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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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:
- The documentation about this feature on mahara.org is not great, something I’ll rectify shortly after making this post (if I can stay awake), and
- Those who sign up for a free demo Mahara account anywhere won’t get to see the feature, as you need an Admin user to set up the special group types that can be used for assessment.
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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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.
Perhaps its just the clients that I tend to deal with, but the vast majority of focus when deploying a Moodle site tends to follow the following elements:
Typical Moodle Process
This is a very ‘course centric’ way of looking at Moodle, and to be fair this is the way that most people I’ve met want to use Moodle, for better or worse. This does however ignore a number of neat things that Moodle can do that are less course-centric and more student or topic centric, which leads us to this episode of Moodle Obscurities.
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Amidst much geeky fanfare Google recently unveiled its latest, greatest innovation – Google Wave. Without going into gory detail, and admitting freely that I’ve only gotten about two thirds of the way through the one-hour-twenty presentation video (but being otherwise filled in over dinner last night about the whole thing thanks to uber-geek Spud), Google Wave morphs instant messaging, email, document collaboration and a bunch of other tools into one more or less seamless platform, that just happens to be open source as well and lend itself brilliantly to integration with other applications thanks to a rich API. In theory anyway.
So what impact could this have on Moodle? Read more…
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