Moodle Books from Packt Publishing

About a month ago I got an email from Packt‘s marketing department whether I would be interested in receiving a review copy of William Rice’s Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development. I said “yes”, so in the interest of full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book. As Packt also publishes a couple of other books on Moodle, I have decided to review these as well.

So what does one expect from a Moodle book? I think the spectrum that these book try to cover runs from technology to pedagogy. You want to know how to install Moodle on a server and make it run well, but you also want to know how best to use the tools in Moodle to achieve your teaching/learning goals. The easiest way for me to decide whether a book on Moodle is any good is to look at the topics that are notoriously hard for new Moodle users to understand: roles, the gradebook, groups/groupings and metacourses. I will look at each book in turn and give a short description of the book and what audience it is for, then look at each of the difficult Moodle topics and how they are covered in the book. Finally I will look at the pedagogical/didactical ideas in each book.

Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development by William Rice is an update for Moodle 1.9 to his earlier book on Moodle written in 2006. It is written for beginners and advanced Moodle users. It quickly runs you through how to set up your own Moodle site, looks at most of the configuration options and then tries to cover all of the course functionalities that a teacher can use. It tries to do this quite extensively (covering all options) which sometimes does not help making it an engaging read. The chapters on creating course content are split into three: adding static course material, adding interactive course material and adding social course material. This makes it easy to find certain information, but doesn’t make it easy to imagine how you could use Moodle in a real life course. When you read the book it is obvious that Rice has actually taught with Moodle. He manages to cover quite a bit of standard problems that first time Moodle user run into, although his solutions sometimes feel a bit idiosyncratic (e.g. using javascript to solve the problem of not being allowed to put a single course in multiple categories).

Roles are explained in the last chapter of the book. Rice does a decent job and does explain how you can override permissions for a single activity. Everybody should heed to his recommendations for working with roles (basically: start with the default system and only tweak when you actually want to change the default behaviour). I wish he would have put a chapter on roles in the beginning of the book so that he could have explained later on how you can allow students to rate each others forum posts for example. Currently the explanation on how to let students rate posts is not correct, the screenshot seems to come from an earlier version of Moodle.

Rice used a beta version of Moodle 1.9 for writing this book. Apparently the current 1.9 gradebook wasn’t there yet, because the functionality that he describes only fits Moodle 1.8. This is a big omission: don’t expect to get any help on grading in the current version of Moodle from this book.

Groups are only mentioned when the course settings are explained (I couldn’t find groups in the index of the book). The concept is explained properly, but Rice does not go into the technicalities. Groupings are not discussed anywhere.

The concept of a metacourse is explained with a useful example making it clear for the reader for what it can be used. Rice only explains the first scenario from the Meta Course page on MoodleDocs. The second scenario, which can be genuinely useful too, is not explained.

Finally, the book gives scant pedagogical support. It has headings like “Why Use a Directory?”, “When to Use Uploaded Files” and “When to Use the Different Types of Surveys”; but these are few and short. It will not be easy for a new Moodle teacher to grasp the larger concepts on how he/she could use Moodle.

Moodle Administration by Moodle partner Synergy Learning‘s Alex Büchner is for “technicians, systems administrators, as well as academic staff, that is, basically for anyone who has to administer a Moodle system”. It is a big book (350 pages or so) trying to systematically cover all the relevant topics for an administrator using Moodle 1.9 (using the Moodle Admin menu as a guide). The depth of this book is actually quite amazing and I think there is no quicker way for a person with a technical (meaning non-teaching) Moodle related role to get up to speed. For example: Nowhere else can you find information on Moodle networking that is this extensive.

My favourite chapter is Appendix A, the Moodle Health Check. This is a set of over 120 tests related the performance, functionality, security and the system. Each test is linked back to the chapter which describes the actions you should take in more detail. If you follow all the advice you should end up with a healthy Moodle installation.

Roles (and permissions) have their own chapter in this book. It clearly describes the different contexts and permissions. It explains how permission conflicts are resolved and has an example of the non-standard parent or mentor role. The paragraph on best practice is a must read for anybody wanting to touch the role system.

Unfortunately the gradebook, groups and groupings are not discussed in this book. Even though strictly speaking it is not administration, I think it is important that any administrator really knows these topics so that he/she can help their teachers. Maybe something for a next version of the book?

