ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

For all of us on Christmas, may this day give us all new birth.
—The Blessing Candles:
58 Simple Mealtime Prayer-Celebrations

A noteworthy post in Healthbolt  (thanks to ProBlogger):

Healthbolt has done some nice analysis of the layouts of top 10 blogs at Technorati and comes up with the following Composite Map. It gives a unique insight at how a small group of top blogs arrange themselves.

See it at full size and with a key to interpret the colors here  but before you go and look at it, see if you can predict what each color signifies in the following categories:

• Advertising
• Search
• Email/RSS Subscription
• Header/Site ID/Branding/Logo
• Content
• Internal Links/Navigation

Moodle 1.7 is fresh off the oven , announced founder Martin Dougiamas on Nov 8. Of special interest to me are the big names behind the headline features:

Roles - Moodle has a complete new architecture for assigning people permissions. It’s very flexible, allowing you to give just a single person the right to delete posts in one particular forum… Thanks to Open University…

XML database schema – Moodle now supports a single way of specifying database structures using XML [for easier development and wider database support]… Moodle can now run out of the box on Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle… Thanks to Microsoft…

New admin interface – admins get… a new interface designed to make it much easier to find settings and configure Moodle properly… Thanks to Google…

Unit testing framework – developers can now easily write unit tests that can be run as part of a system check to make sure Moodle code is performing as expected… Thanks to Open University…

FIRST, while browsing Stephen Downes’ “OLDaily”, I found a good graphic  from “Creating Passionate Users”. It summed up neatly “Why does engineering, math or science education in the US suck?”
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