The history

First, its worth understanding the current 1.9 state of play in how files are managed.

Each course has a files area. You get the predictable stuff you’d expect for a files area like shown below - you can add files and folders, you can move them around, you can delete them - the usual.

A Moodle 1.9 files area

The problems with this are many and varied, but the two biggies I know of are:

• You cannot share files across courses, making each course a silo of information, which is tedious to manage and inefficient in terms of how files are stored; and
• This files area isn’t totally secure in the sense that if a student knows a direct URL to a file and they are enrolled in the course, then they can access it. Normally this isn’t an issue, but if a teacher was to, say, publish a link to the Assignment1Answers.txt file one week, then a clever student could take a stab in the dark that there might be a file called Assignment1Answers.txt in there as well - and if there is then they can access it by modifying the original URL.

Most of the time the latter of these hasn’t been a problem - I’ve never met anyone personally who has been stung by it - but it is an undeniable flaw. The former problem (file sharing) is usually managed through an integration with an external LCMS like EQUELLA or Alfresco.

Another partially related problem

I never really thought about this until Martin’s discussion with the group yesterday, but, and I’ll say it loud and clear now - Moodle is not meant to be a file repository. When I look back at Martin’s original pedagogical drivers of social constructionism then it makes perfect sense that storing files should be low on the list of priorities. Learning in a social constructionist world isn’t about downloading and reading files, its about collaboratively constructing them with others - a critical distinction.

Learning in a social constructionist world isn’t about downloading and reading files, its about collaboratively constructing them with others

The problem though is twofold:

1. Many online learning courses are nothing more than places to download lecture notes, i.e. a files repository; and
2. Moodle has always supported this quite happily in the past, even with the limitations given above.

If anything this is an indicator of the problem of being known as the ’swiss army knife’ of learning technologies - people use you for all sorts of stuff that you weren’t really intended for. I for one have used Moodle as a website, conference hub, community space and research hub - and many of these require good file management features which Moodle has been able to do well enough to meet the need - for better or worse.

The solution

The solution coming in Moodle 2.0 in layman’s terms - and please if there’s anyone from HQ reading then please correct me is to remove the concept of a bucket of files which resides within each course, and replace it with a file repository which controls access to files based on the resource/activity to which it is connected. Your ability to access the file is based on your access to the resource/activity.

To illustrate this in pictures, in Moodle 1.9 we access files like this:

Accessing files in 1.9

Whereas in 2.0 it looks more like this:

Accessing files in Moodle 2.0

The good thing about this model is that it solves the two problems I listed, and apparently a whole bunch of other ones. Files can be shared across courses, and opening a file up to access via (say) a ‘Link to a file’ resource doesn’t open up everything else in the course files area, because there is no course files area - there are simply files which are being accessed by some resource/activity within the course.

So what’s the problem then?

Well firstly its worth mentioning how you get files into Moodle in 2.0 now that there is no course files area, which usually needs to be done as you are adding your resource/activity. You could always do this in Moodle 1.9 (i.e. add as you go), but in the past you could also construct a neat files area with all your folders, and once you did that then start to link to your files. This was something I would always mention in my training sessions as to me it was important that if you were going to store lots of files you should try and organise them in some way - just like I do on my laptop’s hard drive. *Cough*.

Now there is no link to a ‘Files’ area in the course admin block, so Moodle 1.9 users new to Moodle 2.0 are left scratching their heads about how they are meant to manage files.

Of course you can upload files, but they are stored in a hierarchy which is perfectly logical from a design perspective, and perfectly ugly from a user perspective who is looking to access a file they’ve already uploaded, namely because the file structure looks like this when a user enters their System Files on the File Picker:

If you didn’t notice, the hierarchy (quite logically) to get to a file is:

Category>Course>Resource>[[Something Called Page Content]]>File

which like I said, makes sense, but if I’ve forgotten which resource I uploaded my file from then it can be onerous to track down the right file. Also, the more resources I’ve got, the more difficult it is to find my way through the maze of Moodle-created folders.

So what’s the fix?

