Vale Moodle Navigation Tool
Its funny how you take some things for granted, and then when they vanish, even though you were never particularly fond of them you feel sad that they are no longer with you. I am feeling this way at the moment about the Moodle Navigation Tool, which has been around in Moodle 1.9 forever but has been replaced with the Navigation Block in Moodle 2.0.
A navigation tool recently
Yes, that’s right, the Navigation Tool (shown at right) is gone – going out with not even a whimper from the community.
I first noticed when I was putting together some documentation on the navigation differences between Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0 – at first I thought I was hallucinating, surely it must be there somewhere? But no – completely gone, and I was scratching my head as to how I could have missed something this fundamental to how I get around in Moodle. However as Martin D said in a forum post when I asked where the tool had disappeared to…
“Apparently you and I are the only people who noticed it was there (and look how long it took for you to notice it was gone!)”
Fair point, and I guess it shows how little it has been relied on by me or anyone else that this was the first time (to my knowledge) anyone asked this question on moodle.org.
I know I will have some clients – for better or worse – lamenting the disappearance of the little buttons saying ‘next’. The ones who felt that these buttons should have been far more prominent in the first place will probably be even less happy with the change, and there is a part of me which wonders how long before a sequential-step-through link (minus the ‘Jump to’ menu which is now completely obsolete thanks to the Nav Block) will return. Lets be honest though – Moodle has never been about stepping blindly through content any more than learning has been about learning being a linear process, it has been about learning through exploration and ‘doing things as it occurs to you to do them’ – by ‘Moodling’.
Me and the Navigation Tool in happier times
So although I suspect it won’t be missed by the majority, I will shed a tear for the Navigation Tool over a beer tonight. I might wear a black arm band or something next week too when I present my ‘What’s new in Moodle 2.0′ presentation at the Moot, and think back to all the Moodle training sessions where the Navigation Tool was my special little buddy, taking up 1 – 2 minutes in my session plan which I’ll now have to fill with something about the Navigation Block I suppose.
Vale my largely pointless friend. No longer will you be the scourge of screen readers, the truncater of long Topic names and the botcher of themes. Nobody else may miss you, but I will.
I’ll miss it too, Mark. I spent a lot of time making that thing (those icons in the menu are not simple to do!) and I used it all the time. Unfortunately hardly anyone else did. Thanks for the memorial blog post.