Just a quick note that if you administer and/or support people who use Desire2Learn, Kyle Mackie at the University of Guelph has set up a new Ning group called Desire2Share. It’s a private group and if you want to join us, contact Kyle. His credentials are on the site.

This site is outside of the official Desire2Learn community and is independent of the company. Just a bit of peer to peer support for all of us using and supporting D2L. So far there are 20+ members from around North America.

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Online Course Peer Review at Lake Superior College just posted a nice D2L tip on how to personalize content in a D2L course.

By inserting {firstname} into any HTML spot in your courses (news, content, release conditions, etc), D2L automatically places your students’ first names into your message.  This just adds an element of personalization to your class.  This also works if you’d like a student’s last name or username inserted — {lastname} or {username}.

I have tested a few other variables and have found that these work as well.

• {OrgName} will show the name of the organization (in our case, Camosun Online).
• {OrgUnitName} will show the name of the course.
• {UserName} will show the login name of user.

I have checked the D2L documentation and can’t seem to find any reference or list of available variables so there may be more. Remember to include the brace symbol ‘{‘ and ‘}’ at the beginning and end of each variable.

• 3285 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2009/03/03/personalize-d2l-content-using-variables/Personalize+D2L+content+using+variables2009-03-03+17%3A46%3A17Clint

TiltViewer is a free, customizable 3D Flash image viewing application you can add to your site to create a lovely, interactive wall of photos. In just a few minutes I put together a demonstration page to show off the effect.

The images are being pulled from my Flickr account, and if you click on the rotate icon in the bottom right hand corner, you can the Flickr description of the image along with some other data, which could make TiltViewer a nice little flash card exercise with the image on one side and answers on the reverse.

TiltViewer also integrates with Picasa or with a folder of stand alone images on your web server. And, best of all for us D2L users, I was able to get the application working in D2L without a lot of mucking, which is a bit of a surprise since anything that uses javascript often makes D2L very unhappy. Here is what TiltViewer looks like in D2L.

If you plan to use this with stand alone photos, it does require some mucking with an XML file, but the instructions are straightforward.

• 3025 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2009/02/09/create-an-interactive-wall-of-images-with-tiltviewer/Create+an+interactive+wall+of+images+with+TiltViewer2009-02-09+21%3A25%3A46Clint

Well, I put this video together and demonstrated this technique at a video workshop for our faculty last week, only to have it fail miserably in Internet Explorer 7. Of course. Go figure.

I have embedded dozens of YouTube videos in blogs, wikis, discussion boards and in older version of D2L (prior to 8.3) and have never had a problem. But the D2L HTML editor (which I believe is based on the open source TinyMCE editor) strips out the embed tag when you cut and paste using IE7.

This is a brutal bug, imho, and I’ve reported it to D2L as well as posted it in the D2L user community.

At any rate, here is the video, complete with a spiffy annotation (my first for a YouTube video) explaining this does not work in IE 7.

• 19410 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2008/11/17/embed-a-youtube-video-in-desire2learn/Embed+a+YouTube+video+in+Desire2Learn2008-11-17+15%3A50%3A19Clint