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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
