Ton’s profiel op de Moodle-site van het Surinaamse Instituut voor de Opleiding van Leerkrachten zegt al genoeg:

“Ton Wolf is docent taalbeheersing bij de opleiding van leraren Nederlands en lid van de directie van het IOL. Onderwijsvernieuwing kan hem niet snel genoeg gaan. Leren is het leukste wat er is, maar veel onderwijs is bijna het tegenovergestelde.”

Ton was een van de oprichters van ECOIS, het Expertisecentrum Onderwijs & ICT Suriname. Toen het voor Ned-Moove toch wat lastig bleek om eigen activiteiten in Suriname op te zetten, bood Ton aan om ECOIS voortaan voor de (aspirant) Moodle gebruikers in Suriname te laten zorgen.

De afgelopen drie jaar streed Ton tegen huidkanker. De afgelopen drie jaar heeft hij nog een hoop fantastische dingen kunnen doen.

Lucenda Plet van ECOIS zal hem opvolgen als Ned-Moove contactpersoon in Suriname.

Op 26 mei jl. vond in Bilthoven de Nederlandse MoodleMoot (#mootnl10) plaats. Dat Moodle ook in Nederland nog steeds zeer populair is, werd wel bevestigd door de ruim 60 deelnemers aan dit seminar.

Keynote: Tomaz Lasic, Onderzoeker Onderwijs Moodle HQ

Na een welkomstwoord van Arnout Vree namens het bestuur van de Ned-Moove, was het woord aan de Keynote speaker: Tomaz Lasic. Tomaz werkt als Onderzoeker Onderwijs op het Moodle hoofdkwartier in Perth, West Australië en vormt in feite de interface tussen Moodle gebruikers en het Moodle kern-ontwikkelteam. Met een aardappel als metafoor voor Moodle legde Tomaz uit dat een Moodle op vele manieren gebruikt kan worden, maar dat je je daarbij af moet vragen of het een gewenst of zinvol gebruik is en zo ja hoe je mensen zover krijgt om hun gebaande paden te verlaten om daadwerkelijk Moodle op die manier te gaan gebruiken. Tomaz refereerde verder nog aan het tpack-model. Een interessant model dat een handvat biedt aan het verantwoord integreren van technologie binnen een onderwijssetting. Een extra dimensie vormde de mogelijkheid voor alle deelnemers om direct via sms of twitter zelf vragen te stellen aan Tomaz.

Hans de Zwart leidde vervolgens een plenaire discussie aan de hand van een aantal stellingen. Met dezelfde tool die gebruikt werd om vragen te stellen aan Tomaz, konden de deelnemers nu laten weten (per sms of Twitter) of zij het eens dan wel oneens waren met bepaalde stellingen. Er volgde interessante discussies over bijvoorbeeld het nut van de Community Hub. Slechts 40% van de deelnemers verwacht dat deze (Moodle 2.0) faciliteit, gericht op het delen van Moodle cursussen, in Nederland een succes wordt. Ruim 70% denkt dat docenten in Nederland bang zijn om beoordeeld te worden, wellicht ligt deze verwachting ten grondslag aan het beperkte enthousiasme met betrekking tot de Communtiy Hub.

De tweede helft van de middag bestond uit vier parallel sesies, iedere parallel sessie was opgebouwd uit vier presentaties, behorend tot één van de vier thema’s; Moodle strategisch, Moodle 2.0, Moodle in de non-profit, of No-Moodle.

Moodle strategisch

Binnen dit thema legde Jacco van Gelder (StreamServe Learning) hoe StreamServe Learning Moodle inzet om vernieuwende kennis aan te kunnen bieden. Bianca van Dragt (Dienst Landelijk gebied) lichtte toe hoe Moodle is ingezet om security awareness bij een overheidsorganisatie te creëren. Bob Roos (Feedback Training & Consulting) gaf zijn visie op effectief en succesvol veranderen in combinatie met digitaal leren.

