In December last year, two Liip employees Brian King & I (Penny Leach) went to the Czech Republic for a week, for the first ever concentrated Moodle Developer Conference. There were 16 attendees from around the world, participating in an intense week of discussion about the upcoming Moodle 2.0 release, with a lot of decisions being made and work being planned. The session notes are now online.

After that, I had a 6 week secondment to Moodle HQ, working on improving the Moodle Networking feature for Moodle 2.0. This was my second secondment to Moodle HQ, the first was in 2008, to work on the Portfolio API. Moodle HQ is based in Perth Australia, but there are employees working all around the world in different timezones, so communication largely happens on our jabber development chat, and bug tracker, with the occasional skype video chat.

The first step was to evaluate the current state of MNet, which was added to Moodle 1.8, but needed a lot of work to bring it up to Moodle 2.0 compliance. I created a metabug with a number of subtasks representing the different areas that need work, and then linked all the existing MNet bugs to those. Then I created a whole lot more bugs for a lot of refactoring that needed to happen. Then I rolled up my sleeves and started work. I closed many bugs, some of which affected the stable 1.9 version of Moodle as well, and will be in the next stable point release.

Unfortunately there was more needing to be done than I had time to do, but MNet is now in a much better state to be able to be maintained by more people. I will be doing a handover meeting with David Mudrák soon, and also of course continue to help with bug triage and fixing during the Moodle 2.0 beta period.

Technically, I was tracking Moodle cvs with git, making branches for each bug I was working on, committing to git and then eventually rebasing and using git-cvsexportcommit to land the work into the relevant Moodle branch. This is a workflow that David has recently described in more detail, and works very well for me, a long time thoroughly convinced git user.

Working with Moodle HQ directly is always a great experience, although doing it in a European timezone, as I did in 2008, works better than doing it from New Zealand, which is where I was this time. Even so, I had as always great support from the other core team, testing and doing code review. I hope MNet users will be happy with the improvements in Moodle 2.0.

Finally, I am very happy to annouce that I will soon be working on adding LEAP2A support to the Moodle Portfolio API that will be in Moodle 2.0.

There's already a rough specification for this work, and it's been on my TODO list for a very long time.

LEAP2A is a very simple and open atom-based e-portfolio standard, to promote interoperability between e-portfolio systems. Interoperability is very important in an e-portfolio system, because it is vital to be able to transport portfolio data around with you, as you move between educational providers, into higher education, and on to professional development. Imagine having in one portfolio system, your entire portfolio of work, starting from your first day at primary school, right up to your continued professional development. Of course, one would use many different portfolio systems over that time, so some sort of open standard to transport data around is imperative.

I was involved with the LEAP standard group last year when I was living in London, adding LEAP2A support to Mahara. I attended the LEAP meetings in the UK, and worked on the export side of the project. Nigel took over when I left Catalyst and continued, adding the import side (which is of course, much harder).

But wait, you ask. Isn't Moodle a learning management system, not an e-portfolio? Why do we care about interoperability with an e-portfolio standard? The answer is of course, that while you're working, you are entering data into Moodle, and at the end of the course, the natural thing to want to do is to export some of that data into your portfolio. At the moment, we have the Portfolio API in Moodle for that, which I worked on for last year for 3 months, during my time at Moodle HQ. However, at the time I wrote it, it wasn't at all clear what portfolio standard we should support, so content is transferred in "raster" format (rendered to HTML or a file like a pdf). Since then though, LEAP has emerged as a clear front runner, and now that Mahara 1.2 (almost released!) fully supports importing and exporting LEAP2A, the time is right for us to take the plunge and add LEAP2A support to Moodle's Portfolio API. This improves the integration between Moodle and Mahara, as well as opening the door for Moodle to integrate better with other e-portfolio systems that implement the LEAP2A standard.

I am therefore very grateful to the State of New Hampshire for providing the funding to Liip for me to do this work. This comes from a grant from the New Hampshire Department of Education, and a collaborate group made up of the following school districts:

• Exeter Region Cooperative
• Windham
• Oyster River
• Farmington
• Newmarket
• Timberlane

Special thanks also to Matt Oquist who has been tirelessly helping me find funding for this work!

