Wow, I’d planned on spending several hours working on these Learning Labs maintenance issues this afternoon. Instead it took all of 25 minutes, which makes me suspect I must have missed something, but so far I’m not seeing any glaring issues. If you notice something’s not working right, though, just let me know.
Don’t forget, the Learning Labs will be unavailable for a good chunk of time this afternoon! Read all about it. If this presents a problem for you, you need to let me know, like, now.
The Learning Labs will be offline for an extended period of time on Friday, November 7, starting at 1:00, for some system upgrades. The bad news is it’s going to take awhile to do what I need to do, but the good news is, once I’m done, future updates will only take a few minutes instead of upwards of an hour.
Thanks in advance for your patience, and let me know if this conflicts with a scheduled use of the Learning Labs you have planned.
I’m done with the Learning Labs updates that were scheduled tonight. Sort of. I hit some snags along the way and need to revisit this task at a time to be determined down the road.
The Learning Labs will be offline for an hour or so this evening, around 9:00 CDT, for maintenance. Sorry in advance for any inconvenience.
Jean Piazza has announced this year’s reading list for StrateReaders:
Links to purchase each book on Amazon* are provided at StrateReaders, along with a discussion board to talk about each book before or after the scheduled conference call. You just need a Learning Labs account to participate–if you don’t have one yet, sign up for free.
* Of course, you can buy the books elsewhere if you’d like.
Sometime this week, I’m going to shut down the S.O.S. (that’s “Stratepedia Online Support”) section of the Learning Labs. I thought providing a level of peer support was a good idea, but it never really caught on in this case and I think confused more than it helped. Not to worry: Our Stratepedia Guidebooks are still online, and you can always e-mail your questions to us at help@stratepedia.org.
If you have any questions about this transition, drop me an e-mail or leave a comment.
In other support-related news, Amber and I are in the process of revisiting and revising the aforementioned Guidebooks to make sure they address the kinds of questions we find ourselves answering more often than not. These new Guidebooks will be rolled out as we get them done and will be available for free in both web-based and PDF formats. The latter is suitable for printing, if that’s your liking.
We’re using a great new application I found a few weeks ago called ScreenSteps. It’s great for creating how-to guides for anything to be done on a computer, and can be exported to blogs (if you’ve been following my series on Goodreads you’ve seen ScreenSteps in action), straight HTML, or PDF. I think Depot’s Guidebook will be updated to this new format within the next few weeks; other guidebooks will follow.
But that’s not all! Keep following Hello (the blog you’re reading right now) for tutorials, case studies, and anything else that might not fit within the context of our guidebooks. If you’ve got tips or success stories to share with others, let us know and we’ll showcase your work within Hello’s virtual pages.
To recap: S.O.S. is going away, the Guidebooks are staying put but will be getting a significant facelift (and PDF versions), and we want to showcase your tips and successes on our blog. Thanks!
Time for another round of Moodle updates–over the course of the day I will be patching the eMentoring4educators server and the Strategic Tutoring support server. Each will be unavailable for 30-60 minutes for the update process.
Tonight, at 9:00 CDT, the Learning Labs will be unavailable for the same amount of time.
Sorry for the inconvenience–Moodle is kind of a pain to keep current.
The updates to the Learning Labs I mentioned earlier are now complete. Upgrading Moodle to new versions is never as easy as it should be, so let me know if something looks odd. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused!
Heads up, all you Learning Labs fans: Sometime this evening (probably around 10:00 central time) I’m going to take the Learning Labs offline for a bit so I can upgrade to the latest version of Moodle. This will take anywhere from five minutes to an hour, but I’m guessing it’ll be on the shorter end of that spectrum.
Moodle 1.9 has a ton of new features, but nothing that’s going to make the site look out of the ordinary the next time you sign in. Let me know, though, if you see something odd.