Moodle 2.0

In dit thema verzorgde Arnout Vree (Avetica) een workshop over de mogelijkheden van Moodle 2.0 in relatie tot Onderwijs 2.0. Leo de Penning (TNO) heeft een Moodle-module ontwikkeld voor Scorm compliant toetsing en training in simulatoren. Leo besprak een tweetal toepassingen van deze module; het trainen van F16 vliegers en het toetsen van rijvaardigheid in rijsimulatoren. Bas Brands (Stoas Learning) ging in op wat Moodle 2.0 betekent voor beheerders, ontwikkelaars en grafisch vormgevers.

Janneke Louwerse (Stanislascollege) blikte terug op de implementatie van Moodle en keek alvast vooruit naar Moodle 2.0.

Moodle in de non-profit

Harriet Kuipers (Stichting taal voor Afrika) legde uit hoe een e-Learning programma (binnen het curriculum in Ghana) met als doel, audiologen meer informatie te verschaffen, tot stand is gekomen. Luuk Terbeek (Bright Alley) ging aan de hand van de praktijkcase ‘Moodle in Nepal’ in op de rol die Moodle binnen OLPC/OLE kan spelen. Hans-Jaap Moes (e-Learning for kids) besprak wat Moodle voor e-Learning for kids kan betekenen. Michel Wesseling (International Institute for Social Studie) wees erop dat Moodle, als open source lms, een belangrijke bijdrage kan spelen voor ontwikkelingssamenwerking.

No Moodle

Jeroen van Dalsem (ColdTrick IT Solutions) behandelde Elgg een open source tool die het mogelijk maakt je eigen sociaal netwerk te creëren. Kaj Rietberg (Internet in school) liet zien hoe de open source tool WordPress gebruikt kan worden als leertool. Roy Scholten besprak de belangrijkste functionaliteiten van de nieuwste versie (versie 7) van het open source content management systeem Drupal.

Terugblik vanuit het Ned-Moove bestuur

Het Ned-Moove bestuur blikt tevreden, mede door de vele positieve reacties van de deelnemers, terug op het seminar en wil ook namens deze weg alle sprekers nogmaals hartelijk danken voor hun inzet. Op korte termijn zullen op deze website presentaties verschijnen van de sprekers (enkelen zijn inmiddels al op deze site geplaatst). Met dank aan Marcel de Leeuwe vind je hier de foto’s van het seminar.

Learning Technologies

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the 2010 Learning Technologies Exhibition in London. In many ways this event is very similar to the Online Educa in Berlin (e.g. most Berlin exhibitors were in London too and the conferences shared a keynote speaker). There are two main differences: Learning Technologies seems to draw a slightly less international crowd and it focuses more on the world of corporate learning. In this post I want to capture the people I met and the technologies that I looked at. What caught my eye?

Mobile Learning, Social Media and Serious Gaming
Those were the three buzz words that most exhibitors thought would sell their services best. I made it a point to enquire with any exhibitor who used any of these terms in their marketing and found out that most of these claims were very hollow. For example, I talked to a developer of mobile applications who told me they would gladly convert all my existing e-learning content into a mobile format (why would I want to take something that does not take advantage of its medium and move it over to a medium where it fits even less well?). Another one on the ridiculous side of the effectiveness scale was the vendor that showed me a screenshot of an internal social networking site where people could do a daily crossword. Honestly? Where is the first vendor that can show me a scalable mobile learning event/application that can only work because it is delivered through a mobile Internet enabled, location aware phone with a camera? The medium is the message right?

Technology Companies versus Content Development Companies
Luckily there were some exceptions to the rule. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the knowledgable people of Caspian Learning. They have developed a serious gaming platform (Thinking Worlds) which utilises Adobe Shockwave to deliver single user 3D virtual worlds in the web browser of the participant. I have been a participant in an excellent course that used their technology and was very curious to see what the authoring environment would look like. After a solid demo I came away very impressed. The way that scenarios can be created and managed looks wonderful. I believe it is fair to say that Caspian’s technology is good enough to enable a new way of designing learning events. The ball is now in the court of learning designers (I like that better than “content developers”), they have to explore this new technology and have to learn a whole new set of skills. Authoring is easy, but how do you design effective scenarios? The field is very immature in this respect. Here is a demonstration video of a game made with their engine:

Caspian’s business model is interesting too. They consider themselves a technology company foremost, and not a content development company. Their business development efforts are spent on finding content partners. They already have a deal in place with IBM and I wouldn’t be surprised if companies like Accenture, Tata and NIIT will follow soon. This is the perfect way to make your business scale and it will allow you to focus on developing your technology (managing technical people like programmers is fundamentally different from managing learning consultants).