This is the tricky bit - how to make it usable for those Moodle users who do not have an external file repository with all the bells and whistles. I understand that Moodle isn’t a file repository, but I also believe that a big part of Moodle’s beauty is that it works straight out of the box without having to say ‘oh, no, it can only do that if you plug it in to other product x’.

To be fair, there are plenty of things 1.9 couldn’t do, like proper LCMS functions and videoconferencing which people were cool with having to plug into other systems for, but managing files is such a basic thing (for better or worse) for many elearning practitioners that this is something worth sorting.

I think/hope the fix won’t be too difficult, combined with some re-education of 1.9 users. I can see a couple of ways out of it which don’t compromise the current situation, namely:

1. Provide a search feature, which will at least let me search files which I have access to as a teacher by virtue of being enrolled in a course which has a link to a file. This already exists in things like the Flickr repository connection, so I can’t see why it couldn’t be done in the Server Files area; and/or
2. Allowing metadata tags to be stored against a file, which could then be clicked or searched, again based on my access to the files as determined above.

I think one or both of these will allow the best bits of the new file management architecture to stay, while allowing users to manage files a little better, but hopefully without putting too much focus on file management.

So what about right now?

As it happens I think I’ve worked out a neat work around for now, which will get past the problems faced by adding content directly through a resource/activity - I hope this doesn’t give the guys at HQ a heart attack for suggesting it, but its all I can think of right now and it seems fair…

I also should have shown that you can hide the original folder after you’ve created it, meaning you’ve got the underlying structure even if student’s can’t see it, but I forgot, and its hometime

Summing up

I think the internal Server Files area is closer to being usable than I did when I first used it, and even just knowing the work around above makes me far more comfortable that I can actually structure some files. For those who would like to vote for the tracker changes, the link for a search function is here - I think it would be worthwhile, get on and vote for it if you do to.

Hope this somewhat lengthy post has been useful.

What a huge four days. As I sit here at the end of it all I am torn between wanting to dump every idea in my head into words and going to bed and sleeping for a couple of days. I could prattle on about how good it was to put names to faces, the fact that we managed to put on a large conference which didn’t lose its relaxed feel (which was a big risk in my eyes which I think we managed to avoid), the quality of presenters such as David Jones, Michelle Moore and David Parkin, or for that matter the parallels between Parkin’s tirade on teamwork and its relevance (in my eyes) to social constructionism. I could also shower thanks on the delegates, co-workers, sponsors, co-workers, venue support staff and everyone else who helped make this Moot such a success.

I won’t bother doing any of this though, not because it isn’t important, but because this afternoon I think I had a moment where I realised the power of any community, and in particular the Moodle community which I feel proud to be a part of.

To set the scene, I was running a hands-on workshop on moving to Moodle 2.0 with a large group (sixtysomething). Day 3 of a conference, energy levels (mine anyway) quite low, and with the workshop starting off with multiple technical fails causing some catastrophic issues and big frustrations for all participants. Through pure chance, who should decide to sit in on the session other than Martin Dougiamas, and just to add some more interest, the awesome Jonathan and Michelle Moore from Remote Learner. To say that I was somewhat ruffled was an understatement - presenting a session which was going titanic while two of the most knowledgeable Moodle people going around and the Founding Father were sitting up the back watching me.

As technical issues were resolved, I kicked off the discussion about changes to the files area within Moodle, which to me is the most significant change in mindset that users will need to deal with in the move to 2.0 and in my opinion still needs some more thought before it will be in a state which will be what I’d call user friendly. I started to explain and show how files are managed differently in Moodle 2.0, and I could feel the room drop into a stunned silence, and before I knew it hands were shooting up like prairie dogs about how difficult it would be to do things the way they had been done in the past in Moodle given the changes.

What happened next was, to me, quite stunning.

The next fifteen minutes turned into a frank and at times blunt discussion between the group and primarily Martin about some of the challenges which some users would face in Moodle 2.0 given the changes to how files are managed. The group would throw questions at me, when I couldn’t answer them (which was most of the time) Martin would jump in and explain not only how it worked, but the problems which caused the functionality to change, which then led to ‘yes, but what about…’ type responses, which then led to his admission that sure, there are use cases which the team at HQ haven’t considered, and some embryonic ideas were thrown around about what might need to happen - all in a way which was totally open within the group.

