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On May 30th, 2009 Richard Stallman (RNS) was awarded an honorary degree from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay Ontario and gave the convocation address to the Lakehead’s 2009 graduates. RMS’s address focused on the need for educational institutions to switch to free and open software rather then addicting there students to proprietary products from the software giants. Lakehead’s use of windows media format for there streaming video of the convocation ceremony and use of proprietary software for teaching was heavily cirtisesd provoking Dr. Gilbert, president of the university, to offer a small rebuttal after the address and agreed to consider Stallman’s challenge to adopt free software in the university.

A recording of the convocation address can be found below:

Download MPEG Copy

CONTRIB-497
*Added more visualizations
*Added selector UI Widget for flex/flare visualization
*Refactored some of flex actionscript code.
*Added defaults for selected group and items in visualizations.
*Improved removal of nodes and edges when an item or group is deselected in a legend.
*Fixed a memory leak realting to the removal and addtion of nodes.
*Added more options for and control of the flex/flare based visualization from the Moodle back end.

I have finished two more visualizations based on the grade distribution. They are:

Grade Distribution by Group in a bar graph:

Grade Distribution by Item in a bar graph:

I have also added a new user interface widget witch i call a selector that looks like a legend however only one item on it can be shown at once. When a new item is selected a request is sent to the Moodle back end to get new data based on the value of the selectors item. This allows for selectors to have many diffrent functionality that a developer can program in from the visualization class on the Moodle side of things with out having to change any action script or plug-in code.

I have also change how nodes and edges are hidden when you click on a legend item. Be for the visualization would just set the visible property of the nodes and edges to false but now it will remove the nodes and edges from the data list (tree) and put them back once requested. This allows for live scaling and resizing of the axes and layout, witch makes the char much easier to read and looks much cooler when animated.

There has also been a lot of refactoring and bug fixes to the flex/action script code i made for the front end including fixing a memory leak so things should run smoother.

I should have the new code up on the test site tonight and plan on making a commit with the new code to the CVN once i do a bit more testing on it.

I have updated the test site with the new visualization!

CONTRIB-497
*Added new visualization, Grade Distribution
*Fixed some minor bugs
*Made abstract visualization class for creating visualizations by making classes witch extend it.
*Made visual_settings.php witch takes a visualization class and truns it in to XML witch flex can read in.
*Made flex visualization application read in XML formated settings as well as tab formated data from moodle and combind them to make a custom visualization.
*Made flex visualization application read and use langue strings from moodle.
*Added printer firendly tabTODO:
*Add more visualizations
*Refactor some of the flex/actionscript code
*More douctenation
*More UI functions for the flex application

CONTRIB-496
*Fixed a minor bug in lib.php witch caused some problems geting a list of statistics used in the plug-in.