About ConversionThingy 2
ConversionThingy 2 was written by me (Peter Friesen) during a series of
long nights in the spring and summer of 2010. I found the impetus to start
work on it shortly after my home campus of SUNY Plattsburgh began reviewing the
feasibility of using Moodle as a replacement for ANGEL. After discovering that
there was no practical way to feed Moodle one of ANGEL's Common Cartridge
productions, I went home, took the lid off a Moodle backup file, and began
a routine that would find me cursing at (and in) XML long after the
children were asleep. 7.3 files came first; then 7.4 files; and then, months after I'd started, the
processes to bring Moodle 1.98 files into Moodle 2.x. [A fix for the ANGEL IMS-CC exports was also a
part of the program for its first year.]
ConversionThingy 2 is the second LMS course conversion
utility I've written. The first ConversionThingy dates back to 2004ish when a program
of my devising moved my campus from the SLN's (SUNY Learning Network's)
proprietary LotusNotes based system into ANGEL. Two years later,
SLN itself adopted ConversionThingy to shift its operations to the ANGEL platform--and
in 2007, that first incarnation of ConversionThingy won me an
ANGEL IMPACT Award for "Exemplary Individual Contribution to
the ANGEL Community." The original
ConversionThingy ran its 17,000th conversion shortly before I began work on ConversionThingy 2
ConversionThingy 2 was written using Microsoft's VB Express (2008), and
should run on any more-or-less current Windows system. I think. Works fine on
XP and Windows 7.
ConversionThingy 2 is affiliated neither with ANGEL nor with
Moodle. And while Peter Friesen is Instructional Technology Coordinator at
SUNY Plattsburgh during the days, ConversionThingy 2 is a product of the
night (like Batman, sorta), neither affiliated with nor endorsed by SUNY or with SUNY Plattsburgh
(and in this regard, too, like Batman).
About the Author
I serve as Instructional Technology Coordinator at
SUNY Plattsburgh, where
my time is spent in helping the faculty to take advantageous use of the
technologies at their disposal. At other times I'm father and husband,
woodsman and electrician, plumber and programmer, cleaner and carpenter, generally
at home with, if not honoured among, foxes and pheasants.
--Peter Friesen, August 1, 2010
