Activating and understanding Google Drive repository in moolde

When I activated the Google drive repository in our moodle 2.6 instance last week, it was not immediately clear to me what we were seeing and how things were behaving.

 I had to register the moodle site with Google to activate the GD plugin.  This made sense.

It took me two tries to create the definition in Google, I missed the key part about sharing the moodle callback file with the Google definition.  This was not conceptually difficult either, I was just lazy and missed the first time.

Once the integration was successful, and I could see the new Google Drive option in my moodle, when browsing for a file.

This is where it got a little sketchy for my brain for about a day, until I spoke with my colleague Mike Smith, who in 90 seconds cleared up my confusion.  What confused me was why I was seeing different directory lists when I was browsing from two different computers.  Since I was not clear how moodle was sharing login authentication info, this really spun me around.  the last part that confused this issue was that when I would browse the GD option, and would get a login box - that upon clicking did not require me to login, it just simply showed a directory listing....some space out in the Google cloud.  Associated with me, somehow.

Finally, I understood, that when you access the Google Drive from moodle and the login window appears, if there is a google account active in memory or if there is a cookie or something on the computer, then you would automatically be logged in.  The integration with GD has nothing to do with who you are logged into the moodle as......and everything to do with what google account is around on the rendering computer.  Or, if Google cannot determine, then present the Google login. 

One of my computers was automatically logging into another Google account, a help account....so when I browsed the GD, I got a different home page listing - for that account.  Once I logged out of the account, It made even more sense - since it then offered me two accounts to choose from when I browsed the GD.

Make sense? It does to me, now,

A big take away for me is the your Google account knows alot about you.  Your Google account wants to know more about you, it wants all of the things that matter to you in your computing experience.  It wants to know more and more about you, to target things to you based on what it knows about you.

Moodle is not the *culprit here.  Moodle is just a little player, trying to play with the big boy Google.  Moodle is simply trying to allow its users seamless access to Google, and all its power!  Google is the one collecting everything it can, writing information on your computer, as well as in its cloud.  Whatever it can to take over every aspect it can.

So, when Moodle is intrgrated with Google - via the little ole Moodle plugin repository, you are simply making a way for people who use the Moodle to access their stuff out in Googleland.....

Helpful infor in my journey to understand Google wants to rule the world.
Helpful moodle blog post for integrating and understanding moodle and google drive/docs.