September 14, 2006
They Stole OUr Learning Environment - Now We're Stealing It Back
In my previous post, I made a claim about how I could add my own Widgetbox widgets to a Moodle installation.
So here's a proof of concept Moodle "It's My Learning Environment and I Want It Back" Greasemonkey script.
...and here's the proof - taken from moodle.org:
(The script is named as it is because I had a peek of the new-and-still-in-testing
A couple of obvious issues - the size of the iframe is not right. I tried to dynamically resize it by looking at the scrollheight and scrollwidth of the iframe, but couldn't get my code to work (It's late, I'm tired...), so if anyone has the solution, please let me know.
There's also a fudge to select where the ifram goes - I hard coded it in to go at the top of the left hand frame, identified by peeking at the page HTML and finding the id attribute of the panel I wanted my frame to go above.
Other things that need doing - the layout needs tidying up, removing the frame borders maybe?
The widgets on the widgetbox panel would probably need sizing to fit in with the Moodle set up you know you're going to be working with.
And so on...
If you want to play, get a widgetbox account, create a panel, get the URL of the script that generates it and paste it in to the appropriate spot (after var wbURL= and in quotes) in the Greasemonkey script.
You may also want to place the script elsewhere by changing the squirtPoint, whcih should be set to the id of the Moodle panel above which you want the Widgetbox panel to appear.
If anyone out there has access to other locked down VLEs and can knock up an equivalent script, let me know and I'll link to it from here.
Also, if anyone can tid up my script, please let me know:-)
This all reminds me of the Need to Know strapline: THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION LEARNING ENVIRONMENT. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK ;-)