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!

Open Source: Getting Failure for Free (Online Educa 2009)

On the last day of the Online Educa I did a talk titled “Open Source: Getting Failure for Free (and Why That is a Good Thing)”. Whenever I talk about open source it is like preaching to the converted: no sceptics in the audience. The two other speakers in the “The Added Value of Open Source Solutions in Times of Crisis” session were pretty hardcore. Matteo Uggeri was wearing a “I do not work for Fronter” badge and Elias Aarnio prefers to talk about “Free Software” and did not use the proprietary laptop that was available to do the presentations.

In my talk I tried to explain that cost should not be the only reason for choosing open source software. Another reason to use open source software is the fact that it will allow you to innovate faster. The slides are available on Slideshare, as a 1.4MB PDF file and below:

[slideshare id=2648592&doc=091204opensourcegettingfailureforfreehansdezwart-091204061723-phpapp01]

A special thank you to Alex Wied, senior manager at Accenture who kindly allowed me to use some of his slides in this presentation.

Will it Blend? A Presentation at Online Educa 2009

This morning I presented in the “The Moodle Experience: Moodle in Practice and New Developments” pre-conference session at the Online Educa in Berlin.

My talk was titled “Will it Blend” and the slides are available on Slideshare, as a PDF ( 4.9MB) and below (no audio unfortunately). If you have any questions about these slides, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments.

[slideshare id=2631031&doc=091201willitblendonlineeduca-091202055317-phpapp02]

On Friday (14:30-16:00 in room Lincke) I will talk about the use of open source software in corporations. My talk is titled “Open Source: Getting Failure for Free (and Why That Is a Good Thing)” and is part of the “The Added Value of Open Source Solutions in Times of Crisis” session.

I do hope to meet readers of this blog there!

10 Things to Like About Moodle

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.

[slideshare id=1262865&doc=09040710thingstolikeaboutmoodleslideshare-090408032056-phpapp01]

Download the slides as a 3.5MB PDF file.