In my quick chat with Gavin Cooney from Learnosity I advised him to pursue a similar strategy: the core competences of his company are their technical skills (I call them “Asterisk plumbers”) and their ability to find strategic partnerships (not that he needs any advice, I am sure his business development skills far outshine mine!).

Some companies seem to sit on the fence when it comes to being a technology or a content development company. LearningGuide Solutions has an Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) and develops content for it. I believe that EPSSs could be a very efficient way of getting people up to the task with a piece of software. The demo of their product left me underwhelmed.  They have been on the market for quite a while now, but their LearningGuide does not seem to have evolved past a an improved version of an online help system. The granularity of the context sensitivity was disappointing, the authoring has no version control and there are no social features. Wouldn’t it be great if people could write their own tips with the guides? How come LearningGuide has not kept up and emulated some of the functionality that platforms like Get Satisfaction have?

Learning as a Managed Service
I was interested to know whether any vendors would be able to deliver a large part of the learning function (at least the technology and support for the technology) as a managed service. I talked to two vendors:

I asked the people from Learn.com why they keep winning the reader’s choice for “Best Enterprise Learning Management System” category of Elearning! magazine (“Is it because all your customers get a free subscription to the mag?” wasn’t really appreciated). The first answer came from the sales guy: “Because we guarantee Return On Investment”. I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean, but they seem to think it is relevant (check out the relentless Flash-based ROI counter on their site). Luckily the next guy had a more sensible answer: Learn.com has all of their customers on the same code base and has a rapid development process for this code. This means they are able to deliver new functionality and fixes faster than corporations would be able to do for themselves. According to them they have the authentication problem solved and are able to integrate with HR systems like SAP through a mature web-services based architecture. They also had really smart answers to my questions about reporting. One thing I appreciated was their support for all web browsers: it is not often that somebody can promise me support for IE, Opera, Firefox and Safari without blinking. I always take that as a sign that technicians might be in charge instead of marketeers.

Another company that I checked out was the Edvantage group. This UK based business has signed a couple of large contracts recently. They deliver a completely integrated content development and delivery street through a Software as a Service solution. In that sense they are similar to Learn.com.

I would be interested to hear from anybody who has some real world experience with either of these companies.

Moodle Everywhere?
Moodle has become ubiquitous. It seemed that about one in four stands at the exhibition had something to say about Moodle. You can see that this is very market driven (open source finally has become cool), as a lot of the exhibitors had no idea what they were talking about.

My personal favourite was somebody from Saffron Interactive whom I asked about their social networking offerings. Their whole stand was adorned with logos from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I was wondering if they maybe had thought of a smart way to integrate these services into learning offerings. She showed me a couple of screenshots of something that looked a bit like Ning and told me they created social communities for their clients. She then proceeded to tell me that the platform they used for this was Moodle and that an implementation of Moodle in general only takes three(!) days. I love Moodle, but I would never use it to create a social community and to make Moodle look like her screenshots takes a lot more than three days. I had to move on after that.

A very impressive Moodle offering came from aardpress. They have invested a lot of their programming talent (months and months of work) into creating Moomis, a set of tools that fills some of Moodle’s gaps for the corporate learning world. Unlike the corporate Moodle solutions that I have seen so far (e.g. ELIS), Moomis is not a set of successful open source projects that are integrated into Moodle. Instead, all functionality is created inside Moodle itself, using Moodle’s libraries and its add-on architecture. This had advantages on the usability side, but could have disadvantages on the side of functionality (i.e. it is hard to write a very rich tool from scratch). aardpress (they don’t seem to want to capitalise their name) is hard at work getting Moomis ready for Moodle 2.0. I hope they are successful in turning this into a sustainable project and maybe even collaborate a bit more with Moodle HQ in developing this type of functionality.

In the conference part of Learning Technologies there was a small meeting of corporate Moodle users that I crashed into in its last 15 minutes. I am glad I did, because I met Mark Berthelemy there, who I had only seen on Moodle.org before.