The concept of metacourses is explained properly and describes both ways of sharing enrolment across courses. The book has no pedagogical support, simply because it isn’t aimed at a teaching audience.

Moodle Teaching Techniques is a slightly older book by William Rice (2007). The subtitle “Creative Ways to Use Moodle for Constructing Online Learning Solutions” conveys the aim of the book: provide the reader with solutions that help you make the most of the many features found in a standard Moodle installation.

The book starts with a chapter explaining some general well accepted instructional principles (e.g. Big Ideas, Distributed Practice, Guide Notes). These principles are then coupled with different Moodle features.

The book then has a chapter on each of the most used Moodle modules. The chapter on the forum module for example, describes how to create a single-student forum, how to motivate students to interact with a “best of” forum, how to keep discussions on track and how to monitor student participation in a forum.

Even though the book is written for Moodle 1.6, I would still recommend it to anyone who wants to be more creative in their Moodle teaching practice. A lot of the advice in this book can even be used in other virtual learning environments.

Roles and the 1.9 gradebook are not discussed (they didn’t exist in Moodle 1.6), groups are used in some of the examples, grouping and metacourses are not written about, but the pedagogical support of this book is great. I really wish more people would attempt to write a book like this.

The last book in this review is the very recent Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner’s Guide by Ian Wild. The author describes the audience for the book as follows:

If you are a teacher, lecturer, or trainer faced with using Moodle for the first time and you want to convert your teaching materials to Moodle quickly, effectively, and with the minimum of fuss then this book is for you. You may have toyed with the idea of using Moodle but you are not sure how to begin converting your face-to-face teaching online. If so, this book will show you how to create engaging and entertaining online courses. You may need to support your face-to-face teaching with online activities, including assignments and tests. In this book, we get you started with blended learning.

Wild has an entertaining style of writing and uses the most recent version of Moodle. The book is very hands-on with a lot of examples on how you would start putting materials online. Many teachers want to know how they can put Powerpoint presentations online, or how to convert a big document into a readable wiki. He is very tuned into what teachers would like to do nowadays. I especially like his paragraph on how you would embed a video from YouTube or TeacherTube into Moodle or his explanation on how to find images for your course (with a short chapter on copyright and a single mention of Creative Commons in the paragraph on Flickr).

Roles are only written about in a paragraph on assigning students and teachers to your course. The concept of a meta course is not explained. However the gradebook has some great paragraphs dedicated to it. Wild shows how you can add your own categories, move grade items into these categories and create your own grade items. It is a pity that he doesn’t go into the different aggregation options for these categories, because this is often the hardest part to understand for a new teacher (is the Moodle project sure that “Simple Weighted Means” is the best way of saying that the total course grade is the average of all grade items/categories?). Groups and groupings also get a proper explanation.

There is quite a bit of pedagogical support in this book. If you follow Wild’s advice you will end up with a significantly better course than most of what I currently see in the learning field. The book has some nice ideas that any teacher can follow up, however please note that most of these seem to be geared to secondary education.

To conclude: For teachers I would definitely recommend Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner’s Guide. Administrators should read Moodle Administration. Read both books if you want to understand roles, the gradebook, groups/grouping and metacourses.

I do think there is space for another Moodle book. Where is the author that starts with a social constructivist concept of teaching (we don’t currently have this in most schools, universities and businesses) and explains how this vision can be created with practical integrated Moodle activities?

A final note on Packt as a publisher. They seem to have interesting low-cost, print on demand, direct-marketing business model. Very often they are the first publisher to have a book out on a particular (open source) technology. When you buy a book from them you support the open source project:

Packt believes in Open Source. When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project.

In the long term, we see ourselves and yourselves, as customers and readers of our books, as part of the Open Source ecosystem, providing sustainable revenue for the projects we publish on. Our aim at Packt is to establish publishing royalties as an essential part of the service and support business model that sustains Open Source.

Their tagline really fits the title of my blog: “From Technologies to Solutions”.

