Moodle Moot: Keynote from Martin Dougiamas

Keynote from Martin Dougiamas

Tuesday morning

Martin Dougiamas is the creator of Moodle and delivered the keynote address to the conference this morning.  Two of the more interesting things I would like to share are his assessment of how well Moodle is being used pedagogically, and also what is new in version 2.0.

Pedagogy in Moodle

So how are pedagogical practices progressing in Moodle?  Martin doesn't think that it has progressed far enough.  Here is how he lays out the typical progression of how people teach in Moodle:

1. Put up the handouts (Resource, SCORM)
2. Have a passive forum - "OK, go talk now"
3. Using Quizzes and Assignments
4. Use wiki, glossary, database - here you are constructing things with your fellow students
5. Use the Forum seriously and actively - having more directed discussions
6. Combine the activities into sequences - you have to think about the student's learning journey
7. Think deeper about learning activities - i.e. have students create new discussions and respond to others
8. Use the Survey module to study/reflect
9. Use peer-review modules like Workshop - get students to be teachers with everyone grading each others, and the teacher can grade the grading
10. Sharing ideas, active research, self-study

According to Martin most courses stay in the first couple of steps.

Directions for Moodle

1.9

• Consolidation
• attention to detail throughout
• consistency throughout
• simplify the interface
• tidy up the code
• better help documentation
• fix known bugs
• Complete gradebook rewrite
• Outcomes (competencies) as part of grading
• Groupings
• Performance improvements (twice as fast as 1.8)
• Tags
• Notes
• Fancier themes
• Bug fixes

2.0

• Improved internal file handling
• import: support for external repositories (Merlot, Google Docs, Facebook, Flickr, and lots of others, plus you can roll your own)
• export: support for e-portfolios (Mahara, MyStuff)
• Moodle will not be a portfolio system - they will only push out to other systems
• also export to HTML, PDF, XML
• Community hubs - connect to other Moodle servers/repositories
• Conditional activities (think selective release from Vista)
• Progress tracking
• Web services API
• New Modules: Feedback, wiki (new wiki?) and probably others
• Secure feeds (RSS) and flows
• Blog comments, external blog support (grab blog postings with specific tags)
• Messaging improvements (redirect where messages are sent - third party services, popups)
• Improved security/performance
• Improved usability/interface

In Closing

Martin closed with a singe question:

Q. What is the single most powerful technique for online education?

A. getting students to ask questions

Ain't it the truth!

Greg


Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 10 2008, 01:41:37 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

Moodle Moot: Building Courses in Moodle

Building Courses in Moodle

Monday morning

This turned into more of a "here's what's new in 1.9" and lots of very specific questions about more advanced settings.  Here are the highlights...

Groupings

Moodle Docs on Groupings

In Moodle 1.9 onwards, groups may be organised into groupings. Activities and resources may then be assigned to particular groupings.

This is useful if you want to make different activities for different groups.  The traditional groups tool will create spaces for different groups that all contain the same activity.  For example, the groups tool will create separate groups all with the same assignment.  Groupings will let you create different assignments for each grouping.

Grading Discussions

There are new ways to calculate the grade from the ratings for each discussion - addative, average, maximum, minimum, counting.

Gradebook

* You can create custom columns (make your own column)
* Add feedback to the gradebook
* Outcomes reports (need to do some more research on this)
* Create custom calcuated columns
* There's a lot more to look at here, so there will be more to come...

Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 09 2008, 02:08:14 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Blogging from the Moodle Moot

I am attending the Moodle Moot this week in San Francisco, a gathering of people interested in using Moodle.  We are located in downtown SanFrancisco, with a view of the Transamerica building, and mere 3 blocks from where the great Steve will come down from the mountain and reveal the holy handset 2.0. 

I am going to blog about what I learn about Moodle, so stay tuned...


Greg
Posted by gdkraus ( Jun 09 2008, 11:31:14 AM EDT ) Permalink

Digital Ethnography

I've been looking for a good way to help faculty understand where their students are coming from as they take courses. I think Michael Wesch at Kansas State has found a way. Check out these YouTube videos.

A Vision of Students Today

And...he's found a way to describe how the culture, creation, and transfer of information is changing because of the digital technologies.

The Machine is Us/ing Us
Information R/evolution

Brilliant stuff. Please share.

