Moodle Teaching Techniques: Creative Ways to Use Moodle for Constructing Online Learning Solutions

William H. Rice, IV
*****
Often books on software do a "feature parade" laying out literally hundreds of features found in a program like Photoshop, yet the real utility of the software comes from knowing how the features can be used together to create certain effects. Those books are rare and very valuable. Moodle Teaching Techniques describes how to use Moodle to achieve a number of educational purposes, explaining how the features available can be used within over-arching learning concepts. Very useful and a book we want to get to the faculty who get trained this summer.

Moodle: E-Learning Course Development

Willian H. Rice, IV
****
I've had this book for just over a year and never read it through until now. Since I'm changing jobs and becoming a tech trainer and curriculum integrator I needed to read this through to widen my understanding of how to get things done using Moodle. To put it simply this is the best book of its type -- so far. It's clearly written and thorough. We used it last summer for prepping a faculty training and will use it again this year.

The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology

Nick Cook
****
Looking more than a little like a 1950's sci-fi book, the cover to The Hunt for Zero Point does it no favors for its credibility. Nor does the "new journalism" style, with its lurid descriptions of sites, author feelings, meetings, and the mysterious "Marcus" -- an academic of some sort who is never really identified, but who directs Cook's quest through indirection. Nor does the lack of footnotes. However, the bibliography helps somewhat, as does the existence of Nick Cook as a real person who works at "Jane's Weekly," not to mention that he still works there after the publication of this book.

What to make of it then? The student who lent it to me thought something was going on, though who knows what? A quick search with Google turns up a surprising amount of research going on in the field of anti-gravity -- even Boeing right here in Seattle. Some of the stories seem just a little too far fetched. Cook recognizes that information and disinformation are mixed into a very difficult cocktail to take without some hesitation. It helps his credibility that he doesn't swallow it all, but it does put him into a bind -- are his informants helping keep the spin going? Is his book doing the same. The work he did linking Nazi war criminals with US technology developments is credible but by his own admission unproven. Pretty good book actually.

The Dwarf

Par Lagerkvist, translated by Alexandra Dick
****
The dwarf is the embodiment of human aggression. This is not hard to fathom: he cuts off the heads of little kittens, despises the weak and innocent, is proud to have strangled another dwarf, Jehoshaphat, making him the last dwarf at the court, and eventually poisons the Prince's best friend. Written in the form of diary entries, the story is entirely from the dwarf's point of view. He is thoroughly an unreliable and limited narrator: he can't understand the Princess Angelica's love for the son of the Prince's bitterest enemy, her mothers love for the Prince's best friend (not to mention why the Prince "puts up with" such a thorough rake), nor the court's Renaissance man's interest in learning and art for their intrinsic interest. He values war, revenge, and power intrinsically.

This would seem almost flat-footed (and sometimes is) except that the limited perspective forces the reader to consider how aggression affects relationships, identity, values, and meaning. Most of the time the dwarf embodies the Prince's aggression, but there are times when he acts upon the Queen and Angelica -- encouraging the Queen's self loathing and abasement upon the murder of her lover, and Angelica's suicide upon the murder of her lover. As the embodiment of the Prince's aggression, he is almost completely destructive to his best interests, destroying his friendships, love relationships to his wife and daughter, and his country. Eventually he is sent to the dungeon (repressed) where, in the last sentence of the book, he reflects "on the day when they will come and loosen my chains, because [the Prince] has sent for me again." So the dwarf will live on and be active again.

So what positive bit can we take away from this book? Maybe to be alert and aware to how our own aggression affects us? That some other course between total repression and total inhibition has to be found, what ever that might be? It seems to me it was no accident that The Dwarf was written during World War II.