Open Source

Showcase Shorts: Your update on the latest Moodle Developments! Time to kick off the year!

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by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’ and happy New Year to you all!

Like many of you, our teams took some time over the last few weeks to celebrate the festive season with their friends and family, but somehow still managed to smash out a ton of work!

We made great progress on delivering our Moodle Product Vision, which focuses on empowering you for life and delivering improvements designed to help you unlock your creativity, help facilitate collaboration and optimise your business & learning outcomes.

We are excited to share a few highlights of our recent efforts with you!

Custom Domains are coming to MoodleCloud

We are happy to announce that Custom Domains are coming to MoodleCloud. Providing our MoodleCloud Plan users with the opportunity to use their own domain name, this is one of our most highly voted new feature requests and we are thrilled to say that it’s almost here. 

 

Another Plugin will be available in Moodle Mobile Apps

In a wonderful example of collaboration with our Moodle Community, the ‘mod_checklist’ plugin will soon be supported in our Mobile Applications. This will mean that all the plugins available to our MoodleCloud Plan users will also be available in our app for the first time, rounding out the proposition for those users. 

Course creation is getting simpler 

We’ve been thinking about how we can make creating course content in Moodle easier and help our users get creative. We started some deep dive research in this space to help us better understand how educators and learning designers create courses, what they need from the process and how we can make it better for them. 

We’ve also been working hard on improving how courses can be structured in Moodle to make them easier to navigate and provide more options for how content can be presented. 

Our most commonly used functions are getting better

Our activity icons and one of the most used functionalities in Moodle, the Activity Chooser, are getting a face lift. These changes are designed to help educators more quickly pick the right activities to include in their courses and make it easier for students to identify what they are working on easily. 

We are also improving the functionality provided in our ‘Browse User List’ page to make managing users faster and simpler. These updates will be incredibly helpful to Moodle Administrators who use this functionality day in and day out.

And, we continue our journey to enhance the functionality provided by our Plugin Directory, making it easier to search, find and select the right plugin for your Moodle implementations.

More opportunities to learn Moodle are here

We’ve launched a brand new ‘Moodle for Learners’ Course on Moodle Academy, with functionality built in allowing the customisation of the course content for your own Moodle implementation. We’ve also got a bunch of new Webinars coming and are getting ready to launch our new Moodle Developer course soon too.

That’s it for this edition of our ‘Showcase Shorts’, we hope you’ve enjoyed the updates.

Until Next Sprint!

The Moodle Products Team

Montreal.rb Jan 2024 Building an AI Medical Scribe in Ruby

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The video of the Jan 2024 Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup A.I. talk “Building an AI Medical Scribe in Ruby” by Jean-Sebastien Boulanger (CTO of Circle Medical) has been posted. Description: “In this talk, I’ll share insights from our experience creating an AI medical scribe using Ruby at Circle Medical, a hybrid primary care provider seeing over 50,000 patients monthly. We leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a scribe to enhance clinical documentation and save doctors’ time.”

Achieving Log Centralization and Analysis with Open Source SIEM and XDR: UTMStack

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Achieving Log Centralization and Analysis with Open Source SIEM and XDR: UTMStack

Log centralization and analysis are crucial for organizations in troubleshooting system errors, identifying cybersecurity threats, and adhering to various regulations such as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI), Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), and more. While contemporary SIEM solutions have simplified log management, […]

The post Achieving Log Centralization and Analysis with Open Source SIEM and XDR: UTMStack appeared first on Linux.com.

Andy Wingo: nombrilliant, actually

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Today, a middle-aged note: when you are young, unless you been
failed by The System, you enjoy a radiant confidence: everything you say
burns with rightness and righteousness, that the world Actually Is This
Way, You See, and if you think about it, it Actually Should Be This
Other Specific Way. This is how you get the fervent young communists
and Scala enthusiasts and ecologists and Ayn Randians. The ideas are so
right that you become an evangelist, a
prophet,
a truth-speaker; a youtuber, perhaps.

Then, with luck, you meet the world: you build, you organize, you
invest, you double down. And in that doubling, the ideas waver,
tremble, resonate, imperceptibly at first, reinforced in some ways,
impeded in others. The world works in specific ways, too, and you don’t
really know them in the beginning: not in the bones, anyway. The
unknowns become known, enumerate themselves, dragons everywhere; and in
the end, what can you say about them? Do you stand in a spot that can
see anything at all? Report, observe, yes; analyze, maybe, eventually;
prophesize, never. Not any more.

