Its been a while since the last unofficial Moodlemoot update so I thought I’d round out the week by giving another glimpse into how the planning for the largest Moot in the Southern Hemisphere (we think) is going.
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.
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.
Sometimes in life things go to plan. Other times they go completely to hell in a handbasket. The last few days have been a combination of the two in terms of my trip to London and my attendance at the UK Moot.
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…
Ok, duty of disclosure stuff first. A few weeks back I was asked by the folks at Packt Publishing to review the recently released Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios Beginner’s Guide, and in return they’d give me a copy of the book. Well, they kept their part of the bargain and so now I’ll keep mine.
Last time I posted about assessment in Mahara it was using Mahara’s somewhat limited capacity to act as an assessment tool. I got no problem with this, since I agree that things like a Gradebook really belong in an LMS rather than in an ePortfolio, collaboration and social networking tool like Mahara.
But what if you need to do a more formal assessment in an LMS like Moodle?
A single sign-on integration between Moodle and Mahara is nothing new, and has already provided a basic integration between the two systems, but there has never been a neat way for students to submit a selection of work from their ePortfolio into Moodle for assessment beyond copying and pasting links between the two systems…
…until now.
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.
Read more…
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:
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.
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