource:

When you put files in the HANDOUTS/ or SHARE/ folders of your class folder, a “Middfiles Class Folder” resource will automatically be added to your Course Hub site. This resource provides a link that allows students to easily browse the files without having to mount a network drive. There is nothing extra you need to do. Read on for more details.

Middfiles is now securely accessible via the web

This summer LIS added WebDAV support to Middfiles, a new feature that allows any Middfiles file or folder to be shared securely via a web-addressable URL. What this means is that you can now put links to files and folders into email, blogs, and websites. When a user clicks on the link they will be prompted to log in before their browser downloads the file. To try it out, go to https://middfiles.middlebury.edu/ and copy-paste a link to a file.

The other benefit of this new feature is that Middfiles can now be easily used as file repository by classes primarily using a blog or Moodle site. If you have large files to share that are too big for the blog or Moodle, just put them in Middfiles and copy-paste the https://middfiles.middlebury.edu/Classes/Fall12/…/… link to the file into the blog or Moodle site.

Course Hub / Middfiles integration

As mentioned above, the Course Hub now automatically creates a “Middfiles Class Folder” resource when you put files in the HANDOUTS/ or SHARE/ sub-folders. This scan happens every few hours, so if you need the resource to appear more quickly, you can add it manually to the Course Hub.

In addition to providing the resource-link in the Course Hub sidebar, the Middfiles Resource provides a detail-view with the class-folder paths needed to map a drive to the class folder on either Windows or OS X. Class Folder PUBLIC_HTML/ sites

While LIS does not actively provide support for building static HTML websites, some instructors choose to build their own HTML websites and serve them out of the PUBLIC_HTML/ sub-folder of the class-folder on Middfiles. If any files are placed in the PUBLIC_HTML/ sub-folder a “Middfiles Public Website” resource will be automatically added to the Course Hub. If files are moved or removed from the PUBLIC_HTML/ sub-folder the resource will automatically be removed.

To get the number for a lab, you can go to the main LabStats page and click on one of the labs. The URL will content some text like “id=65″ and that is the number to use in the short code. The LabStats site also has a lot of other information about our computing labs.

Thanks to Petar Mitrevski for helping out with some configuration on the LabStats site to support this new feature.

We have been tracking activity across our web sites since January, giving us some good information on how our web sites are being used. Here are some high level stats based on data collected from January 1 – June 30 2012 across over 550,000 pages.

Visits: 3,933,170
Unique Visitors: 2,236,190
Page Views: 12,227,234

We are averaging over 3 pages per visit, with the average visit lasting over 3 minutes.

No surprise that the most visited page in our web presence is the homepage, receiving over 2,000,000 visits during the 6 month period. Placement can change based on the time of year, but the other top pages include academics, athletics, the portal pages, the online directory, and our login page.

To support these types of web sites and pages we have a number of platforms that we use.

Middlebury Web Presence – Presentation

Three main presentation platforms

Drupal – an application framework that we use to build CMS applications for the Midd and MIIS main sites, Davis United World College Scholars, Davis Projects for Peace and the Museum. Content is a mix of static (text, images and media stay the same until someone changes it) and dynamic (feeds of information update from other sources, like 25Live and blog rss feeds).

WordPress – self-service and flexible platform, supporting over one thousand sites. Provide the ability of the site owner to change the look and feel through a number of themes, and turn functionality on and off as needed. WP allows for the display of dynamic and static content. A number of plugins allow for pushing content to social media platforms, as well as pulling in content from resources like Google Maps.

Kurogo – modular framework for adding condensed views of content throughout our web presence, currently drives the mobile dashboard, the portal and the constituent gateways. The service contains very little content, almost all of the text, images and media are pulled from other sources.

There are other platforms that either support the presentation of web content, or provide a presentation for information that lives in another system.

Calendar: 25Live – generates the main calendar view, as well as spuds for individual departments. Provides a presentation layer for information in R25.

Course Catalog – Presentation layer of course information stored in Banner. Also provides course listings for academic departments and faculty.

Dining Menus – Presentation layer for our menu system

GO – a shortcut service and a way to keep persistent urls as web sites change. The addition of QR codes for every shortcut has made this a valuable tool for our print media.

Mediawiki – rarely used to build a web site because it is not easy for a wiki owner to provide an appealing look and feel, but the tracking and discussion features are useful for a site that requires a lot of collaborative editing for all content. This is the same platform that runs Wikipedia.