I think it is pretty advanced marketing for them to contact a not-so-well-known blogger as myself to write a review for one of their books. They support user groups with free copies for prices and reviews. Their customer service is exceptional (from a Dutch perspective at least). When I asked them about the delivery of my Moodle Course Conversion book, I got the following reply:

Firstly please let me apologize for the delay in shipping the book to you. Usually all postal shipments to ‘ Netherlands’ are delivered within 18 days maximum. It appears that there is some delay in the shipping process. Since your book was shipped out via Royal mail ordinary post, it is untraceable.

However you need not worry, kindly email us if you do not receive your book by the 16th of January, I’ll be glad to help you.

For all the trouble this has caused you, I have placed a free eBook of ” Moodle Course Conversion: Beginner’s Guide” in your account. You can access this eBook immediately and meanwhile your print book should be on its way to you.

There is one thing I would love Packt to change: their layout/typesetting. When I read their books I get the feeling that MS Word was used for creating all the pages. I would love it if they would invest in some typesetting technology that would make the layout look less amateurish.

If anyone at Packt is reading this, I would be happy to receive any of the following books for review: User Training for Busy Programmers, AsteriskNOW, PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects, ImageMagick Tricks, Mobile Web Development and WordPress for Business Bloggers!

The Spy in the Coffee Machine

Slightly over a year ago, I had a conversation with Erik Duval about privacy in this digital world. He basically argued that losing privacy is not a problem as long as the transparency is symmetric. This is basically the point that David Brin writes about in The Transparent Society. The conversation started my thinking on this topic. Was Bill Joy right when he allegedly said “Privacy is dead, get over it”?

I was hoping that O’hara and Shadbolt’s The Spy in the Coffee Machine would give me some new perspectives on this issue.

The book opens with a chapter on the “disappearing body”. We have less and less face-to-face contact and more and more phone, email and Internet (IM, (micro)blogs, social networks) communications. A physical presence leaves behind few signs, whereas information is persistent.

When the prophetic but currently unfashionable Marshall McLuhan predicted that we would soon be living in a global village thanks to new technologies and media, most people took that to mean that travel would be straightforward, intermingling of diverse cultures frequent and influences wide and strong. But one other property of a village is the absence of anonymity and secrecy. Privacy is at a premium, and that is another aspect of the global village with which we will have to come to terms.

In our society we have a very hybrid view on privacy. It isn’t a value neutral concept. Some cultures regard privacy with suspicion. In “the West” we have a positive opinion on privacy and see it as something to be protected by law:

But on the other hand, many use new technologies to expose themselves to view to a previously unimaginable degree. Webcams and Big Brother provide almost unlimited access to some exhibitionists, while very few people will pass up the opportunity to appear on television. […] Most academics would kill to be interviewed about their work, even as they cling to the copyrights of their unread articles.

The book then provides a comprehensive overview of current technologies and how these relate to privacy. They do this in a matter of fact, objective and entertaining way. A couple of examples:

Moore’s law makes it trivial to search extremely large datasets (the end of practical obscurity) and is especially interesting when it comes to personal memory:

The amount of information that an ordinary person can generate, and store, is now colossal. It is possible to store digital versions of life’s memories in increasing quantities. As human-computer interaction specialist Alan Dix one playfully noted, it takes 100 kilobits/second to get high quality audio and video. If we imagine someone with a camera strapped to his or her head for 70 years, that will generate video requiring something of the order of 27.5 terabytes of storage, or about 450 60gb iPods. And if Moore’s law continues to hold for the next 20 years or so [..] we could store a continuous record of a life on a device the size of a sugar cube.
The ability to record memories, and store them indefinitely in digital form in virtually unlimited quantities has been dubbed the phenomenon of memories for life. This is an important area of interdisciplinary research; we will need to understand how it will affect our social and political lives, and our psychological memories.

Web 2.0 mashups allow you to easily bring multiple public resources together. By combining different databases you can now easily see where in your area all the sex offenders live (see Megan’s law):

In a clever demonstration of the dangers of mashups, consultant Tom Owad mashed up book wishlists published on Amazon with Google Earth, but with a twist. The Amazon users leave a name and a home town, which was often enough to locate them via Yahoo! People Search, at an individual address, of which Google Earth would hold a detailed satellite image. He also filtered out most of the books, to leave only those who read subversive literature. The result was a map of the world with readers of subversive books located upon it; click on the location of such a reader, and get a high resolution satellite image of his or her house. Of course, Owad was merely demonstrating the principle, not building a usable system for genuine deployment by the Thought Police. But ….

