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!