Monkeys with typewriters

Wisdom Architects
Another meeting I thoroughly enjoyed was my talk with Lawrence O’Connor from Wisdom Architects. We chatted about implementing learning technology in very large organisations, discussed theories of memory and the Mind Palace 3D iPhone app he is developing. This app will help people memorise better using the time-tested technique of building a memory palace. I find it fascinating how we are both using technology to outsource our memory (my phone keeps all my to-do tasks, phone numbers, etc.) and to help us get a better memory. I am wondering whether we will see more study tools like this app and like eFaqt in the near future.

Lawrence very kindly gave me a copy of Jemima Gibbons‘ Monkeys with typewriters. This book about social media at work is published by Triarchy Press which has a lot of other interesting titles. I really liked Gibbons’ unconventional approach: she went out and interviewed about fifty people that have either changed the face of social media or have run succesful social media projects in companies. The book is divided into six chapters titled: Co-creation, Passion, Learning, Openness, Listening and Generosity. Each chapter starts with a myth and a reality (e.g. Myth: Social networking is a time waster, Reality: Building connections is vital to business). My copy is now full of dog-ears. A couple of the concepts/ideas that I want to explore further:

Here is an O’Reilly quote:

You design applications that get better the more people use them, then the applications that work get the most user data. The winners are those that harvest collective intelligence: Amazon, Google… Google is actually harvesting the intelligence of all users. [...]
One of the things that I suggest to any company is what data assets do you own and how can you build new fresh data services against that data? I think a lot of traditional businesses have enormous data assets, they just need a slightly different mindset.

Then there is IBM’s idea of reverse mentoring programmes, where younger employees teach the older staff about social technologies. And a great quote from Clay Shirky:

All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, they rely on the managing of information.

Gibbons formulates an argument that I use often when I try to get people to be more transparent about what they are doing:

Today’s smart businesses are not so much about creating an owning knowledge as about applying and learning from it. If [a company's] blog posts and research papers are freely available, to be used , re-mixed, mashed up and built upon, that’s fine: the core competence of [the company] lies in the minds and knowhow of its consultants.

The book ends with “30 ways to get social”: great practical advice.

Other Meetups
Learning Technologies really does seem to be the place where all the British e-Learning people come together. It was chance for me to meet a lot of people that I had only met virtually before. I had a good chat with David Wilson from Elearnity, talking about innovation processes and about his research network. I met some of the people from Brand Learning and The Chartered Institute of Marketing with whom I have been working in the last couple of months on a marketing curriculum. I got to shake Rob Hubbard‘s hand and talk to him about his excellent Rapid eLearning Development Course. The only appointment I missed was the one with Jane Hart, maybe next time!

Bersin Executive Roundtable
The day after the event I joined Josh Bersin, Allan Keetch, Donald H. Taylor, Barry Davis, Ghassan Mirdad and Christina Tsirimokou for a corporate roundtable organised by Bersin & Associates. This was a diverse group of people with very different problems, so occasionally it was hard to find some common ground.

We did manage to have a good discussion about integrating talent management and learning. Doing this from a system’s perspective seems to be the holy grail for many organisations. Bersin thought the overlap between these two things is not as profound as most people think it might be. There really isn’t that much integration to do. On the other hand he has seen many organisations crumble under the weight of their completely systemised and integrated competence management systems.

Allan Keetch noted how good talent management systems are important and useful when an organisation is restructuring. I agreed partially with him. We all know that nowadays it is not only what you know, but also who you know that is important. There are barely any talent management systems that take this into account. My employer just went through a restructuring exercise and I am quite sure that my hiring manager had a good overview of my formalised competencies (and those of my competitors for the job), but had no insight into the network that I would bring into the job. As organisational network analysis (ONA) will mature I imagine we will see more and more tools that creates these social graphs automatically based on existing communication and collaboration patterns. (Remember O’Reilly’s quote, earlier in this post?).

Josh Bersin had keynoted on informal learning and it was therefore fitting to have Barry Davis at the table. He works for Creganna Tactx Medical and he believes that learning is working (or is it the other way around?) and that everybody in his company should be a trainer. His organisation is just the right size for his ideas to have a lot of impact. For example, he has managed to “formalise” (“organise” or “facilitate” would probably be better here) the 70-20-10 rule of Charles Jennings.

