It was always my intention to write a post summarising last April’s Moodlemoot in Loughborough in the UK. It was a highly enjoyable event with many Moodle luminaries present and there was much to write about.
However, I doubt I will ever write that post, so I have decided to share the presentation that I did titled 10 Things to Like About Moodle. It tries to describe the factors that have contributed to making Moodle such a success in the seven years of its existence. The audio is sometimes a bit hard to understand (too much hand-waving on my part), but overall it should still be valuable to many people.
About one and half years ago I wrote two Dutch articles for Van twaalf tot achttien, a magazine catering for teachers in secondary education. These articles were the first in this magazine to be published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that I can publish them on this blog and that you will be able to reuse what I have written (as long as you comply to the license agreement).
I have always believed that is very strange that our government subsidises many schools and teachers to create learning materials, but that these organisations and people are not required to share these materials under a free license. This has mainly to do with a lack of awareness of this problem and I am hoping that this article increases knowledge about the importance of free licensing of software and content.
Note how the designer who laid out the page wasn’t very interested in the contents of the article. His or her thought process must have gone something like: “Ah an article about software… let me find an image of a CD… yes, great Adobe Creative Suite CS2”. Really fitting for an article that talks about the Gimp!
The second article was co-written with Leen van Kaam (at the point of writing a colleague at Stoas Learning). It is titled Scenario’s voor de implementatie van een Elektronische Leeromgeving (ELO) (Scenarios for the implementation of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)) and describes a maturity model for implementing virtual learning environments in secondary education. It can be used to set goals and manage expectations in schools and should make it easier to understand why certain parts of a VLE implementation are successful and other are not.
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 an essay of no more than 500 words discussing the title in relation to Knowledge, Innovation and Quality. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.
Ikea by Flickr user splorp, CC licensed. Anybody interested in co-authoring a book titled: "Ikea for Dummies, Guerilla Shopping for the Whole Family"?
Outsourcing, the process of subcontracting to a third party, is mostly discussed in the context of large businesses offshoring some of their work to other countries. Reasons for outsourcing can vary, but usually have to do with saving costs, getting access to proprietary knowledge, improve quality through standardisation or help with research and innovation.
I have also seen the term used in two other contexts:
People now outsource part of their brain functions to technology. To use myself as an example: a lot of my memory is now outsourced to my mobile phone (much more than the phone numbers of my friends; also reminders, lists, pin codes, etc.).
Smart companies outsource a lot of their work to their customers, saving costs in the process. The most brilliant example is Ikea. In the old days furniture was delivered fully assembled and straight into your living room. With Ikea you drive your purchases home yourself and then spend hours putting it all together. Ikea takes this very far, letting you tap your own soft-icecreams.
“Subcontracting” to the customer has become very pervasive in the Western world. You take your own groceries from the shelf (in the past somebody got them for you) and in some supermarkets you are the one scanning them at the cash register. Full service gas stations don’t exist anymore. Money is taken out of ATMs, not at a teller and in many restaurants you have to clean up your table yourself.
There are two types of outsourcing to the customer:
Things that are just as fast and convenient when you do them yourself as when they are done by somebody else. The ATM is an example. This type is usually made possible by technology and will keep expanding in our society.
Things that are more inconvenient or take more time to do yourself, but that allow the service/product to be cheaper. Gas stations are an example of this. This is only interesting for a customer if there is an attractive balance between time lost and money saved. When time is very valuable, paying a bit extra to get service becomes interesting. That’s when you decide to get your groceries delivered for a fee or pay somebody in India to research and book that next trip abroad. As long as the costs of labour in the BRIC countries stay much lower than labour costs in the US and Europe I foresee more and more cases of individual customers offshoring what was outsourced to them.
If I had more words, I would have tried to explore what these trends might mean for the way that we teach, train and learn. I can imagine that learners soon will be asked to assemble their own curricula, find their own sources and even assess themselves. In that sense there are parallels between outsourcing to the customer and the shift from “push” towards “pull” in learning.
Maybe in a next post?
Unfortunately, I didn’t stick to the self-imposed rules in this post. But Lars von Trier didn’t do that in most of his Dogme 95 movies either (and he took a “vow of chastity” which cannot be said of me!).
Not too ago I participated in a course on how to drive a forklift truck. Part of the course was a classroom session in which the facilitator seemed to enjoy nothing more than telling anecdotes about terrible forklift accidents. Those anecdotes left a deep impression on me and they have made me much more careful whenever I am driving a forklift truck. However they also paralysed my partner (who owns the business that uses the forklift), making her completely nervous when she has to drive it.
I was reminded of this course when I chanced upon the following safety video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6srFWdsovio]
(actually the video that I saw had even more gore, but has now been removed)
In the Netherlands we have had a campaign for years that warns people not to be careless when dealing with fireworks. The slogan is “Je bent een rund als je met vuurwerk stunt” (meaning something like: “You are an idiot when you play around with fireworks”). The initial campaigns were very shocking with posters and videos of damaged limbs. I couldn’t find any of the original materials, but did find this photo from a news article:
Slogan on the poster in the background: "...Stuffed 30 firecrackers in a football..."
and this TV ad::
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sxq7zfS9Ms]
“Old year’s eve, we are ready for it. You too?”
The campaign has now lost its shocking edge and tries to make its point by alluding to what can happen to your virility when you have an accident:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfvyMi2Isl4]
“Gentlemen, never keep fireworks in your pockets”
Talking about virility is now an oft-used trick in trying to stop people from doing things. It is used in this UK anti-smoking ad for example:
Does smoking make you hard?
These last two campaigns are obviously geared towards men (so was the forklift course by the way: the facilitator could not stop making offensive sexist jokes) and I wouldn’t be surprised if men in general need a different campaign than women when they need to be scared into (not) doing something.
I would be very interested to hear about any research that has been done into teaching about safety. It would be great if people have tried to answer questions like:
Is is possible to change people’s work behaviour by scaring or shocking them with graphic examples?
If yes, does this change in behaviour last and does it make them more careful or too careful (to the point of paralysis).
Are there relevant cultural and gender differences when trying to teach about safety?
The Dutch Moodle users group (Ned-Moove) organised the fifth Dutch language Moodlemoot in Amsterdam last Wednesday. It was a successful event with nearly a hundred people attending and two excellent keynote speakers: Helen Foster and Martín Langhoff. Helen is Moodle’s community manager and Martín is an important core Moodle developer and currently architect of the school server in the OLPC project.
The programme of speakers was better than in any earlier Dutch moot, with tracks about education, business, digital pedagogy and sysadmin/development tracks. Nowadays events like this leave digital tracks and can be relived in a way through the Twitter messages, blog posts and shared slides. My ex-colleague and friend Marcel de Leeuwe wrote an interesting (Dutch) blog post about his experiences at the moot that includes his slides and my co-Ned-moove-board-member and friend Arjen Vrielink did a conceptual talk about Moodle networking. Many of the other speakers have put their slides online at the Moodlemoot 2009 website.
Moodle in the Netherlands finally seems to be taking of outside of secondary education. About half of the visitors did not come from the educational sector:
Sectors/Visitors at the Dutch Moodlemoot
My own presentation was less about Moodle and more about learning this time. I talked about instructional principles that can be used to make sure you deliver top quality blended learning. The slides and audio are in Dutch and can be downloaded as a 5.3MB PDF file or viewed here:
