The Future of Moodle and How Not To Stop It (iMoot 2010)

Yesterday morning I got up at 6:30 to deliver a presentation at the very first virtual Moodlemoot: iMoot 2010. All in all it was a hugely enjoyable experience. I had people attending from among other the United States, Ireland, Zambia, Australia, Japan.

The platform for delivery of the session was Elluminate, which worked flawless. I am still amazed at the fact that we now have easy access to the technology that makes a virtual conference with a worldwide audience possible.

My talk was titled “The Future of Moodle of How Not to Stop It”, an adaptation of the book by Zittrain.

I first recapped the recent discussion about the death of the VLE:

[wpvideo htbfDWKU]

I showed how Moodle was conceived and developed when the web was less mature then it is now (the social web as we know it was basically non-existent) and how a teacher can create a learning experience for his or her students using nothing but loosely coupled free tools. Horses for courses.

I then looked at the two mental models that Moodle could adapt from Drupal:

Drupal’s tagline is “Community Plumbing”. I believe Moodle’s could be “Learning Plumbing”.
Drupal sees itself as a platform. This is exactly what Moodle should reinvent itself as.

In the final part of the presentation I looked at how the new Moodle 2.0 API’s (repository, portfolio, comments and webservices) will be able to help make the shift towards a platform. I finished with asking people to imagine what an appstore for repository plugins and what an appstore for learning activities would look like.

The slides are on Slideshare and embedded below (you can also download a 2MB PDF version). The session has been recorded. Once that recording comes online, I will update this post and try and share that here too.

[slideshare id=3065049&doc=100204imootthefutureofmoodle-100203180009-phpapp01]

The one difficult thing about a virtual conference, by the way, is communicating the dates and times. Timezones add a lot of complexity. iMoot, for example, provides users with a custom schedule for their timezone and replays each session twice after the live event. I am starting to believe in the Swatch Internet Time concept again. Wouldn’t a single metric .beat not be great? See you @850!

(Auto) Presence: Increasing Team and Network (Communication) Efficiency and Productivity

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about how (auto)presence could increase team and network communication. The post also has to include some video or audio. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

I decided to put this month’s blogpost in a 17 minute long Slideshare presentation (download the 1.5MB PDF here):

[slideshare id=3049248&doc=presence-100201150604-phpapp01]

My voice was recorded with VR+ on the iPhone. This cheap app converts the file to MP3 and allows you to upload it over wifi. The MP3 file is hosted by the Internet Archive.

I would love your comments and ideas on this matter!

Moodle and Multimedia, a Ned-Moove Seminar + iMoot 2010

In April 2007 I was one of the founders of the Dutch speaking Moodle user group, Ned-Moove. When we started nearly three years ago it was still necessary to give Moodle “a face”. Now Moodle has become ubiquitous and the mission of the user group is slowly changing: we now mainly organise meeting trying to bring Moodlers together.

Next Wednesday, the 27th of January, Ned-Moove will have its yearly “jaarvergadering” at Stoas in Wageningen, NL. We will choose new board members, get commitment for our plans for 2010 and deal with our 2009 finances. Right after the jaarvergadering is our first seminar of the year: Moodle and multimedia. There are three excellent speakers (they will speak in Dutch):

Isabelle Langeveld reviews the Packt book “Moodle 1.9 Multimedia“. I have reviewed some Moodle Packt books before and am curious to hear what she thought about this one.
Wytze Koopal will talk about multimedia repositories. Knowing him, I am sure he will touch on open content and the many places on the Internet that have good educational content available.
Finally Randy Vermaas, consultant at Stoas, will talk about how Moodle 2.0 will help you with integrating multimedia into your course.

All the practical information about the meeting and the seminar can be found here. Registration is free and is done over here.

On another note: iMoot 2010 is promising to be an exciting Moodle related event. It is the first full-fledged virtual Moodle conference. It runs from February 4-7, spanning 31 timezones and 210 countries. Registration is relatively cheap (45 Australian dollars). The program has a lot of interesting sessions.

I will be presenting too. My presentation is titled “The Future of Moodle and How Not to Stop It“. Recently there has been a lot of discussion on the death of the VLE. I will try to recap the discussion and see how this reflects on Moodle (2.0). I do hope to meet you there!

The State of Dutch Speaking Moodle 2009-2010

Two years ago I started writing up a little “State of Dutch Speaking Moodle”. You can find the previous versions here:

This year I am pressed for time so all I have done is compiled the graphs (I haven’t looked at any of the sites this year).

Registered Moodle Sites
In 2009 Moodle.org has implemented some automatic culling of inactive registered websites. This has meant that registered sites for most countries have gone down in 2009. Obviously this does not mean that Moodle is less used (see the Moodle Stats page for proof of that). The way usage is measured will hopefully stay the same so that comparisons between different years will start to make sense again. Please don’t forget that there are many Moodle sites in operation that have not registered (so if you are a journalist don’t misunderstand this and misquote me).

Registered Moodle Sites

Ned-Moove Members
Our Dutch Speaking Moodle Users Group, Ned-Moove, has grown again in the last year. I can’t help but notice that all the growth is in the Dutch memberships. I realise that this might be due to a cultural difference (Dutch people seem to love organising themselves formally), but it is still a pity.

Ned-Moove Members

Ned-Moove is looking for new board members. So if you are interested (especially if you are from Belgium) please let me know before January 27th! If you would like to become a member of Ned-Moove you can register here.

Ned-Moove Sponsors
Ned-Moove is always looking for sponsors. Their financial contributions make it a lot easier for us to organise our seminars and Moodlemoots. In 2009 we found three new large sponsors and four new small sponsors.

Ned-Moove Small Sponsors Ned-Moove Large Sponsors

Please register here if your organisation is interested in becoming a sponsor.

Conclusion
I have a feeling that 2009 was really a breakthrough year for Moodle worldwide. For example, it became the market leader in the LMS category for eLearning Guild members. In the Netherlands something similar has happened. Without the quantitive data to back it up, I am sure that Moodle is the number one LMS in the Dutch corporate world: you find it everywhere.

There is one market where the Dutch are way behind in Moodle adoption: the tertiary education market. This market was shored up by Blackboard about 5 years ago. I am still waiting for the first Dutch university or college that will make the switch. Maybe 2010 could be the year for that?

An Open Office spreadsheet file with the data that I used to create the graphs is available here.

My New Job Title: Innovation Manager Learning Technology

My employer has gone through a restructuring exercise in the past couple of months. This means that from today onwards I will have a new job in the company.

I used to be Blended Learning Advisor in the global learning design and development team, now I will be Innovation Manager in the IT department of the Human Resources function.

I will be managing the innovation funnel for learning technology. I am very aware that this is a perilous job! As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince (via Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations):

There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things…. Whenever his enemies have the ability to attack the innovator, they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend him sluggishly, so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable.

I doubt the writing in this blog will change much (I see this change as a continuation of what I was doing before), but do expect some posts on innovation management pretty soon.