Stop and think about that image for a bit. The head of a global software project with millions of users sitting down with a bunch of end users and kicking around ideas in an impromptu session without corporate spin, attempts at masking areas for improvement and trying to come up with ideas about how to improve the software, and at the same time shift the mindset of users to understanding why change needs to occur. I wonder how likely this would have been for any other piece of educational software.

One of the things I am constantly trying to get people to do is to contribute ideas and opinions to Moodle through moodle.org and the Tracker. I tell them that grumbling to me about something is a start, but grumbling to the community through these open forums is far better, and the ultimate is to contribute ideas to the Community about how to improve the software. I tell them to not ask what Moodle can do for them, but to ask what they can do for Moodle. I tell them that you do NOT need to be a developer, or to have any formal ideas about what constitutes good UI design, to contribute to the Moodle project - you just need to be willing to think, and to share. I thought to myself that if I could get people to make the conceptual leap that participating in the online Moodle community is no different to sitting there in a room with Martin Dougiamas then I reckon we’d end up with far more in the way of community input into Moodle, even if the involvement is already significant. I told the people there that if signing up for a Tracker account was too hard, then at least send me through the ideas and bugs and I’d log them on their behalf.

…if I could get people to make the conceptual leap that participating in the online Moodle community is no different to sitting there in a room with Martin Dougiamas then I reckon we’d end up with far more in the way of community input into Moodle

Ultimately, I realised that the varied perspectives of a group like that is the whole thing which makes Moodle tick, and that the more people looking at the software in its 2.0 beta form and contributing their perspectives back to the community, the better all future releases of Moodle will be. I thank Martin for being the kind of person he is, for being willing to listen, and for not just tipping out the door when the questions started, but for openly engaging with the community like he has done from the start.

I may not have faith that the new files management environment in Moodle is spot on just yet, but I do have faith that if we engage with the community then we will work it out - together - and that to me is the essence of why the Moodle community has thrived, and will continue to thrive, as long as we have a willingness to be an active part of it.

Six people signed up to the Tracker by the end of the workshop - and this is more important to me than all the technical fails in the world.

For those who want more information about some of the things I talked about, check out:

• Specification for Multipage views, i.e. ‘mini-websites’ in Mahara - get in there and share your thoughts.
• Add your comments in here to keep the view submission to Moodle on the Mahara team’s radar.
• Check out the specifications for the walled garden - something I didn’t discuss through lack of time but is another key change on the horizon.
• Download a beta version of the 1.3 Beta for those who are that way inclined.

The presentation is below, but to be honest its rubbish - I’m working hard on eradicating Powerpoint from my life so I’ve stopped caring as much. Slideshare’s butchering of the formatting doesn’t help either If it acts as a reminder for the things I talked about then go for it.

The presentation is shown below, and remember to also:

• get on to Moodle.org and share your thoughts on how the file manager should work here
• test out the latest version of Moodle 2.0 at the QA site
• log any bugs you find in the Tracker
• bid farewell to the Navigation Tool

Welcome to MootAU10

I remember being in the meeting when the topic of session lengths came up, and to start with we were looking at 40 - 50 minute sessions, which for my money is a more common format for the conferences I’ve been at.

We then stopped and thought about what we wanted to encourage in our presentations, and the first and foremost thing was to make them accessible. Having a shorter presentation time would, we hoped, allow anyone who had a story to tell to get up and tell it without the fear of having to pad out a presentation to the best part of an hour. In hindsight it worked - we had our presentation slots more or less filled way in advance, with good diversity in the kinds of presentations on show, and we did eventually have to turn some presenters away - far better than the opposite!

There was also a philosophical argument about how much time should be needed to tell a story, make it interesting, capture the main points and give people something worthwhile. My argument is that, within reason, you should be able to customise a presentation to fit a time no matter how short that time is - you just need to restrict your scope! A nice parallel is Curt Bonk’s bio, which comes in everything from three to six-hundred word versions. Granted, the 28-word version is the shortest meaningful response, but to me it highlights that you can tell a story in just about any length of time provided you vary your level of detail.

