Dutch Moodlemoot in Amsterdam 27-05-2009

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:

[slideshare id=1513758&doc=090527willitblendslideshare-090531151216-phpapp01]

All in all a great event. I am looking forward to next year, it will most probably be in Belgium.

Moodle Presentation at the Institute of Social Studies

Last week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at one of the Institute of Social Studies‘ educational lunch sessions. In one and a half hours I talked about free software in general, about the things that make Moodle a great project (in this case mainly its philosophy and its license) and about how Moodle can be utilised best in tertiary education.

The slides and audio are available on SlideShare (or as a 4.8MB PDF file) and embedded below:

[slideshare id=1469310&doc=090520moodleisspresentation-090521070937-phpapp02]

If you already know about free software and Moodle and are only interested in practical ways of using Moodle in your courses, start at slide 52.

Feedback is more than welcome as always!

Presentations on Moodle 2.0 and on Moodle, Mahara and Elgg

My employer, Stoas Learning, organized a Moodle seminar today. I did two presentations in the morning (both of them in Dutch).

The first one was titled: “Moodle 2.0, een sneak preview”. I discussed the new features that will appear in Moodle 2.0 and did a quick demo of how you can use the repository API to pull in an image from Flickr, hand that in as an assignment and then push it out to GoogleDocs for savekeeping. You can find the slides below:

[slideshare id=1165502&doc=090318moodle20-090318180829-phpapp02]
(view at Slideshare or download a PDF version)

The second presentation was titled: “Moodle, Elgg & Mahara – Samenwerkend Leren, Kennisdelen & Sociale Netwerken – Van Formeel naar Informeel”. I tried to use three cases to explain that e-learning can be more than just a web-based, unfacilitated, content to single learner experience. These were my slides:

[slideshare id=1165542&doc=090318watnogmeeralt-090318181552-phpapp01]
(view at Slideshare or download a PDF version)

I do realise that these slides lose a lot of their meaning without my spoken words. When I posted Slideshare presentations previously, I wrote I would try and record the audio for the next time. I guess I failed…. I am sure there will be another chance.

The Future of Moodle and How Not to Stop It

The annual Holland Open conference is held today and tomorrow in Amsterdam. It is a conference about open standards, open source and open business.

I did a very general talk about Moodle, focusing on its community and what the future might hold. The slides of the talk are publicly available, can be downloaded here (2MB) and are licensed under a Creative Commons license:

[slideshare id=604539&doc=hosc2008-1221731404519865-8&w=425]

Moodle and Digital Pedagogy

The Dutch Moodle association, Ned-Moove, organised a seminar on Digital Pedagogy and Moodle. I had the honour to be able to do a presentation on my work as a teacher at the Open Schoolgemeenschap Bijlmer. This (Dutch!) presentation was very practical: which simple benefits can be had from a Virtual Learning Environment in secondary education (where they currently have about 7 computers per student 7 students per computer).

The presentation is public (download it as a 3.4MB PDF file) and has some examples that should inspire and enthuse:

[slideshare id=602499&doc=080917moodleinhetvo-1221644014077576-8&w=425]

Next time I will try and record my audio so that the slides will make slightly more sense.