In the last few weeks, I’ve slowly started to set up my iBook as a web server to eventually use it to store a Moodle site for all the students at my school. I’ve learnt a few networking tricks, but I still have to figure out a bunch of little things.
One thing I learnt just a few hours ago is that some of the problems I had were related to a utility commonly used on the Mac to decompress downloaded files. In general, StuffIt Expander is great, but for certain .tar.gz packages, I need to use Apple’s BOMArchiveHelper instead. Stuffit decompresses the packages, but as folders rather than as installers, which confused me quite a bit. It was a very un-Mac experience, but I thought that maybe this was due to the cross-platform nature of these web-related tools. I though that, if some components plug into Apache, a web server which is available on Linux, OS X and Windows, and run entirely within, then maybe these components were the same regardless of the OS, which would have explained the unnatural packaging. Fortunately, FreeMacBlog’s “Server Series” made me realize that something was wrong in the decompressing process. At the moment, I can access my iBook locally using Cyberduck – a free ftp client for OS X -, but I am still unsure about my settings for non-local access. From my Mini, my external IP address doesn’t seem to work. I’ll need to test a few more things.
Anyways, now that my iBook has been updated to Tiger (OS X 10.4), I thought I’d give another shot at setting up Moodle. I went back to Moodle’s website to check whether a new version was out and, yes, finally, there was a universal binary version of my beloved Course Management System. “What’s a universal binary?”, you may ask. A UB is a Mac OS X file with code that enables it to run properly on both PPC and x86 (Intel) Macs. Finally, I could install Moodle on my Mini, which is a much faster machine. (It’s almost five years newer!) Normally, PPC applications run fine on Intel-based Macs, but the PPC version of Moodle was one of the rare exceptions. (I still don’t really understand why.) Furthermore, this new version of Moodle was based on MAMP, which I knew was a well designed Apache-MySQL-PHP solution for Mac OS X. The old version was based on XAMPP, which doesn’t install as “cleanly” as MAMP. (MAMP doesn’t install random files all over your hard drive: it keeps everything in one neat little folder.) I downloaded and installed. Moodle was running and I was going through the configuration of my Moodle site (and not of the AMP components) in a matter of minutes. It “just worked”… Wow! After wrestling with that stuff for years, Moodle’s MAMP package got my server up and running (although only locally at the moment, as far as I know) in less than five minutes.
I can now start designing online quizzes and organizing the various modules that the site will have to make sure that everything fits together nicely and addresses the issues that our school has at the moment with paper files. I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon, but I think it’d be sweet if every teacher had a laptop at his/her desk and could easily look at the same information from a variety of angles. At the moment, with paper files, it is not obvious to keep track of attendence, homework, test results, behaviour problems, learning challenges and everything else all at once. Different documents focus on different things, and it is rather difficult to get the whole picture due to this fragmentation. Also, with online, self-grading quizzes, it will be much easier to get students to work more on the things that they do not understand well right away. I will write more on the advantages of an online system once I have a prototype ready and need to sell the idea to the teachers and management at my school. They seemed to think it was a great idea, but it will have to work significantly better than the actual system to convince the school to give teachers a laptop each to follow the progress of our students. Who knows? Anyways, I’m excited that Moodle is running now. I’ve already started to test quizzes. It’s relatively easy and fast to design new quizzes and it seems to be a rather powerful framework. I mean, it’s used by several universities – in Canada and elsewhere -, so I’m sure it will be more than enough for our school.
I have to come back… I have to come back to South Korea because I won’t be done by the time I go back home for Christmas 2006. I’ll just be getting started! The use of this type of technology in education is at the very core of my strongest beliefs. A small school where I have proven myself as a teacher is the perfect place for me to experiment as I will be given a lot of freedom on how to do things. Of course, at the moment, it’s still an after-class pet project, but I’m confident that five years from now, it will be an important part of how I earn a living and how I contribute to society. And that is why I spend so much time at my computer all the time. I’ll get there. I have to.
One of the programme’s suggested use is to keep your system files and your personal files and data on separate partitions so that you can do a clean install of your OS without wiping all of your music, videos, documents and settings from your drive. It seems like a great idea. I’ll try that sometime soon. Another obvious use of the programme is that it will allow me to install and run Ubuntu natively rather than in a virtual machine. Whether or not I manage to get Moodle running under OS X, I’ll also need to get it running under Ubuntu so that I can have a truly free solution. Moodle did not work in a virtualized Ubuntu. I guess 