Sounds basic? It is.

Which is why I was a little disappointed when I read that some had found the sessions too short. If I was a presenter and I ran out of time, then I wouldn’t be blaming the length of time (provided I knew in advance how much I had to work with), I’d be filthy with myself for not planning the delivery well enough.

If I was a presenter and I ran out of time … I’d be filthy with myself for not planning the delivery well enough.

It also highlights to me what I see as a responsibility of ours as presenters - namely to not attempt to compress as much information into the shortest time possible, but to remove some content and focus on making whatever is being delivered clear, well paced and ideally with links to further resources if folks want more detail. I know I’ve broken this rule many times in the past, but the last couple of days have made me realise that this is a critical skill in being a good presenter and is something I’ll take away from this Moot as something to re-focus on going forward.

I must say that having to present in a relatively short timeframe did make me step back when putting my presentations together and think about what was really important to have in there - I cut as much fat as I could, and yes, sacrificed one or two things I’d have liked to have in there, but it was good for me to be brutal about what I was going to cover. I guess the proof will be in the pudding tomorrow when I present - feel free to let me know

These are, of course, only my thoughts - I’d like to hear from anyone who can convince me otherwise about the lengths of the sessions, or who reckon the shorter sessions have been a winner. The feedback we get from this year will inform the next Moodlemoot for sure…

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.

When Phil Marriott and I looked at how this could work, particularly trying to take into account the ideas from Curt and the potential translations into Moodle by Julian, and then the amount of time we had left over for people to actually work on their course, it became clear that the biggest challenge was going to be how to get participants to create something meaningful. The original plan I had in my head for this back in March was to have the pedagogy leader (Curt) and the Moodle master (Julian) working around a topic which everyone would have some knowledge of - my ideas were coffee and the weather. Hackneyed, but do-able. The one thing I didn’t really want to do at the time was to have the content being about online learning, or I thought we’d risk having a circular ‘we’re creating an online learning course about online learning’ thing.

Unfortunately, the more we looked at the logistics of the situation, the more it looked unlikely that we would be able to do anything other than this, and I put this down to two reasons:

1. Creating a course like this focuses somewhat on the content, under a model that content someone else has created is the primary entity within the course. This of course flies in the face of the constructionist idea that it is the student interactions and subsequent student-generated content which are the most important part of an online learning environment; and
2. Even if we were focusing on course content which someone else had created, one day working with a bunch of people you don’t know is a foolishly short time to expect to create anything of consequence. Not to mention breaking most instructional ideas which put an emphasis on good course design being something you do before you get in and set up your Moodle course.

Now at this point I must tip my hat to Phil for the initial activity participants did, which involved critiquing some Moodle courses, analysing them against Curt’s R2D2 model, and using a Moodle Feedback activity to get people sharing their perceptions of the courses as well as experiencing the Feedback tool itself - worked an absolute treat I thought.

As the day went on though, I felt in myself that we’d lost focus on exactly what the desired outcomes from the day were meant to be.

Moodling around the Masterclass

When I listened to Curt present, it was at times like a Tsunami of information and ideas, some of which were highly relevant to Moodle, some of which were more to do with good teaching practice and how to use a bunch of technological goodies to best effect.

When I listened to Julian for the most part, it was more focused on Moodle and the use of the tools within, with his session on Databases being a stand out for me along with some of the course design principles and tricks shown early on using (among other things) HTML blocks. The final session did however go into more detail about some of the things coming in Moodle 2, and there were some diversions in there to the power of Twitter, which was interesting but not directly Moodle related.

So then all sorts of other questions popped into my head. Had this ended up being really an ‘eLearning Masterclass’ which had Moodle as a bit player? Was it even possible to have a Moodle Masterclass without bringing in a bunch of other tools to supplement it? By having so much information ‘pushed’ to the participants were we violating the very notions of constructionism that we were meant to be espousing?

