2012 iMoot is coming up!

I love the iMoots so far, and this will be my third one, for which I have already registered.  The Moodle community seems to be able to remain unsullied by the excessively commercial LCMS market, although some temblors have been felt via the recent gutting of some of Moodle's developer revenue stream by the purchase of a Moodle hosting service by one of the big government-contract heavy LMS titans.  I believe teachers shall remain the same however, and will send my energy to those who continue to keep it simple on behalf of learning via online delivery.  Cheers!  Hope to bump into you at the iMoot *:-)
http://2012.imoot.org

Non-user administrators flush Moodle, replace with Sakai *:-(

Bummer.  I say Bummer.
VHL (Very High Level) administrators who don't live in or use the LCMS worlds, have decreed that the default LCMS shall not be Moodle for a while, so that the home grown Sakai can be trotted about for all to see.  Lotta work I have done is now on hold, and legions of conversion programmers are queuing up to offer their services (students will probably do it for free, sorry).
So ... the waiting begins, for a return to sanity.
No worries, I'm gonna Moodle anyway *:-)

Watch your back, and your wallet *:-|

https://plus.google.com/112545836862737596402/posts/bf1uWLfAUub

One Thousand Seventy One carefully crafted words gone in 60 microseconds

Perhaps fatigue, rushing to judgement, procrastination, or an equally familiar foible resulted in the loss of an important 1,071-word Moodle forum post intended to fulfill one of the assignments in the MCCC course I am currently attempting to pass.  Note to self: even if the second instance of a particular Moodle course that I have on display is simultaneously viewed in a different browser than that of the primary content-entry browser, if I close the secondary browser before completing and uploading the post, the post will be lost.  Unfortunately, the primary browser appears to remain active and fruitful, allowing continued entry, but when the attempt is made to post the content to the forum, the screen and message below are delivered without recourse and leave me feeling yucky and depressed:

No worries ... I regained my strength to continue, and got the post uploaded and turned in on time *:-)  Yay!

The mystery of the 2nd Pencil-Hand: Theme = "Standard Theme"

Per request, here is a screen shot of the Themes > Theme Selector output screen:

The other Pencil-Hand ... what will happen?

This morning I wanted to find out what would happen when I click on the pencil-hand in the block top bar, which I was too timid to try last night.  Here is where I started:

Here is the pencil-hand I clicked this morning:

... and KA-BOOM!  Near-instant and radical change to the screen display, now showing what is below:

I will go to Moodle Docs to figure out all the things I can do from here.  What a difference a click makes!

Which pencil-hand do I click?

With editing turned off inside my new course, I wanted to practice entering description text, so I turned editing on.  Because two pencil-hands showed up in the block I wanted to edit, I was concerned that I would click on the wrong one and blow the block away or something.  With trepidation, I studied the scene shown directly below:

Although I was not sure, after staring at the scene, and doing mouse-overs a couple times, I guessed, and got it right, enabling me to enter the text shown in green.  Here is the pencil-hand I chose:

Yay! Win! *:-)