Kim R.
Posted by kmwilli3 ( Feb 21 2008, 10:15:25 AM EST ) Permalink Comments [1]

New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology

I found the following article from the NYT:
New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology

I can understand the author's sentiments 100%. But, as the last paragraph would suggest, it's up to teachers to hold students accountable, right?  Here's some notable quotes:

"Perhaps there's a nicer way to put it. The baby boomers seem to see technology as information and communication, said Prof. Michael Bugeja, director of the journalism school at Iowa State University and the author of "Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age." Their offspring and the emerging generation seem to see the same devices as entertainment and socializing."

"I'm so tired of that excuse, said Professor Bugeja, may he live a long and fruitful life. The idea that subject matter is boring is truly relative. Boring as opposed to what? Buying shoes on eBay? The fact is, we?re not here to entertain. We're here to stimulate the life of the mind."

Posted by cdmorris ( Nov 09 2007, 12:06:13 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Report Documenting Growth in Online Learning

The SLOAN Foundation recently released its fifth report on the growth in online learning - Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning

There's a nice summary page at the link above as well as a full report you can download.

A few highlights:

The 9.7 percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 1.5 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.

Nearly twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2006.

A large majority (69 percent) of academic leaders believe that student demand for online learning is still growing.

Faculty acceptance of online instruction remains a key issue.  Those institutions most engaged in online do not believe it is a concern for their own campus, but do see it as a barrier to more wide-spread adoption of online education.

Higher costs for online development and delivery are seen as barriers among those who are planning online offerings, but not among those who have online offerings.

Posted by klducket ( Nov 05 2007, 06:29:32 PM EST ) Permalink

Facebook in instruction?

Should we use Facebook in instruction at NC State? Below are two articles about Facebook and learning environments.

Facing the Facebook. By: Bugeja, Michael J..
Chronicle of Higher Education, v52 n21 pC1-C4 Jan 2006. (EJ756266)

I'll See You on "Facebook": The Effects of Computer-Mediated Teacher Self-Disclosure on Student Motivation, Affective Learning, and Classroom Climate . By: Mazer, Joseph P.; Murphy, Richard E.; Simonds, Cheri J..
Communication Education, v56 n1 p1-17 Jan 2007. (EJ753327)

Shall we discuss?

Kim R.
Posted by kmwilli3 ( Nov 01 2007, 01:45:49 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Class Website Templates

This will be a short posting, I just wanted to let the NC State community know that there are some new CSS templates that DELTA (Tim Wright) has made.  You can find them here, DELTA Templates.  The new ones are at the bottom of the page and they mirror that of the new NCSU main page.

Here's a thumbnail of the red one:





Posted by cdmorris ( Sep 27 2007, 10:15:28 AM EDT ) Permalink

Speak your mind about Vista

DELTA has recently announced the dates of two forums that will be held this fall, for members of the NCSU communiy to discuss Blackboard Vista and other Learning Management Systems (LMS). The announcement states:

Posted by swatkins ( Sep 06 2007, 09:51:09 AM EDT ) Permalink

Interactive white board

One of the new tools available in the Libraries' Learning Commons is an interactive white board -- the Polyvision Walk-and-Talk. Use your laptop (or borrow a Libraries laptop) to project files or webpages onto the large, wall-mounted white board screen. Then use your finger or a stylus to annotate and navigate the displayed content on screen. All of your annotated work can be quickly saved as image files (jpeg, png, etc.) to your laptop or flash drive for later reference, too.

The Walk-and-Talk is mounted in the Presentation Practice Room, which seats 14 and can be reserved online and used for group presentation rehearsals and delivery by any NCSU faculty, staff, or student. Stop by the Learning Commons service desk and ask try out this new tool.

Posted by jmwill16 ( Aug 15 2007, 02:21:10 PM EDT ) Permalink

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

The folks at Common Craft have done it again! Here's a cool, short video that explains what Social Bookmarking is with examples from Del.icio.us.

I find the Common Craft "X in Plain English" series to be really effective at explaining what certain technologies are with a minimum of technology used to create the learning materials. The Common Craft folks emphasize the strength of "designing with constraints."  As they claim, "You might think that having constraints is limiting, but I think the opposite. Constraints are liberating. By narrowing the scope of possibilities down to only a few ways to present ideas, we can eliminate needless decision making and complexity." Here's a link to their All About Constraints manifesto.