Ultimately I think there is a potential conflict in these events between the people who are there because they need to know how to use the more advanced features of a tool, versus those who are there because they need to know how to improve their teaching techniques irrespective of the tools involved. I don’t really know how to manage it either, or for that matter if I’m just thinking too deeply about all of this…

One thing I will say though was that I’d be stunned if people didn’t leave the session with at least one good tip on improving their teaching practice and one good tip on how to use Moodle better, and probably a whole bunch of ideas. The people I spoke to all seemed to be happy with it, but I’d love to hear some more thoughts here about what worked, what didn’t, and what we could do better next time (if there is a next time).

All in all, considering this was one big experiment, calling on two extremely busy people from other sides of the globe to work together and come up with something which we could feasibly deliver in a day, I’m happy with how it went, and I’d like to thank all of those who came along and made it an enjoyable day.

Tomorrow - the Moot begins!

A navigation tool recently

Yes, that’s right, the Navigation Tool (shown at right) is gone - going out with not even a whimper from the community.

I first noticed when I was putting together some documentation on the navigation differences between Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0 - at first I thought I was hallucinating, surely it must be there somewhere? But no - completely gone, and I was scratching my head as to how I could have missed something this fundamental to how I get around in Moodle. However as Martin D said in a forum post when I asked where the tool had disappeared to…

“Apparently you and I are the only people who noticed it was there (and look how long it took for you to notice it was gone!)”

Fair point, and I guess it shows how little it has been relied on by me or anyone else that this was the first time (to my knowledge) anyone asked this question on moodle.org.

I know I will have some clients - for better or worse - lamenting the disappearance of the little buttons saying ‘next’. The ones who felt that these buttons should have been far more prominent in the first place will probably be even less happy with the change, and there is a part of me which wonders how long before a sequential-step-through link (minus the ‘Jump to’ menu which is now completely obsolete thanks to the Nav Block) will return. Lets be honest though - Moodle has never been about stepping blindly through content any more than learning has been about learning being a linear process, it has been about learning through exploration and ‘doing things as it occurs to you to do them’ - by ‘Moodling’.

Me and the Navigation Tool in happier times

So although I suspect it won’t be missed by the majority, I will shed a tear for the Navigation Tool over a beer tonight. I might wear a black arm band or something next week too when I present my ‘What’s new in Moodle 2.0′ presentation at the Moot, and think back to all the Moodle training sessions where the Navigation Tool was my special little buddy, taking up 1 - 2 minutes in my session plan which I’ll now have to fill with something about the Navigation Block I suppose.

Vale my largely pointless friend. No longer will you be the scourge of screen readers, the truncater of long Topic names and the botcher of themes. Nobody else may miss you, but I will.

Which brings me to the all-new and improved Workshop module, which for me is the biggest new feature from a pure teaching and learning perspective in 2.0. That’s not to say that things like the Repository API, better integration with ePortfolios, the controversial and yet long overdue introduction of Conditional Activities and the changes in navigation in Moodle aren’t all great - but none of them quite grab my imagination like the way the Workshop activity does.

Why? I think because it brings in a genuine peer review activity which allows students to review the work of others, and then to be assessed on their capability to assess the work of others - something that I think will be an absolute Godsend particularly in Higher Education where the ability to critique the work of others becomes more important. The Workshop also sneaks in a genuine rubric marking assessment type - remove the peer reviewing involvement in a Workshop activity and just make it teacher led and you have yourself a bona fide rubric driven assessment task.

Not to say that the Workshop is new. Its been around forever in Moodle, but unfortunately it was so unwieldly, unreliable, unsupported and just downright difficult to use that it has only been used in earnest by a handful of Moodle Holy Men (and Women) who actually understood how to use it and all its idiosyncracies for quite a while now. My advice to clients was to not touch it with a ten foot Moodle pole as it simply wasn’t up to a standard which I felt comfortable to associate my name with, thanks to its years of neglect. It was the classic underachiever - the student who you just knew could change the world if only they could get their act together and learn to relate to people a little better…

Moodle 2.0 however sees the introduction of a completely rebuilt Workshop activity, thanks largely to the work of David Mudrak, which has greatly improved the user interface, stability and functionality of the Workshop activity. I’m not going to step through the whole process of setting up a Workshop for a couple of reasons - firstly, its relatively self explanatory once you get into it, and secondly there are already videos out there by people like Gavin Henrick and Mary Cooch giving an overview. Thanks to these two I managed to get my head around most of the features quickly, but understanding how the grades are calculated took considerably more head scratching and some sagely guidance from David in the Moodle forums before I felt I could explain how it worked to someone else without needing to bluff my way through

Having finally got my head around how it all works, I thought I’d share it with the community - hopefully this will help those of you trying to understand how the grades in a Workshop are calculated and maybe inform some of the user documentation being written for the Workshop in the near future. In all its unpolished, raw glory, here’s the summary of how grades are calculated.

