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):

Isabelle Langeveld reviews the Packt book “Moodle 1.9 Multimedia“. I have reviewed some Moodle Packt books before and am curious to hear what she thought about this one.
Wytze Koopal will talk about multimedia repositories. Knowing him, I am sure he will touch on open content and the many places on the Internet that have good educational content available.
Finally Randy Vermaas, consultant at Stoas, will talk about how Moodle 2.0 will help you with integrating multimedia into your course.

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

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!

The State of Dutch Speaking Moodle 2009-2010

Two years ago I started writing up a little “State of Dutch Speaking Moodle”. You can find the previous versions here:

This year I am pressed for time so all I have done is compiled the graphs (I haven’t looked at any of the sites this year).

Registered Moodle Sites
In 2009 Moodle.org has implemented some automatic culling of inactive registered websites. This has meant that registered sites for most countries have gone down in 2009. Obviously this does not mean that Moodle is less used (see the Moodle Stats page for proof of that). The way usage is measured will hopefully stay the same so that comparisons between different years will start to make sense again. Please don’t forget that there are many Moodle sites in operation that have not registered (so if you are a journalist don’t misunderstand this and misquote me).

Registered Moodle Sites

Ned-Moove Members
Our Dutch Speaking Moodle Users Group, Ned-Moove, has grown again in the last year. I can’t help but notice that all the growth is in the Dutch memberships. I realise that this might be due to a cultural difference (Dutch people seem to love organising themselves formally), but it is still a pity.

Ned-Moove Members

Ned-Moove is looking for new board members. So if you are interested (especially if you are from Belgium) please let me know before January 27th! If you would like to become a member of Ned-Moove you can register here.

Ned-Moove Sponsors
Ned-Moove is always looking for sponsors. Their financial contributions make it a lot easier for us to organise our seminars and Moodlemoots. In 2009 we found three new large sponsors and four new small sponsors.

Ned-Moove Small Sponsors Ned-Moove Large Sponsors

Please register here if your organisation is interested in becoming a sponsor.

Conclusion
I have a feeling that 2009 was really a breakthrough year for Moodle worldwide. For example, it became the market leader in the LMS category for eLearning Guild members. In the Netherlands something similar has happened. Without the quantitive data to back it up, I am sure that Moodle is the number one LMS in the Dutch corporate world: you find it everywhere.

There is one market where the Dutch are way behind in Moodle adoption: the tertiary education market. This market was shored up by Blackboard about 5 years ago. I am still waiting for the first Dutch university or college that will make the switch. Maybe 2010 could be the year for that?

An Open Office spreadsheet file with the data that I used to create the graphs is available here.

Invitation: Ned-Moove Organises a Moodle Meetup

Nederlandstalige Moodle Vereniging — Ned-Moove

On Wednesday, the 25th of November, Ned-Moove organises another Moodle Meetup. A selection of service providers in the open source educational technology space will be presenting their products.

The programme starts at 15:30 and finishes at 18:30. Topics include Edurep, Teleblik, Zimbra, Wintoets, and Mahara (and the presentations will be in Dutch).

The location is the Open Schoolgemeenschap Bijlmer on Gulden Kruis 5, 1103 BE in Amsterdam. Attendance (and parking!) is free, although we do require a registration: click here to register.

I do hope to see you there!

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 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.