Those seem like wise words when considering packaging any learning content on the Web.


Posted by klducket ( Aug 13 2007, 01:41:52 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Learning modules length

I haven't even tried to read War and Peace because looks more like a heavy-duty door stop than a book. I'm sure it's a great book. I wonder how many other people like myself have never picked it up because of its length...and what we're all missing out on.

Most distance education courses use learning modules as a way to organize the mass of information and activities that compose a course into manageable sections. To a certain extent, this keeps both students and faculty from experiencing War and Peace syndrome (yes, I just made that up). After all, if a student dreads their classwork because it's overwhelming, their likelihood of truly engaging in it can certainly decrease.

Learning modules are an effective way of turning an epic novel of a course into a serial publication. But how long should those individual units be to cull the most student engagement and information retention? A review of this article:

Pomales-Garcia, C. and Yili Liu. (2006). Web-Based Idstance Learning Technology: The Impacts of Web Module Length and Format. The American Journal of Distance Education, 20(3), 163-179.

provided some interesting insights. According to Pomales-Garcia and Liu, module length has little, if anything, to do with performance--what it impacts is student perception of difficulty.

The researchers' article also demonstrated the a number of other things about module length and content presentation, such as:

• Shorter modules are perceived as less difficult than longer modules
• Modules that contain video are perceived as less difficult than ones including only audio or text
• Shorter modules and modules that include videos are considered more visually attractive and exciting.
• Perception of module length is affected by length of the module, not the presence of video, audio, or text
• No performance differences based on module length, but longer modules were considered less aesthetic and attractive
• Video and audio modules were perceived to last longer than their length. Text modules were not.
• Quitting, pausing, or completing a Web module in one session has more to do with module length than format.
• For long modules, text modules are perceived shorter than video/audio modules of the same content.
• The more media in a module, the greater the student  satisfaction with it

Interesting stuff...
Posted by kmwilli3 ( Aug 10 2007, 11:02:06 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Wired on Twitter and Second Life

There have been a couple of articles in Wired recently that I have found interesting, so I thought I would share the links with you guys.

The first is an analysis of Twitter that describes the site as creating a "social sixth sense" among friends who use it. I had played around a little with Twitter, but I hadn't been able to figure out its usefulness. This article helped me make some sense of it.

The second article looks at an interesting contradiction present in Second Life: on the one hand, companies (and universities) are pouring resources into building virtual environments there, but on the other hand, there's hardly ever anyone present in the world. I found some of the technical limitations attributed to Second Life that the article describes to be noteworthy. The Metaverse this ain't. :)


Posted by swatkins ( Aug 08 2007, 01:47:00 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

3D NC State

According to Mike Cuales, Senior Multimedia Specialist with DELTA:

During the summer, DELTA sponsored a student team to build a virtual model of the NCSU Main Campus using Google SketchUp as part of the "Build Your Campus in 3D Competition."  The 100+ buildings will be deployed on Google's 3D Warehouse and can be viewed in Google Earth. The students and staff will be presenting their work next Thursday, August 2, at 3:00 PM in the new RENCI/NCSU visualization facility in Partners I, suite 1500, on Centennial Campus.  For more information on our virtual environment initiatives, visit our 3D-OLE research page.

There is a cool video that previews what the main campus model looks like through quick fly-bys, check it out!


Posted by cdmorris ( Jul 30 2007, 09:38:03 AM EDT ) Permalink

How to navigate through the "River of News"

We've talked about RSS feeds on this blog in the past and Google Reader too.  The following video appeared on a Google company blog and is an interview with a guy who uses Google Reader to get through 600+ feeds efficiently.  What is valuable to me is that it's one experienced blog viewer's perspective on how to read a feed reader (Google Reader).  He points out a few ways to decide whether or not to read something such as looking at the author, if there are pictures, how new the content is... and so on.  He also talks about keystrokes, something I'll try out myself I suppose. 

The video itself is not of the greatest quality and certainly could be shorter, but I think you might find it interesting... at least, you know, for the first few minutes, you know.


Posted by cdmorris ( Jul 26 2007, 05:03:08 PM EDT ) Permalink