I must stress that this is not the full story - there are some more complexities in the way grades are calculated which I haven’t touched on, but as time goes on I might try and get my head around them and think of a way which they can be explained in non-mathematician terms. I’d love to hear feedback on whether the presentation above makes sense - for those coming to my Workshop at the Moot I’ll be going through the Workshop from beginning to end with participants acting as students - submitting work, peer reviewing and seeing their grades calculated.

Somewhat stressed, but getting excited as we get close to the Moot - look forward to seeing lots of you there!

So most of you know I work for NetSpot, a Moodle Partner as well as a bunch of other things, and that NetSpot are organising and sponsoring this year’s Australian Moot. I’m also on the organising committee in an unofficial role of ‘community advocate’, which was primarily because I’m the one at work who tends to be the most involved with the Moodle community and the one who will usually be piping up about ‘the Community this’ and ‘the Community that’. Now I know I don’t represent all of the community - but I have tried to at least make sure I am a litmus test against anything going on around the Moot to make sure that it is continuing to focus on the needs of the broader Moodle user base.

Today, unfortunately, I found out that there has been some chatter in discussion forums around the statement (formerly) made on the Moot website that the Moot would be the ‘largest educational conference in the Australasian region in 2010′. As some pointed out, this is clearly incorrect, with the ACEC2010 conference held a while back being far larger than what the Moot will be, and there may have been others as well. What cut a little was the suggestion that we’d done this deliberately to boast about how big the conference was going to be, which I can say is about as far from the truth as you could get.

The Moot will be big. We’re pretty sure (but can’t say 100%) that it will be the biggest Moots ever in the Southern Hemisphere, and maybe one of the largest in the world so far. What we missed (and I’m not even sure who put that line in there in the first place, could have even been me for all I can remember), was the inclusion of two little words - ‘one of’ - in the context of it being a large educationally focused conference. All I can offer is a personal apology to anyone who was misled by this error, it was in no way meant to be blowing our own trumpet. As soon as the inaccurate sentence was pointed out to us we added those two little words that make a big difference, and I truly hope that the community understands that when organising something as large as this then mistakes can happen, and this one was just that.

If there are any other inaccuracies that people see on the website then please contact us and we’ll do our best to get it sorted out asap - if we know about a problem then we’re generally more than willing to fix it.

Now back to focusing on how to make this the best Moot ever

First some quick stats

So far:

• We have over 270+ confirmed delegates with about nine weeks left, so this is well on track to be a 350+ delegate event, which is fantastic;
• We have six very welcome sponsors on board: NetSpot (Diamond), The Learning Edge International, Echo 360, Pukunui Technology (Silver), e-Works and Elluminate (Bronze) - big thanks to all our sponsors;
• The Masterclass is completely sold out, and we have 73 people signed up to attend across the five workshops;
• Yesterday, after my mail out to delegates who hadn’t logged in to the Delegate Hub, we ended up having over 500 delegate-generated hits for the day, which is great since it shows how folks are engaging with the site;
• Five streams of presentations have been scheduled and filled, with just a couple of final touches to be made (hence the occasional gaps in the program); and
• The conference is now well and truly global, with international delegates and/or presenters from the US, UK, New Zealand, China, Indonesia and Japan - that I know of.

Hub access stats - big spike yesterday - excellent...

Now on to a few things that have stood out for me…

The Masterclass

Wow - the response to this has blown me away. All credit to Phil Marriott who was the one who came up with both the idea for the Masterclass, and the name Masterclass itself, so when these things start springing up post-Moot then remember it was Phil who thought of it.

