Join the dots

With ten weeks to go, we now have a draft program for the Australian Moodle Moot being held in Melbourne. Having been stranded in the UK under a cloud of volcanic ash I haven’t had much time to be involved with the program, so when it was released today it struck me at how many interesting presentations there should be, and many thanks to all of those who have submitted presentation abstracts – I think the content of this Moot will be ‘top shelf’ in terms of what will be on show.

View the program

First I’d like to say how happy I am to see the number of presentations which really do fit in with the ‘without limits’ theme of the conference that I discussed in an earlier post. There appear to be a large number of presentations which fit in with the idea of taking the use of Moodle to the next level, so well done to the organising team and the Advisory Committee for putting together what looks like it will provide some thought-provoking content right across the board.

I’d also like to welcome some of the international delegates making the trip from all corners of the spherical globe to be involved – a quick flick over the list and I can see we’ve got folks coming from Indonesia, Mozambique, the UK, New Zealand, Japan and the US, so for a regional conference its great to see this kind of global interest. We’ve also got a good strong representation across all sectors – schools, TAFE’s, RTOs, Universities and Corporate environments, so hopefully there will be something for everyone in the program.

Some of the presentations I’m specifically keen on checking out are:

• The presentations by Sumiko Iida and Julian Cox from UNSW, who have piloted Moodle side by side with an existing LMS and allowed teaching staff to choose which one they prefer to use (the closest thing to a real-life ‘LMS shootout’ I’ve seen in a while);
• The presentation by the nice folks at the Canberra Institute of Technology who I’ve been lucky enough to work with as they have implemented an integrated Moodle, EQUELLA and Wimba environment;
• Nitin Parmar’s presentation on lessons learned from deploying a large Moodle implementation at the University of Bath, which ties in quite closely by the looks with what I’ve been up to with CIT in recent months; and finally
• Colin Beer’s presentation on analysing data extracted from Moodle to investigate student engagement.

I’m also in there somewhere, I’ll be talking about the next generation of integration between Moodle 2.0 and Mahara, as well as some of the changes I hope to see in Mahara in the near future to take it to the top shelf of ePortfolio tools.

It is worth mentioning at this stage though that this is only a draft program, and there will no doubt be some reshuffling of the schedule as more presentations get added to it and we start to discover all sorts of clashes that we haven’t even thought of yet! The main thing was to show off some of the presentations which we know will be delivered and hopefully give people enough time to sign up before the Earlybird registration date passes (which has now been extended until the 14th May). If there is anything glaring about the program, then please get into the Delegate Hub (needs a login to the site which you should have been provided with when you registered) and post in the Moot Lounge area.

Only ten short weeks to go – time to get focused on the Masterclass!