It seems I am the recipient of one of this year's Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards

This is really an amazing thing for me and I'm quite overwhelmed by it. Looking back over the last 5 years I've been working on this Open Source Education stuff, there are so many people who have helped me out, inspired and motivated me, and I'm quite sure that this award is a recognition of all of the work of those people as well. The list is far too long to mention, but some of the people who stand out the most over the years are Andrew McMillan, Martín Langhoff, Richard Wyles, Martin Dougiamas, Eloy Lafuente, Nicolas Connault, Nigel McNie, and Heinz Krettek.

Additionally, I am one of those lucky people who get to work on Open Source during work time - from 2004 to early this year for Catalyst in New Zealand, and now for Liip in Switzerland. I am immensely grateful that I have had the encouragement and support of my employers.

Finally, a pony!

The response to this has been immense - I have had emails, tweets, instant messages from many many people. I cannot respond to everyone individually but I am very grateful for the support from each and every one of you.

I am happy to announce that Liip are now a Mahara partner! Mahara is an Open Source ePortfolio system.

In many respects Mahara is a "sister" application to Moodle, providing students with a learning environment that they themselves own, giving them them the ability to showcase their work and collaborate with their peers. However, Mahara is also well suited as a social networking system, running out of the box without Moodle.

Mahara was originally funded by the New Zealand government's Tertiary Education Commission, and has grown into a thriving open source product that is increasingly being adopted worldwide. It makes a lot of sense for Liip to be a partner, both because we're already the official Moodle partner in Switzerland, and Mahara fits very well into our existing list of projects we work with, but also because I have been involved in Mahara since the start, and wanted to continue my involvement since coming to Liip. Liip have been fantastic supporting me in this goal!

Here's my general update of what's happened over the last few months of completely shifting my life around.

I'm living in Fribourg, Switzerland. This is a really cute little town, just 20 minutes train ride from the capital, Bern. I think it's supposed to be officially French-German bilingual but it really isn't. French is the language spoken in all the shops and cafes. I don't have any French yet, so this has been a bit of a challenge - the lowest point was trying to buy the official Rubbish bags at the supermarket.

It took quite awhile to find an apartment - I think I looked at between 20 and 25 altogether before I found a perfect apartment just over a bridge from the fringe of town - I'm living in a renovated apartment in an old house on the river bank and it's absolutely perfect. I can hear the bells from the cathedral and I have a good walk to work, 35 minutes, and there's grass and river and a bus stop outside for the mornings where I take longer than normal to get up. I found a vegetable market just over the bridge on Saturday mornings, that has a whole stall dedicated to mushrooms! This made me disproportionately gleeful. After almost a month of looking at apartments that I didn't want, I visited the apartment, signed the contract, moved in, and bought & assembled most of the furniture within a single weekend, with the help of my amazing boyfriend. Apparently this is almost unheard of in Switzerland.

I'm working at Liip, and it's great. I cannot imagine being thrown into a better bunch of people in a foreign city/country/language. I'm working on Moodle, doing some Open Source projects, working with great people, drinking a lot of beer and throwing the pony around. This is not a euphemism! I got to be a part of the group celebrating Liip doing so well at the Best of Swiss Web awards (more on this in another post), and it was just awesome to watch my new work people excel at what they do.

I went to the German Moodlemoot in Bamberg last month and had a great time (finally getting to try the Moodle Mojitos) and met some more Moodlers for the first time - most notably Heinz, who it was fantastic to meet, and David, who dutifully bought me beer for helping him with git, as well as seeing the familiar faces of Martin, Helen and Petr, which always makes me happy. For the first time I was at a conference and people who weren't me talking about Mahara (although of course I talked about Mahara as well), and that was a pretty big buzz in itself.

I love Swiss trains! Travelling back from Bamberg I changed about 4 times, and the change that made me switch onto a Swiss train made me warm and fuzzy. I also like Spätzle, Lindor chocolate, Cardinal (my local beer), Coop, Olivenbrot, the pizza place near work, Lily's, and Freitag (I am happily telling everyone I'm Swiss now that I have a Freitag wallet, which is complete nonsense). lost.ch makes me happy, having my name on my letterbox makes me happy (this does not happen in New Zealand). My boyfriend makes me happy. Inappropriately appending 'chen' or 'li' on the end of everything makes me gleeful and drives everyone else crazy. So far, I don't think much of Cablecom, Migros, apartment hunting, eating Pferd (pony!) or endless dairy products.

