Tag: imoot

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.

The Future of...
The Future of...

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:

  1. Drupal’s tagline is “Community Plumbing”. I believe Moodle’s could be “Learning Plumbing”.
  2. 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!

Moodle and Multimedia, a Ned-Moove Seminar + iMoot 2010

In April 2007 I was one of the founders of the Dutch speaking Moodle user group, Ned-Moove. When we started nearly three years ago it was still necessary to give Moodle “a face”. Now Moodle has become ubiquitous and the mission of the user group is slowly changing: we now mainly organise meeting trying to bring Moodlers together.

Next Wednesday, the 27th of January, Ned-Moove will have its yearly “jaarvergadering” at Stoas in Wageningen, NL. We will choose new board members, get commitment for our plans for 2010 and deal with our 2009 finances. Right after the jaarvergadering is our first seminar of the year: Moodle and multimedia. There are three excellent speakers (they will speak in Dutch):

All the practical information about the meeting and the seminar can be found here. Registration is free and is done over here.

iMoot 2010
iMoot 2010

On another note: iMoot 2010 is promising to be an exciting Moodle related event. It is the first full-fledged virtual Moodle conference. It runs from February 4-7, spanning 31 timezones and 210 countries. Registration is relatively cheap (45 Australian dollars). The program has a lot of interesting sessions.

I will be presenting too. My presentation is titled “The Future of Moodle and How Not to Stop It“. Recently there has been a lot of discussion on the death of the VLE. I will try to recap the discussion and see how this reflects on Moodle (2.0). I do hope to meet you there!