Middmedia – an interface to media storage, it provides embed code for audio and video streaming as well as direct links for download.

This post is a follow up from the Middlebury’s Web Presence – A Few High Level Snapshots post. Next up will be an overview of our curricular platforms.

You’ll find this feature under the “View/Edit” tab of the self-service admin interface. There is now a field for entering a single admin username. The user will be added or removed as an admin of any codes you check before hitting the corresponding submit button. A handy “check all” box allows you to make an addition for all shortcuts that you are an admin of.

You are not able to remove yourself as admin from a shortcut if you are the only admin via this feature. Instead you are prompted to add another user as an admin to discourage the orphaning of GO shortcuts.

I hope this feature makes the administration of your GO shortcuts easier and more enjoyable!

• A theme customizer that lets you change your site’s settings and styles in one interface.
• Automatic Twitter embeds. Paste the URL of a Tweet into one of your posts and it will automatically show up in the post, like the example below.
• HTML Image Captions. When writing an image caption you can include some HTML tags like <b>, <i>, and <a> to add information to your caption.

WordPress 3.4 is here! Update your site now to try the new theme customizer, better headers, HTML captions & more: wp.me/pZhYe-BE

— WordPress(@WordPress) June 13, 2012

Here’s a video that highlights these features.

There is more information available about WordPress 3.4 in their official blog and developer documentation.

I attended the 2012 New Media Consortium’s summer conference located in Boston at the MIT campus for the first time, accompanied by Joe Antonioli. It was an invigorating several days of talks around new technology and education. I want to introduce you to some of the great speakers and ideas that I encountered. The embedded videos are short but get to the core of many of these ideas. Please take at least a few minutes to scan them and watch further if you find them interesting.

I began the conference with an entire morning session with Dr. Jeff Borden of Pearson called “Personalization : How Far Can (Should) We Go?” He advocates encouraging creativity, giving students safe places to fail but holding them to mastery. He cautions that too much personalization can be a bad thing, when “filter bubbles” over-personalize our experience, but data can provide invaluable feedback to both educators and students. He covers a lot of the same material in the following short video from a different conference. It’s worth watching.

This video, clips of which were shown during Kaltura’s presentation “Enhance Your Online Learning Environment with Video”, highlights the profoundly transformative effect that technologies as simple as YouTube can have. Just the first 7.5 minutes of this video will get this point across:

Several of the talks I attended were about game based learning and gamification as powerful tools for engagement and active learning.

In “Just Press Play: A Unified Game Layer for Education” Andrew Phelps (Rochester Institute of Technology) introduces “Just Press Play” an achievement/badge based system which provides a scale of accomplishment for students to engage in a range of activities and track what they have experienced.

Brett Bixler’s 20+ ways to Add Game-like Elements to Your Learning Designs

During “Which? The Academic Technology Card Game” David Thomas put forth the simple idea “Time is valuable. Entertainment values your time.” We played a card game that “inadvertently” got us talking about academic technology. It sparked inquisition and discussion and it really was fun. The following video is his short TEDx talk “What Makes a Place Fun?”

Helen Keegan urges us to take risks to get people curious. She used a “pedagogy of deception” when creating a fictional person whom the class followed via social networks.

My takeaway was that there really are opportunities to do things in new ways now, genuinely new ways that don’t simply transplant old practices into new technology, that are worth exploring. The message seems to be, take risks, encourage creativity, and get students engaged in learning by leveraging the new social, mobile, visual, storytelling, and gaming technologies.

More to engage with:

New Media Consortium Summer Conference presentations playlist Includes Joichi Ito’s opening keynote.

Tweets (Some top tweets from our own Joe Antonioli!) (click the all link for the full list)

iTunesU contains many of the talks

If you would like to pause this and explore the stories on your own schedule, just click to open one of the story bars. This will stop it from advancing to another story, giving you time to read the title and caption.

If you’re on-campus you can also get to these resources by typing mail, go/mail, go/email, go/webmail to get to WebMail; go/bw or go/bannerweb to get to BannerWeb; and portal, m, students, facstaff, staff, faculty, go/portal, go/m, go/facstaff, go/students, or go/faculty to get to the Portal. Searching for any of these terms will also bring you directly to these sites and the links to them remain in the site footer. You can also customize how and whether they appear for you in the Portal.

Thanks also to Adam Franco for setting up Edge Side Includes so that we can show custom content to on-campus people while still delivering a cached copy of the page to make your browsing experience faster.