I missed the announcement early last week, but Moodle 1.9 was made available in early March. Since I haven't mentioned anything about Moodle since last October, I have some making up to do with the open source project responsible for this course and learning management system.

Significant new features in this new version of Moodle include:

• An all-new Gradebook designed from the ground up for expansion and integration with other systems
• Integrated support for Outcomes, so that learning goals can be tied to individual courses and activities, and can be graded against.
• Performance improvements due to review and refactoring of many parts of the Moodle code.
• Tagging is now a core function allowing users to easily link things like users, blogs, courses etc as well as external sites like Flickr and Youtube through the use of simple tags.