There are also technologies that could help in keeping us empowered. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project for example “enables Websites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents”.

The Panopticon is here according to the authors. They use the final chapter of the book to finally give some of their own opinion about whether we have a worrying future ahead of us. They take a very balanced viewpoint: these new technologies also solve many problems and have big advantages. At the same time we should never forget that bureaucracies are information thirsty and that function creep is a reality:

The struggle for personal space between the individual and the community takes place on a number of fronts, and we should not expect sweeping victories for either side. There will be small advances here, mini-retreats there. In the background, the astonishing progress of technology will keep changing the context.

As I finished this book I read about the premiere of Privacy Matters‘ (Dutch spoken) film about the importance of privacy. They do not allow the embedding of their video so I will link to a version on Youtube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OohrAPiDnMA]

The production quality of the film is incredible and the special effects are great. The final message of the film makes sense: stay aware. However, I found the tone too fear mongering and paternalistic. It made me averse to the video and left a sour taste in my mouth. Where is the constructive look towards the future?

For me this post about privacy is an unfinished conversation. There are lots of things to think about and I guess we should keep paying attention. Privacy will be one the many sociological concepts which will get a completely different meaning over the next decades. What are your thoughts on this topic?

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, book cover — Here Comes Everybody

I am convinced that the web will change our society in many ways that we cannot currently grasp. Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a book which everybody who is interested in these changes should read. Many books on technology take a very shallow approach. Often they focus on the technology itself or only look at one particular aspect of how technology can be used (e.g. books on “How Wikis can change the way you collaborate”). Shirky’s book is the first one I have read which takes a very deep sociological and often philosophical perspective on the ubiquitousness of the net and its wider implications.

He is not the first author to draw an analogy with the invention of movable type. The social effects of this invention lagged decades behind the technological effects:

Real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable.

We are just now entering the chaotic period. We cannot accurately predict the changes that will happen to society now that we have the Internet. It will be many years before we can oversee and look back at the consequences. I can instantly see how the above is true for education. Currently the old institutions are still in full reign, but they are more and more broken (e.g. look at the percentage of students who prematurely quit their vocational tertiary education in the Netherlands). These institutions have not harnessed the new possibilities of technology.

So what are these new possibilities? The book is full of wonderful examples, but Shirky’s main point is that the Internet allows groups of people to self organize without the need for organizations, firms or (governmental) institutions. Traditional communications were always one-to-one (like the phone) or one-to-many (broadcasting, like television). The net enables many-to-many communication which we never had before. E-mail was the first example of this, but IM, (micro-)blogs and social networking sites enable this too. These new tools are “eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination”.

Shirky has a great observation on media:

The twentieth century, with the spread of radio and television was the broadcast century. The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a small group of professionals and then delivered to a large group of consumers. But media, in the word’s literal sense as the middle layer between people, have always been a three-part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it [..] and they like to share it [..]. Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption.

Social tools are coming into existence that support new patterns of group forming and group production. My personal favourite example is open source software. Clay Shirky attributes the success of this method of producing software to the way that it gets failure for free. For this reason, he considers open source software to be a threat to commercial software vendors:

Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source ecosystem is outsucceeding commercial efforts, but because it is outfailing them. Because the open source ecosystem, and by extension open social systems generally, rely on peer production, the work on those systems can be considerably more experimental, at considerably less cost, than any firm can afford. Why? The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.
The overall effect of failure is its likelihood times its cost. Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood. [..] The obvious problem is that no one knows for certain what will succeed and what will fail. [..] You will inevitably green-light failures and pass on potential successes. Worse still, more people will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea. Given this asymmetry, you will be pushed to make safe choices, thus systematically undermining the rationale for trying to be more innovative in the first place.
The open source movement makes neither kind of mistake, because it doesn’t have employees, it doesn’t make investments, it doesn’t even make decisions. It is not an organization, it is an ecosystem, and one that is remarkably tolerant of failure. Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free.

Do yourself a favour: If you haven’t read this profound book, please read it as soon as you can.