And then, years later, you are still here. The things you see, the
things you know, other people don’t: they can’t. They weren’t here.
They aren’t here. They hear (and retell) stories, back-stories,
back-back-stories, a whole cinematic universe of narrative, and you know
that it’s powerful and generative and yet unhinged, essentially unmoored
and distinct from reality, right and even righteous in some ways, but
wrong in others. This happen in all domains: macroeconomics, programming
languages, landscape design, whatever. But you see. You see through stories, their construction and relation to the past, on a meta level, in a way
that was not apparent when you were young.

I tell this story (everything is story) as an inexorable progression, a
Hegelian triptych of thesis-antithesis-synthesis; a conceit. But there are structures that can to get you to synthesis more efficiently.
PhD programs try: they break you down to allow you to build. They do it
too quickly, perhaps; you probably have to do it again in your next
phase, academia or industry, though I imagine it’s easier the second
time around. Some corporate hierarchies also manage to do this, in
which when you become Staff Engineer, you become the prophet.

Of course, synthesis is not inexorable; you can stop turning
the crank anywhere. Perhaps you never move from ideal to real.
Perhaps, unmoored, you drift, painter rippling the waters. But what do
you do when the crank comes around? Where to next?

Anyway, all this is to say that I have lately been backing away from
bashfulness in a professional context: there are some perspectives that
I see that can’t be seen or expressed by others. It feel very strange
to write it, but I am even trying to avoid self-deprecation and hedging;
true, I might not possess the authoritative truth on, I don’t know,
WebAssembly, or Scheme language development, but nobody else does
either, and I might as well just say what I think as if it’s true.

* * *

Getting old is not so bad. You say very cheesy things, you feel cheesy,
but it is a kind of new youth too, reclaiming a birthday-right of being
earnest. I am doubling down on Dad energy. (Yes, there is a similar
kind of known-tenuous confidence necessary to raise kids. I probably
would have forced into this position earlier if I had kids younger. But, I don’t mean to take the metaphor fa(r)ther; responsible
community care for the young is by far not the sole province of the
family man.)

So, for the near future, I embrace the cheese. And then, where to? I
suspect excessive smarm. But if I manage to succeed in avoiding that, I
look forward to writing about ignorance in another 5 years. Until then,
happy hacking to all, and thank you for your forbearance!

Old new apps and new old apps

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TWIF generated on Thursday, 18 Jan 2024, Week 3

Community News

@linsui pings us about:

Element – Secure Messenger and its update to 1.6.10. Yes, we skipped a version as upstream is busy working on their X enhanced app. Stay tuned for that upgrade coming sometime soon. Until then, this update might contain that critical fix for calling functionality that’s been plaguing users for months.

@Licaon_Kter has new old news:

In green app suite news, Fossify Calendar and Fossify File Manager are both live, hence more of your orange apps can be replaced. Even the Gallery got an update to 1.1.1, and more are in the pipeline as you read this.

Kore, the official remote for Kodi, was downgraded from v3.0.0 to v2.5.3 as newer versions include a non-FOSS dependency. (Upstream issue #912).

Transportr – Public Transit is back after a one and a half year long hiatus. Its contributors have changed the map library to a fully FOSS one so now commuters can enjoy their rides in the updated app.

Removed Apps

2 apps were removed
  • OCR Test – App is no longer developed and was crashing.
  • TUC WLAN – The app is no longer needed to configure Wi-Fi.

Newly Added Apps

8 more apps were newly added
  • ANONguard – App for the AN.ON anonymisation service, read more here.
  • BLE Radar – A tool to monitor, analyze and find BLE devices around you.
  • Edifier RC10D1 – Unofficial remote control for Edifier R2730DB speakers.
  • Kotlin Quiz – Quiz taking application about Kotlin.
  • M3U – Free stream media player.
  • OMGSoundboard – A full soundboard app that will make your day a little brighter.
  • Planetario – The Solar System in your Phone.
  • ntodotxt – Managing your to-dos within a todo.txt file locally or via WebDAV.

Updated Apps

150 more apps were updated

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Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation from the Linux kernel

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What follows is a letter from Hans Reiser to myself, which he wrote some two months back, and has asked me to publish, with his thoughts on the deprecation of ReiserFS from the Linux kernel. I have transcribed it to the best of my ability. Plaintext email may not be the best way to read it, as such, I have also made available PDF and HTML versions of the letter. ↫ Fredrick R. Brennan Hans Reiser is the creator of the ReiserFS file system, which used to be a serious contender for the Linux file system you’d use in the early 2000s. In 2006, Hans Reiser murdered his wife, and is currently serving a prison sentence for this crime. Hopefully, after he completes his prison sentence, he can become a contributing member of society once again, if the professionals and specialists involved in such matters deem him capable of doing so. The long letter mentioned here was actually quite a fascinating read, and details his abrasive behaviour in the Linux world, the design of ReiserFS and its place in the ecosystem at the time, and his thoughts on the removal of ReiserFS from the Linux kernel.