I have seen live: Gazpacho twice (although once was in München) and Explosions in the Sky. I hate smoking in bars, but I loved both bands.

As soon as I have conquered German and French (any day now: yeah right!) I will be completely happy.

As of this morning, I have officially finished my 3 months with Moodle HQ, and am back on board with Catalyst fulltime (still based in London though).

The Portfolio API is "finished" - still a few things to sort out, and undoubtedly a few more bugs will shake out over the next few months.

Working for Moodle HQ has been a great experience. It turns out the flexibility of working remotely on my own time suits me pretty well.

I particularly appreciate the help of Nicolas Connault and Dan Poltawski, for sanity checking my API, writing plugins, helping me with testing and writing tests, and providing pictures of kittens.

Assuming I get it together, I will hopefully be talking about this work, and Moodle/Mahara integration at a Moodlemoot near you soon.

What I've been up to codewise recently:

• Today I landed the Portfolio API in Moodle CVS. This doesn't mean that it's finished yet, just that it's stable enough to be there without breaking other things. There are two plugins so far, box.net (requires API key), and a simple download plugin. I'm working on putting little 'add to portfolio' buttons all through Moodle, after that I'll be doing the Mahara plugin. Whee!


• I had a really interesting Skype conference with Simon Grant at JISC last week about the ePortfolio standards he's working on, PIOP and LEAP 2.0 which look very interesting. I am hoping that phase 3 (!!) of the Moodle/Mahara integration (I am currently working on Phase 2) will implement one of these, as well as for Mahara's own import/export.


• buffycli has hit Debian, v 0.2.1 was uploaded today. Many thanks to Martin for uploading it, Enrico for providing perl bindings to libbuffy (and suffering endless questions about them), SammyV and debian-perl for perl stuff, and Francois for packaging stuff. Man I bugged a lot of people to get this done.


• I've also finally started having a look at finishing what I started back in Easter at the Mahara hackfest, namely the ability to use views for profile pages and a wall blocktype plugin. This is quite cool as it introduces the ability to have different view types, autocreated views at user-creation event (as well as fixing a long standing issue of the core not being able to subscribe to its own events, which was daft). I hope to get this merged next week with plenty of time for testing before 1.1

As people have started sending me grouchy emails about the lack of blog posts describing the adventures of the last few weeks, here is an obligatory update.

As it was my turn to be shown around Europe by Martin after the great Penny and Martin Adventure 2008_1 (NZ), I have been galavanting for the last 3 weeks. Since I left New Zealand, we have visited:

.ch: Zürich, Bern, St Moritz, Pontresina
.de: München
.fr: (near) Bandol
.it: Torri Ventimiglia, Genova, Firenze, Bologna, Ferrara, Mantova, Lovere

and: learned to make Olive Bread, got fat on salami, pate, beer, contentment and laziness, played frisbee in the sea, sailed, eaten snails and donkey (!!), done hardly any work, slept far too much, and drank a lot of beer (did I mention this?!)

phew! that's quite a bit. I'm now in London staying with dispersed parts of Mischief Bad Group until I find a flat, and have started back full time work, speccing out the Moodle Portfolio API which is quite a complicated wee beasty.

Photos from the trip are of course on flickr

The final thing I was waiting for to come through has arrived, and now I can announce:

I'm leaving. Moving to London initially, but I hope to be in Europe proper by the end of the year. I'm not really leaving Catalyst yet, I'll still be loosely tied to them, and for the next few months I'm going to be working on the Moodle Portfolio API & Mahara Integration for Moodle 2.0.

I'm leaving New Zealand on May 21 (which is also my last day at Catalyst here), and will have a few weeks holiday, continuing the Penny and Martin Adventure, before arriving in London June 15.

For those who know and care about my little black cat, Andypants is moving into my Mt Vic flat and taking over the lease, and Nothing will stay there with him.

