ElearningWorld.org

For the online learning world

Author: Gareth Barnard

Elearning WorldLinuxTechnical
Gareth Barnard

A little bit more Java

As a follow on from ‘A little bit of Java’, I thought that we’d progress into something a bit more complicated. The thing is with software creation is that the initial learning curve is steep, but once you’ve gotten over that then things do become easier. One way of climbing that initial curve is to have a defined goal with an outcome that you strive to reach. The program also needs to have a purpose so that it does something useful for us. Then we will be motivated to attain the goal of achieving our solution when things get tricky. Therefore our program will take text that we enter and apply a ‘Substitution cipher’ and tell us the result. That result we can then enter again and get what we originally typed back.

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A cygnet
Elearning WorldLinuxTechnical
Gareth Barnard

A little bit of Java

Life is all about learning and maintaining the skills you have. I started off writing software in procedural languages, then moved on to C++, being object orientated, then Java came along and I fell in love with it. I found it much easier not having to worry about memory management and having so much ‘out of box’ components, especially graphical ones. So let us learn and revisit the language and discover it.

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Bee with a summer hat on
Elearning WorldMoodleTechnical
Gareth Barnard

Behat revisited

In the first two parts, I covered getting up and running with running acceptance tests sequentially, using a Ramdisk to speed things up, running tests in parallel, specifying a custom theme to test on and writing your own tests. Over a year later we revisit Behat to speed up the process of orchestrating the environment and to understand a bit more about what is going on. To understand this post, I recommend that you read the first two parts beforehand.

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A row of ducklings
Elearning WorldMoodlePedagogy
Gareth Barnard

Infinite Monkey’s

There is a saying that I know of along the lines that given enough time then a group monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare. This then lead to a thought on if it actually happened then would it be a copyright infringement? Probably not given the time that has transpired, but then consider if instead of it being a random act, then what if the monkeys had just copied the text by learning how to use the keys Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V effectively? Then how could we tell the difference? With that thought in mind, then how can assessors of work on an online eLearning platform then detect plagiarism?

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A model sheep
AccessibilityElearning WorldMoodleThemeUX
Gareth Barnard

Icons, Words, Accessibility and Learning

hen Emma Richardson posted the words “I do like the new Edit Mode button (especially the wording – nice job UX team!) – it makes much more sense to me to have it where it is and it will make it easier for the teachers to understand the purpose I think.” on the Moodle themes forum. This got me thinking again about the ‘Edit button’ and how it has been improved in M4.0 by Bas Brands in MDL-71610. In improving my Foundation theme, I’d decided to remove the ‘Edit mode’ words on the screen because of the space it took up, when once you know what it is, then you don’t need the description. Or do you? In this post I’ll consider this point.

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Smily face keyring
CoursesElearning WorldGeneral
Gareth Barnard

Can AI lie?

We live and exist in a technological world. Gone are the days where we depend upon the direct word of another for our information. Progressively in the last and present centuries, the speed of change of communication technologies has rapidly diversified to the extent that we are able to get the point of view of another from almost any part of the world. We are no longer restricted* to singular sources of information but can pick and choose what we wish. But what is the real truth and if its not, then can we tell if we are only interacting with a machine? Thus, can Artificial Intelligence lie?

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