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

Lauren Slater’s Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century is a marvellous book for anybody trying to understand human behaviour. Her perspective is that these famous experiments (e.g. Milgram’s experiment on authority) “ultimately concern themselves not with the value-free questions we traditionally associate with ‘science’, […] but with the kinds of ethical and existential questions we associate with philosophy.”

What makes this book special is the fact that Slater manages to give each experiment a personal and human touch. She interviews the people who were in Milgram’s experiment and surprisingly finds out that being part of the experiment has changed these people profoundly and made them highly aware of authority later in their lives.

She explores the Bystander effect and finds out that people can be armed against the diffusion of responsibility by educating them about it and by clearly articulating the five stages of helping behaviour:

You, the potential helper, must notice an event is occurring.
You must interpret the event as one in which help is needed.
You must assume personal responsibility.
You must decide what action to take.
You must then take action.

Slater also does her own version of the Rosenhan experiment in which sane people had themselves committed into psychiatric wards (by saying they heard voices saying “thud”) and acted normally as soon as they were in. Most of them got diagnosed with schizophrenia and they stayed for an average of 19 days(!).

My favourite chapter was the one on B.F. Skinner. He is well known for his experiments with animals, but less known for his thoughts on teaching. He was a strong believer on the effects of the environment on behaviour and was convinced that this could be used to create a better society. Slater writes upon reading his Beyond Freedom & Dignity:

Skinner is clearly proposing a humane society rooted in his experimental findings. He is proposing that we appreciate the immense control (or influence) our surroundings have on us, and so sculpt those surroundings in such a way that they “reinforce positively,” or in other words, engender adaptive and creative behaviours, in all citizens. Skinner is asking society to fashion cues that are most likely to draw on our best selves, as opposed to cues that clearly confound us, cues such as those that exist in prisons, in places of poverty. In other words, stop punishing. Stop humiliating.

All in all a great book…

Gang Leader for a Day

A couple of years ago I read Stephen Levitt’s fascinating book Freakonomics. One of the most interesting themes covered was the economics of a drug selling gang in Chicago. Levitt had access to a couple of years of ledger books detailing the income and expenses for one particular chapter of the Black Knights gang. The person who gave him these ledger book was Sudhir Venkatesh who spent a couple of years doing research in the Robert Taylor Homes.

Venkatesh has now written a book about his time in the “projects”: Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. This book is very interesting on many different levels. In the beginning of the book he accidentally gets into contact with a gang leader, J.T., who is strangely willing to have Venkatesh tag along and lets him in on the secrets of gang life. He visits the neighbourhood over a period of years, gradually expanding the number of people who trust him and are willing to share their story with him.

Throughout the book he struggles with his research methodology. He is convinced that doing traditional quantitative research using objective surveys does not lead to any deep insights into why it is so hard for many people to get out of poverty and how it is that people do manage to struggle along. On the other hand his participatory research is also troublesome. What is he to do when he witnesses the gang planning or doing illegal activities? How does he earn people’s trust? He notices that by observing all kind of hustlers and trying to get to know as much about them as possible, he himself is also slowly turning into a hustler: a hustler for information.

I was surprised to find out how much of the drug trade is run as a normal business. Most of J.T.’s problems and dilemma’s are managerial. His actions and behaviour on the street are all in the interest of selling more drugs and keeping their customers happy.

There are a couple of parallels between the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago and the “Bijlmer” area (Amsterdam South-East) where I have been working as a teacher for several years. The sense of community where people know each other and look out for each other is very recognisable. They also share the failure of the urban renewal programs in the 60’s and 70’s. From the book:

From the outset urban renewal held the seeds of its own failure. White political leaders blocked the construction of housing for blacks in the more desirable white neighborhoods. And even though blighted low-rise buildings in the ghetto were replaced with highrises like the Robert Taylor Homes, the quality of the housing stock wasn’t much better. Things might have been different if housing authorities around the country were given the necessary funds to keep up maintenance on these new buildings. But the buildings that had once been the hope of urban renewal were already, a short forty years later, ready for demolition again.

This is exactly what happened in the Bijlmer. Looking back, it is hard to understand how the nearly ideological architectural ideas behind the highrises that were built with expansive empty spaces between them weren’t seen as the complete failures that they turned out to be. I’ll revisit this theme in a post in the future.