This year the Online Educa will be in Berlin from 3-5 December. Pieter van der Hijden made a suggestion to me to create a brochure with all Moodle related activities at the Online Educa.
There are two Moodle sessions on Friday titled: Make Mine a Moodle! (part 1 and part 2). The first part will focus on a couple of global implementations (including Shell‘s) and the second part will have more audience participation.
If you are reading this and are planning to go to Berlin, please leave your name in the comments. It would be great to meet up.
Finally a word about the layout of the brochure. This is called a Pocketmod. It is an easy way to create a small booklet with 8 pages. Please watch the video to see how you have to fold the brochure (alternative instructions):
I really like these small booklets and use them often when I travel for my flight, rental car and hotel details. A little while ago I wrote a small bash script that uses Imagemagick to create a pocketmod PDF from an eight page PDF file. You can view and download the script at this textsnip page.
Novell will launch their new Moodle based LMS this November 4th. In a session called “In the Moodle: How Novell Chose an Open Source LMS” they outlined the process of choosing an LMS that could fulfil their needs. When they needed a new LMS, they first listed their requirements and then used a cross-functional team to look at 9 proprietary and open source LMS’s (Sakai and Ilias).
They will use the LMS internally (for training their employees) and externally (for their partners) and their learning materials are mostly SCORM based. They chose Moodle because it fit their needs the best and because it is pliable. They were able to skin it completely into Novell’s brand and use Moodlerooms (a US based Moodle partner) to make some minor code changes and host Moodle for them.
What surprised me is how narrowly Novell defines training. It is a strict content -> participant relation. They currently have no specific plans on using the rich Moodle functionality that will allow participants/students to be in contact with each other. I realise that it is very hard to design corporate self-paced online training which still maximises the opportunities for participants to collaborate and create, but shouldn’t our leading businesses also lead in this quest? Who knows examples of big multinational companies using tools like Moodle for truly interactive online training.
I noticed that Moodle is becoming more and more pervasive in the corporate world. In the sessions today I learnt that Google uses Moodle for (some) of their internal training needs and so does the CIA.
I have a problem with locked-down hardware. It is not that I don’t like Apple’s products (the iPod Touch is a wonderful piece of hardware), I just don’t like the way Apple’s products treat their customers. I had to help somebody who’s Windows laptop had died. She bought a new Apple laptop and wanted to move her music from her iPod to her new laptop: impossible! It took Linux as an intermediary to get it done.
That is why I love the concept of open hardware. I personally own a Neuros OSD (great when you are on a holiday and want to watch your own videos on the hotel TV) and, since a couple of months, a Chumby.
The Chumby is a computer the size of a coffee mug and made of leather. It has a touch screen, an accelerometer, a microphone, stereo speakers, two USB ports, a WIFI connection and a nice soft button on the top.
So what can it do? I see it as having a couple of distinct functions. It is:
An excellent alarm clock with an easy interface. You can set multiple alarms and decide whether you want to wake up with music or a tone. You can even set the length of your snooze.
A relatively decent speaker set for your iPod.
An Internet radio player. It is full of Shoutcast and other streams.
A digital picture frame for photos that live on the Internet (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Picasa). It can display photos from a particular user, but also from a particular tag.
An RSS reader.
And finally, an Internet enabled device for any kind of content.
The last point is the important one. You can load your Chumby with widgets. There are hundreds of widgets available. You use a web-based interface to add these widgets into channels. Then you set your Chumby to watch a certain channel.
I have created this virtual Chumby (please click the link, it opens in a new window!) to give you an idea of what these widgets look like. This chumby shows a particular channel which I created for this blog post and has a couple of example widgets. Each widget will be shown for about 20-45 seconds. It starts with some random Flickr images showing my favourite tag: decay. You can interact with the screen to move to the next or the previous tag. Next up is Twistori, this displays recent tweets with the word “believe” in it. If you prefer “love”, “hate”, “think”, “feel” or “wish” then you can click on those words to switch to them. The Chumby will then display recent top news stories from Google news. Next this blog using Chumby’s RSS reader (you might see this blog entry). It finishes off with the weather in Amsterdam (including a forecast), a web cam looking at Abbey Road (do you see people trying to imitate the famous Beatles cover?), some video’s from the excellent videojug and the classic blue ball machine animation.
As you can see the Chumby mostly pulls content in. My colleague Job Bilsen had the interesting idea of using it as a device for pushing content to people. He had visions of companies putting Chumbies on the desks of their employees and sending them important updates about things like compliance, RSI, internal news, etc. I can already see a plug-in for a VLE like Moodle. Imagine doing your homework on your laptop with your Chumby on your desk displaying updates from your courses and playing your favourite Last.fm channel (they are working on a Last.fm widget)!
The best thing about the Chumby: the specifications are completely open. I had to get an European adapter for it and they have the precise information about the power supply listed on their website. You are even encouraged to hack into it! Use it as a web server or log into over ssh? No problem.
Where do you get one? Currently the Chumby is only available in the US. They are in the process of complying to all the European rules and regulations so it shouldn’t take much longer before you can buy one over here as well. Want one now? Ebay is your friend!
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:
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:
