Join the dots

Sometimes the English language can be cruel. Sometimes you can miss two little words and get caned for it – sometimes quite rightly. Today I found out that something like this has been stirring up ill will among the educational community around the Moodlemoot and I just want to set things straight as soon as possible, which has been within about thirty minutes of me finding out.

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