Some of you might know that the 2010 Australian Moodlemoot will be happening in July this year in Melbourne, and I’m lucky enough to be on the organising committee for what will hopefully be the biggest and best Australian Moot yet. Its being sponsored by NetSpot, who I do work for, but my role in the whole thing has gradually and unintentionally morphed into being the ‘Community Advocate’, trying to make sure that in the planning phase for the conference the needs of the broader community are being met. What does this mean? I guess it means that I’ve been given a license to stand up in internal discussions and say ‘well that might be one way of looking at this question, but what I think the community would probably want to happen is…’
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Hard to believe that it has been 101 days since I last made a post to Join the Dots, and since the year is almost over I thought I’d do the obligatory ‘Year in Review’ thing.
As I look back over the year I realise that its been a hellishly busy one, and that Moodle has accounted for the vast majority of my work at NetSpot. I’d like to spend more time talking about the cool stuff I saw at AuSakai in the lead up to Sakai 3, and how Mahara is gradually maturing into a really nice ePortfolio tool, but to be fair, 2009 has been primarily Moodle’s year in my life so that’s what I’ll talk about.
Following up on my recent trip to Canberra for the Moodleposium, I headed over to Bathurst to spend a day at the third annual AuSakai conference.
To start with, I was extremely fortunate in getting a chance to have a beer with Michael Korcuska on Wednesday night, which is not a chance that comes along every day. It was fantastic to hear the clear vision for Sakai 3.0 in particular, which is heading in a direction that will address virtually every gripe I have about versions 2.x (which I voiced at last year’s AuSakai, even though I thought I was going to be lynched for the presentation I gave). Read more…
I was lucky enough to get asked to present at this week’s Moodleposium in Canberra, so I thought I’d post my presentations here oif people are interested. Was great to meet a stack of new people and see so much interest in Moodle in the Higher Education sector.
Thanks to all who attended, I’d love to get some feedback (good or bad) about the presentations for anyone who was there. Read more…
Moodle is a demanding mistress, and the amount of Moodle work going for my Higher Education clients in the last month or so has kept me busy enough to genuinely struggle to find time to do any blogging. At last, a fortuitous day off has helped me to get enough time to put together the third video in the Plugins Review series - this one thanks to a query from a friend and colleague who likes to ask questions that I often can’t answer, which in this case related to the Dialogue Module.
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Perhaps its just the clients that I tend to deal with, but the vast majority of focus when deploying a Moodle site tends to follow the following elements:
Typical Moodle Process
This is a very ‘course centric’ way of looking at Moodle, and to be fair this is the way that most people I’ve met want to use Moodle, for better or worse. This does however ignore a number of neat things that Moodle can do that are less course-centric and more student or topic centric, which leads us to this episode of Moodle Obscurities.
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A little while back I wrote a post about using Moodle as a Community Hub rather than as a conventional LMS, with particular mention of the Educause Australasia 2009 conference website. I promised that I’d come back and talk some more about the tools used to create the Hub.
After having created two more in the past month for two higher education professional groups, I’ve also thought of a couple of other things that can make a Community Hub a success.
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As if the Moodle Plugins Review wasn’t enough, I’ve decided to do some more short videos of what I’m calling ‘Moodle Obscurities’, which could also have been called ‘little things in Moodle that I stumbled across by accident and that cold have made my life easier if I’d known about them earlier’. The first of these shows how to cut down the length of a Moodle navigation bar (sometimes called the ‘breadcrumb trail’) to remove what some can see as a superfluous link, removing a potential source of confusion for students. Read more…
One of the things lacking in Moodle according to some people I’ve heard from is the lack of the predictable, sitting on the left of the screen, menu of all items in a Moodle course. Sure, there are plenty of other things that can tell you where you are in a Moodle course, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a neat little menu in that top left hand corner like in every other website since 1995… Read more…
For a while now I’ve been meaning to put together a series of videos on Moodle which aren’t anywhere else. Sure, there are already quite a few doing the rounds on YouTube and MoodleTutorials, but I still felt like I wanted to do something more, so I’ve decided to put together a series of videos on some of the common plugins that can be used in conjunction with core Moodle.
There are several hundred plugins available for Moodle that extend its functionality in all sorts of ways. Some integrate with other systems, some add new functionality, some improve on the functionality that is already there. I’ll focus on some of the more common ones to start with, and then move on to some of the more experimental ones. These aren’t going to be high-quality videos, mainly because I don’t have the time to put together Moodleman-quality presentations, instead I’ll try and focus on getting them out regularly and hopefully let them improve as time goes by.
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