As some of you may have read in yesterday’s blog post on the Moodle workshop I ran yesterday at the Australian Moot, there was some fairly robust discussion on how the file management functionality in Moodle 2.0 differs from that in 1.9. For my money, it is the single biggest change that many users will need to deal with when they move to 2.0, and I thought I’d write up a little piece here about the problems, reasons, solutions and a work around that will make things easier for those who are coming to terms with the changes as they play with 2.0 preview releases.
As day one of the Moot draws to a close, I thought I’d comment on the length of the sessions, which have come in for a little flak in the backchannel discussions about being too short. Fair enough that some have found them too short, but I thought I’d explain the thinking behind it here in a short post.
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Today saw the Moodle Masterclass in Melbourne, the warm-up act for the 2010 Australian Moodlemoot. Having written up what the ideas were in my head a few months back, its now worth doing a little reflection on how it went.
Firstly, big kudos to both Dr Curtis Bonk and Julian Ridden, who both gave great presentations/demonstrations throughout the day – I asked quite a few people on the day how they felt about the session, and the response was uniformly positive, largely because of the ideas put forth by both of these excellent practitioners. Also thanks to Phil Marriott who was the driver behind the logistics, activities and the overall session structures, and to helper monkeys (along with me as chief helper monkey) Thalia, Bek and Tim.
Now enough thanks and more analysis.
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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.
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With ten sleeps left until the 2010 Australian Moodlemoot it may seem odd that I am posting a blog entry. The truth be known I’m only just starting to appreciate the phenomenal amount of work which needs to go into organising a physical (as distinct from virtual) conference for 450 people – but the good thing is that the presentations and workshop I’m delivering at the Moot have forced me to focus on doing some QA work on Moodle 2.0, as well as generally getting my head around some of the nuances of the changes in functionality. Read more…
Eyjafjallajokull doing its best to teach us how small we are
Eyjafjallajokull – a name I still can’t pronounce, even though it has changed the way I view air travel forever. I’m calling it ‘the day the world got big again’, since all of a sudden it made me realise ust how much we take air travel for granted, and how damned far it is from the UK to Australia. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been stuck in the UK after what was a fairly disastrous attempt at attending the UK Moodlemoot last week thanks to the plumes of volcanic ash which shut down UK airspace for the best part of a week. As soon as the reality hit that my flights home had been cancelled I started the frantic task of working out how to get home – along with another 150 000 stranded tourists…
Regardless of whether I sat tight and hoped that the ash cleared or attempted to head down to Madrid by train and catch a flight from there one thing was clear to me – I’d need to submit an insurance claim at some stage to get back all the significant amount of additional money I was spending to get by as I tried to find a way home. When I first phoned up the folks at Travel Insurance Direct (who I must say have been awesome throughout this whole thing), they made two things very clear – that I needed to make ‘reasonable efforts’ to keep the costs down, and that I should keep as much evidence as possible to back up the claim when the time came. I started grabbing the receipts I’d already incurred and tried to work out how I should keep them all together, and I realised that I already had what in theory should have been the perfect answer right in front of me – Mahara.
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A plugin for Moodle that isn’t? How does that work then?
Well its a plugin that isn’t since it is actually a plugin for MS Office, there is no Moodle code side changes required. This has been sending the Moodle Twitterverse into paroxysms of excitement for the past couple of days so I thought I’d better get on board and have a look at it, particularly since it is a great idea and builds on the work that Microsoft have already done integrating MS Live Services with Moodle, so here goes…
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Well the tickets for the Australian Moodlemoot are on sale, the registrations are steadily flowing in, and overall its so far so good for what will hopefully be the biggest Australian Moot ever. In my unofficial role as Community Advocate on the planning committee I’ve done my best to keep everyone remembering what the main ingredient of the Moot is – people. Granted, the potential size of the Moot has meant that we’ve had to go for a larger venue with better facilities, which has driven up the price to be more than previous Moots (but still cheaper than most other comparable conferences going on around the country), but the essence of the exercise remains to be a way to bring the Moodle community together for a couple of days of collaboration, information, fun and learning.
This then brings me to the real subject of this post, which was inspired by Tomaz Lasic’s recent post on communities and pedagogy, namely the Moodle Masterclass we’re running the day before the formal Moot starts.
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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.
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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