Before April 30th

Before April 30th

April 30th is the deadline, as I understand it, when WMF will have established their 5 year plan. If it is alright with you I'd like to work on this a bit.

I think it needs a few things, some of them simple and some not as simple.

For starters we should be explicit about what we are asking for. Do we want developers to spend time on this, or do just want developer support? Personally, as a student, I am looking for a Google Summer of Code project for the Summer and this sounds about perfect for me, in terms of size and difficulty. In the case that they agreed with other aspects of this proposal they would only need to provide mentorship.

Another aspect of this proposal that might need work is in persuasion. We are asking WMF to allow us to adopt the proprietary standard of Moodle, and we should continue to generate arguments for this. In parts of WV there are pages that appear to have the competitive attitude that, "We ARE not Moodle!". Whether or not this is the case, it is not uncommon for different institutions to form "silos" and we should take into account any resistance of that sort we may silently encounter. This is a problem that currently prevails across academic institutions, so why should WV be any different? Here is a video from a lecture at MIT entitled Effective Examples of Educational Technology and Priorities for Future Investment. The video is just over 1 hour and 20 minutes but the discussion occurs within the first 30 minutes. It is the best citation I have at the moment. Hopefully I can follow the speakers publication to find text citations, or find other places where this discussion is talking place. One of my planned activities before the deadline is to generate an essay that provides this information and a new analysis of WV and Moodle as complimentary technologies and communities.

I have more thoughts but if it's alright I'll share them a bit later. Also I would like to help with the proposal and I would just like to make sure that you are comfortable with me editing the proposal page. We'll be able to communicate and we'll have the history so I think it can work out ok.

Mbrad02:18, 14 February 2010

Also does anyone have any idea why this talk page can not be edited to include new chapters?

Mbrad02:25, 14 February 2010
 

Nevermind..I got it..its at the bottom.

Mbrad02:26, 14 February 2010
 

Please do work on this! I have very little time for it and can only do it in small bursts while I'm waiting on other work to get done. Have you installed MediaWiki and become comfortable with PHP? The first step might be to write a converter in any language from GIFT into traditional WV Quiz "tables" format. See if the other Mediawiki programmers on the #mediawiki IRC channel will let you put that translator up on the toolserver; if they won't, let me know here and I can help you host it too.

GIFT isn't proprietary in the traditional sense because Moodle is all GPLed. You can use any of its supported interoperability formats with any other tools, e.g. xml structure editors, etc. I've already made arrangements to share all of the underlying proposed technology with Moodle's Quiz programmer.

99.27.200.19607:30, 14 February 2010
 

Great! I have both of those requirements. I have MediaWiki installed already and I am comfortable with PHP. I have a Sun Java programmer Cert and I have found that most languages are extremely similar. In any case I have completed an accredited course on PHP to make sure.

I shouldn't have used the word proprietary. I meant to say only that it is "identified" with the Moodle infrastructure and community domain and therefore may encounter "silo" thinking resistance. I think I've just read too many older section of WV that seem to want the project to be evangelically limited in scope.

So you would suggest a proof of concept converter? I guess that it may a fairly small project by most standards. If you are considering sharing this with a Moodle programmer then you must be thinking of a two-way converter, which makes sense. We are also lacking an export function for WV quizzes in that case.

Also do you have a user account on WMF? I see various 99.x.x.x IP addresses around on this proposal's talk page and I can only presume that they are all you operating from a DHCP internet connection. Is this true?

Mbrad19:53, 14 February 2010

I've asked a couple people at Google to support this as a Summer of Code project, and I'll be asking for them to match whatever I can raise at http://talknicer.com over the next few months or so. When do you start needing to get paid for the summer? I'll try to raise enough sponsorship to make sure that you will be able to do this.

99.22.95.6118:43, 16 February 2010
 

I am hoping to start working on a project for WV at the end of May at the earliest. I didn't know that GSOC was funded by other sources outside Google, but even if that is not the case of course I am open to other sources of funding. I would just like to be able to see this project through instead of having to find work doing something on a project that I don't care as strongly about.

Mbrad00:21, 20 February 2010
 

Thank you; yes, I don't log in here these days so I always know what new users have to expect. It helps me offer suggestions for improvement when the admins get worn down by the vandals and start adding elitist restrictions. But my email is on the MediaWiki bug, and yours should be too.

Please try out IRC #mediawiki and vote for and add yourself to the cc list of this feature request (you should see channel messages from an irc bot when you do), and talk with the experienced MediaWiki programmers there for tips when you get stuck. 99.22.95.61 18:49, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

99.22.95.6118:49, 15 February 2010
 

When you get finished or bored with a GIFT importer/exporter, please consider writing the adaptive testing and question accuracy review algorithms as abstract PHP modules or pseudocode before implementing them inside MediaWiki's Quiz module, and put those here on this page above the LiquidThreads discussion so that Moodle Quiz programmer Tim Hunt and others will be able to find them. Or, if you think it would be easier, work out the implementation first and then abstract them into PHP modules or pseudocode. I can't say which is more likely to work better for you.

There may not be much database extension overlap between MediaWiki and Moodle, but I don't know either schema very well, so I hope I'm mistaken. Have you looked at the MediaWiki or Moodle SQL table schemas yet? They would need to be extended for both adaptive testing and accuracy review. It is unclear to me whether MediaWiki's database schema would need any changes for integrated conversion between GIFT and Quiz format in MediaWiki's Quiz module. Do you think it would?

99.22.95.6119:08, 15 February 2010
 

I was cramming yesterday and I'm cramming today but tomorrow I'll be available to respond and participate.

Mbrad17:07, 17 February 2010
 

I added myself to the bugzilla feature and voted. I haven't used IRC before but I'll try to sort that out. Previous attempts have not worked out properly.

I don't think GIFT translations will effect the schema. It would probably occur during that point when Parser.php calls the Quiz.php hook. I think, though Im not positive, that the WV microformat is retrieved from the db, then rendered as HTML (pretty much when Parser would be doing the same thing) since it tied to Parser.php. So by adding new parsing rules to identify GIFT. It could read GIFT from the same (page based?) db locations. Alternately we could translate GIFT to WV microformat when we first come across it but that means writing an entire a new extension probably.

If we wanted to go a step beyond we could write an XSLT function into Quiz.php which may be able read translation paths from a separate document. That way if someone wants to add a new microformat, or an XML format, they would only need to add the rules to the XSLT, instead of updating Quiz.php. I think that is considerably more ambitious and might modestly effect the schema, Im not sure.

As far as the Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) I'll provide the documentation that you are asking for. Id be interested in meeting Tim Hunt (online) as well, in case I had questions. Moodle does have an "adaptive questions" extension, and I'm curious about it. Ideally I would want to be able to share the questions and question rankings with Moodle. From what I understand the larger variety of quiz takers a question has been encountered by, the more accurately we can rank the question according to the parameters of Item Response Theory (IRT), which is the most commonly used CAT ranking system.

Mbrad00:14, 20 February 2010