And yes I am well aware that I tried to ragequit elearning, and have clearly failed. I can't say I am surprised in the slightest, and I'm super looking forward to working fulltime on Moodle upstream.

After the Portfolio integration is done, I'm not sure what will be next. I do want to keep working in elearning and ideally on Mahara, but I expect it to shake out over the next month or so.

I'm going back to work today after two weeks of holiday, spent learning to dive & becoming certified, and then frolicking around the South Island with a visiting Martin, and then an obligatory webstock experience.

I'm ridiculously bad at blogging these days, but luckily Martin isn't, so hop off over here to read about Phase 1 of the adventure (Wellington) and Phase 2 of the adventure (the road trip). Photos are on flickr.

Webstock (the tiny bit I saw) was amazing, I'm really sad I missed most of it. There was bad behaviour in the photo booth with ducks.

My other big news I guess, is that I've left elearning at Catalyst and am moving to another project. I've been in elearning for almost 4 years, right from the start pretty much. This is a pretty sad move, but it's definitely overdue. Realistically, it's pretty unlikely that I'll find much time to continue to do any work on Moodle or Mahara in my spare time, so this is goodbye to both of those too for a little while at least. So long & thanks for all the fish!

On Friday, I received the following email:

From: "moodle mug"
To: penny@catalyst.net.nz
Cc: all catalyst employees
Subject: SoMEwHERe a LiTtLe mUg WAiTs...



However, this morning there was a box at reception for me, containing the moodle mug and three packets of red liquorice. Judging by the packaging, I suspect sysadmins.

So last week I took some time off work to go up to Auckland (which henceforth, for T9 reasons, will be referred to as 'Bucklame') to go to the The Big Day Out. I wasn't really thinking about going at all until someone told me Spoon were playing, and, well, we all know how much I love Spoon. So. Off I went.

The roadtrip was pretty uneventful. I drove the whole way in the Frickin Laser, which surprisingly held out remarkably well. We stopped at all the usual places, underwear and Minx Shoes in Otaki, Lunch in Taihape, Jumping into Lake Taupo, and iceblock stops about once an hour. Arriving in Bucklame I immediately got lost but eventually we dropped half the car load off and found James and where we were staying. And beer.

Friday was breakfast at Revel (Venison Sausages, yum!) & then train mission out to the venue, which was rage inducing. Seething hordes of drunken teenagers. One of them was already legless & vomitting on the platform as we arrived. Leh suck.

Beer in stands, watching Op Shop, who I loved, until Spoon. Zomg. Spoon. AIEEEE! I was right at the front against the barrier in the middle, & I got a bunch of photos, and kept track of their setlist, which was:

The Beast and Dragon, Adored
Small Stakes
Don't Make me a Target
The Ghost of You Lingers
Don't you Evah
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb
Two Sides / Monsieur Valentine
Black Like Me
The Underdog
The Way We Get By
I Summon You (!!!)
My Mathematical Mind

That was a 50 minute set but it felt like it only lasted about 10 minutes. I yelled out FITTED SHIRT! But I guess they were pretty constrained by time. I also yelled 'Record the talkback! when Don't You Evah started. Heh, I'm such a groupie. I also saw two of them mooching around the feeding places later on and wanted to go talk to them but was too scared.

I could go on and on and on about it forever. But I won't, except to just say, SPOON <3!

That was really the only thing I cared about particularly much, but there was Phoenix Foundation and so we grabbed a couple beers and watched Pluto and Arcade Fire and Shihad, all of who were aces. I was pissed that Shihad played Pacifier. I really don't like that song. I would be able to happily ignore it if they hadn't renamed themselves Pacifier for awhile, but because they did it just grates. Anyhoo. Off to Phoenix Foundation who started late, because apparently Sam had sunscreen in his eyes and had plugged something in the wrong way. Great Feenix set, except they didn't play Damn the River but they played Bruiser! Which was pretty funny, not as good as the Opera House gig a few months ago but I guess they couldn't go on forever like they always do.

