Just a quick blog post today as it is a particularly crazy time of the year at work - apologies to any clients who I’ve been playing phone/email tag with over the last couple of weeks.
My Giant the day I brought it home from the shops. Its considerably more dirty now.
Some of you may know that in January I bought a bike. I did this to combat my increasing waistline since effectively retiring as a player from my beloved Redcaps, hence ending my main source of exercise. I’ve learned a lot about the cycling community (which is, um, ‘interesting’ to say the least - might write a blog post about that one later if I get the time), lost about 5kg, and gone from being completely shagged after a 4km ride on flat ground to being able to ride the 17km home from work up a bloody great hill (well it feels it to me anyway) withough dying.
The next step in the process is to ride some longer distances, and my starting point is going to be in a couple of weeks’ time in the Bicycle SA Coast to Coast event. At 65km this will be the longest ride I’ve done to date, and will either sound trivial to any ’serious’ cyclist, or frightening to anyone who like me up until a month ago considered such distances to be worthy of car travel only.
The more important bit of this though is that the Coast to Coast helps to support the Smith Family, who in turn support young disadvantaged Australians to get an education, something which is near and dear to my heart for various reasons. Now I’d like the help of my friends, family and colleagues to sponsor me on my way, which you can do by following the link below.
Thanks to anyone who donates, look out for the old slow guy on the black Giant heading to Victor Harbor on the 14th - that would be me.
One of the least understood things in Mahara is the potential for using groups as an assessment mechanism. I think this is because of two reasons:
The documentation about this feature on mahara.org is not great, something I’ll rectify shortly after making this post (if I can stay awake), and
Those who sign up for a free demo Mahara account anywhere won’t get to see the feature, as you need an Admin user to set up the special group types that can be used for assessment.
For a while its struck me as a shame that this is the case as I think it is one of Mahara’s better kept secrets, so I have finally gotten around to putting together a presentation on how it all works, why you should care and what would make it better in future.
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…’
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.
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.
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.
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…
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