We have 75 people confirmed for the Masterclass, which is beyond my wildest dreams when I started to craft the description and structure for it, and now the task ahead is for me, Phil, Curtis Bonk and Julian Ridden to get together over the next couple of weeks and make sure that we make this thing as good as it can be. I am really thankful for the feedback (good and bad) from people on my previous post on the Masterclass and would love to get more ideas from people. Over a beer with Tomaz Lasic in Perth last month it struck me how many similarities between what we’re trying to do with the Masterclass and what he is doing over at HQ with the Moodle Water course, and any time my own independent thought aligns with someone of the calibre of Tomaz I’m a very happy man.

A couple of people have asked whether we can get a bigger room and open up the Masterclass to more people, but the organising committee (with me in agreement) have decided that it should stay as it is for a number of reasons, some of them logistics related, and some of them to not want to bite off too much given that this is the first time a Masterclass like this has been run - that we know of. Either way, congratulations to those who got booked in, and if this is as much of a success as we think it can be then we might see if we can run more of these at a later date.

The Delegate Hub

The Delegate Hub

One of the big things about a Moot is that it brings people together in the physical world, which has been one of the reasons we’ve not toyed with the idea of broadcasting live sessions a-la at the iMoot. This doesn’t mean however that there shouldn’t be a vibrant online community backing the event, and this is what we’ve attempted to do in the Moodlemoot Delegate Hub, which contains a bunch of ‘Delegates only’ resources and activities for people who are attending the Moot. Note that if you’ve paid your registration fees and you have not received a login for the Delegate Hub then please let me know and I’ll send another login out to you - we’ve found that a few people had their welcome email sent straight to the spam bin.

I personally believe that getting involved in the Delegate hub is a really important part of the Moot for the following reasons:

1. It lets you find out who else is coming, and to connect with them through the Hub so you can work out who you’d like to catch up with at the conference before you get there;
2. It lets you view the interests of other delegates through the ‘tags‘ feature (shown), and to share your own interests, which means you’ll know in advance the people who have some common interests to you - which can be important if (like me) you’re painfully shy in large groups of strangers and would like to know someone you can talk to about a common interest;
3. It lets you have a place to ask all the questions that we as an organising committee haven’t thought of. We had one the other day where someone asked what the dress code was for the dinner - basic stuff but we just hadn’t put it anywhere. We have now!
4. It lets you pose questions to Curtis Bonk and Martin Dougiamas for their panel session at the conference - we will be giving them the questions to choose from and respond to during the session;
5. It gives you all the latest news about the conference from the organising committee; and
6. It promotes a sense of community, and that is what Moodle and Moodlemoots are all about!

Interests of the Moot delegates so far

So, if you’re a delegate and you haven’t yet logged in, then do it now - and while you’re at it then let us know through the forums about what other bits and pieces we could add to make the hub more worthwhile.

As you can probably guess, the Delegate Hub is a Moodle site, and yet again Moodle’s reputation as being the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of learning systems has meant that we’ve been able to put together a rich, interactive environment with zero coding and little effort on the whole.

Moodle 2.0 at the Conference

One of the things we’ve been conscious of is how perilously close Moodle 2.0’s formal release will be to the conference. Whether or not it is released in time for the conference, the Beta (Preview, whatever) version should be far more stable by then compared to what it is now (a blog post itself - will get to that one soon too I hope) and we’ve given preference to presentations with Moodle 2.0 content since it will no doubt be something that the community is keen to hear about. We’ll also probably let presenters know that if they need to ‘tweak’ their presentations to incorporate last minute Moodle 2.0 content (if it makes sense) then to go ahead. There are also the workshops, three of which specifically relate to Moodle 2.0 and which are being well filled so far.

In summary, there should be plenty of Moodle 2.0 talk at the conference to keep people interested.

And finally - the possum…

The Moodle Possum in happier times

Rumour has it that the much loved Moodle Possum from last year’s Moodleposium (get it? POSiUM and POSsUM?) will be making the trip to Melbourne for more madcap antics. This time though she might skip giving Martin Dougiamas a piggyback ride - the chiropractor bills after last time nearly made her too poor to buy any straw for her hutch in NetSpot’s basement over winter, and we don’t want that now do we…