Back to the main area for Bjork who I didn't care that much to see, and then Rage Against the Machine, which, ha. That was pretty fucking awesome. We were sitting way back so we could escape quickly afterwards to go to Supergroove, and the delay on the back speaker was fucking me off, but it was so incredible. Before they started I was trying to remember all the RATM songs I used to listen to and I couldn't really, just Killing in the Name, which I played at the christian camp my parents sent me to in the holidays when I was 13 or 14 to get rid of me for a week. It didn't really go down too well. Funny that. Anyhoo as soon as they started I found I did actually know all the words to the songs afterall and it was a pretty big buzz.

Off to Supergroove. This was so much more of a highlight than I thought it would be. Supergroove is the penultimate kiwiana band for me. They played all my old favourites, except She Got The Rhythm, which I didn't really expect them to play since it's a relatively little known B Side.

Endless trip home on a crowded train full of annoying drunk teenagers.

Saturday, shopping, boozing, the usual. Sunday: utterly sick of Bucklame we drive home.

A few choice photos from the trip:

Waiting for Spoon to come on (almost weeing with excitement):



Spoon starting:



Do not feed the mini!



Beer!



Mojo (and my feet) in Bucklame (proof!):




And so, today, I arrive back to work, to find three different types of Catalyst-terrorism.

The first I accidently found on Thursday morning, which I suspect I wasn't supposed to, but I dropped in to work before leaving to pick up my phone charger. My middle monitor was wearing pink underwear. vex had taken a photo and blogged it for me:



Even after a terse company-wide email this morning, I still have no idea who is responsible for it.

The second is totally my fault, I left one of my computers unlocked and came home to find the following calendar entries added:
Feed Pete a Stray dog, 22/1/08 at 6pm
bring mikef some beer 24/01/08 at 6pm

The third is a series of emails from an unknown person or persons regarding my Moodle Mug. Transcript follows:

From: "moodle mug"
To: penny@catalyst.net.nz
Cc: all catalyst employees
Subject: WE HAVE YOUR MUG

If YoU WaNt To SeE tHe MuG AgAin, YoU WilL Do As WE SaY.




From: "moodle mug"
To: penny@catalyst.net.nz
Cc: all catalyst employees
Subject: DO NOT MAKE FUN OF THE RANSOM ATTEMPT

OR The MUG GeTs IT!!!!1




From: "moodle mug"
To: penny@catalyst.net.nz
Cc: all catalyst employees
Subject: Are YOU ReadY to MakE A DEal?!

RepLy to ThiS EmAiL FOr InstrUcTioNs!.




From: Penny Leach
To: moodle mug
Cc: all catalyst employees
Subject: Re: Are YOU ReadY to MakE A DEal?!

I do not negotiate with terrorists.


From: "moodle mug"
To: "Penny Leach"
Cc: all catalyst employees
Subject: Re: Are YOU ReadY to MakE A DEal?!


Do NoT MaKE Us ReS0rt To DESpERATE MEasures!


From: "moodle mug"
To: "Penny Leach"
Cc: all catalyst employees
Subject: PrOOf of LIFe

INStruCtiOns tO FoLLow...

According to Julian, Martin uses the bottle opener because he likes drinking and I use the knife because I like stabbing people.

Slander!

I'm leaving on Tuesday on my brief tour of the states. Going to San Francisco for 5 days with Brenda, on our way to oscon in Portland, where we will meet up with Sam

And much riotous fun will be had.

And talking. All three of us are giving presentations at oscon. I am talking about Mahara. Brenda is talking about how to be a PHP Ninja and Sam is talking about version control

So much to do before then.

But: yesterday with Martín, I managed to merge the changes in Moodle necessary to make the Moodle/Mahara integration (affectionately codenamed Mahoodle) into Moodle cvs, in time for the 1.9 freeze. The Mahara side is slightly less stable, but we have more control over the release process for 0.8 so I'm not too worried, and I'm leaving it in Nigel's capable hands.

Things that I'm currently doing

- organising the NZ pilot superhappydevhouse
- mahara stuff
- upgrading large custom moodle 1.5s to 1.8
- migrating linuxchix mailing list courses (mbox) to moodle backup format
- miscellaneous favours for people.

Things that I'm currently thinking about

- kryptonite
- collective nouns
- oscon

Things that I'm currently not doing but should be

- preparing my talk for oscon
- catcon

Hacking at my house after work on projects is called minirageydevhouse. It involves laptops and booze. And raging.