Finally
I am not the only who has written about Learning Technologies. Jane Hart had some good comments (with a post by Jay Cross in her wake) and Mark Berthemely wrote an extensive post which is very worthwhile to read.

Filed under: Learning, Moodle

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques

Just over a year ago I reviewed four Moodle books published by Packt Publishing. Since then, a lot of new Moodle titles have been added to their catalogue. Richard Dias, Marketing Research Executive at Packt, has kindly sent me a copy of one of these new titles for review: Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques by William Rice and Susan Smith Nash, first published in January 2010.

William Rice has already published a couple of books with Packt. This book seems to be an effort by Susan Smith Nash to  build on an earlier version of the book by Rice. She adds some learning theory and instructional design essentials to the earlier text.

The fact that this is an update of a much older book, doesn’t work very well. Let me share some examples of where it goes wrong:

• Chapter 2 used to be called “Forum Solutions”, now it has been retitled to “Instructional Material”. This is weird: Moodle’s core functionality and strongest pedagogical tool is first introduced as a way to clearly display course information and structure. Then on page 25 there is a paragraph titled “Creating a Separate Group for Each Student”. The context from the earlier book (you might want to do this to create private conversations with students) is omitted, making it a confusing set of pages.
• Chapter 4 has a section that explains how you can exclude quiz grades from a particular quiz in the grade book. The screenshots and explanations are taken from an earlier version of Moodle and do not relate to Moodle 1.9. Moodle 1.9 has a completely different grade book (and has been released since March 2008). It is unforgivable for a book that is published in 2010 to get this wrong. I don’t understand how the reviewer missed this. Hopefully a corrected version will be published as an erratum.
• The introduction to the book explains that  a basic level of Moodle understanding is assumed for the reader as it wants to focus on learning theory. However it then spends more than 5 (of its 193) pages on explaining what an IP address is and how it can be used to restrict access to a quiz. It gets the Linux part on how to see your IP address wrong (another one for the errata).

The book doesn’t really make optimal use of the new and advanced functionality that Moodle 1.9 has on offer. Two examples:

• The concept of “groups” is used in the book in some descriptions of course activities (although not enough to call for its own spot in the index), but the concept of “groupings” isn’t mentioned anywhere. If I were to teach a course with Moodle tomorrow, I would definitely use this functionality as it allows you to be much more flexible in your course design.
• Ever since Moodle 1.7 it has been possible to play with roles and capabilities in Moodle. That functionality is relatively hard to understand and needed some maturation. It is much more usable now in Moodle 1.9. This functionality is only used once in the book (during the discussion on forums) and isn’t explained well enough to my taste.

Does the book have some valuable things to offer? It is not all bad:

• Some of the introductions to learning concepts are theories are good starting points for further exploration. For example, I liked the reference to Bruner’s “scaffolding” concept and spent some time reading the Wikipedia article on instructional scaffolding.
• The pages on basic chat etiquette and wiki etiquette are quite useful. They describe rules you can agree on with your students to make the online learning process more pleasurable.
• The ways of using the choice activity have been slightly expanded compared to the earlier version of the book.
• The last chapter has a nice example of a capstone project assignment that you could adapt for your own teaching. To use the workshop module as the basis for this project assignment is a bit risky, as I would not recommend anybody to use the workshop module in its current state (Moodle 2.0 should solve that problem).

All in all I would not recommend anybody to get this book. If you have 30 euros to spend on a Moodle book (this book isn’t cheap!) choose one of the ones I recommend here. If you have a basic understanding of Moodle and are looking for generalised teaching techniques for online courses you are much better served by Gilly Salmon‘s work on e-moderation (see E-moderating and E-tivities).

Hopefully I can be more enthusiastic about the next Packt title I get to review…

Filed under: Books, Learning, Moodle

Programma
De keynote op deze Moodlemoot zal worden gegeven door Tomaz Lasic, Education Researcher bij het Moodle hoofdkwartier. Vanuit Australië (en in het Engels) zal hij vertellen over pedagogiek en online leren. Hij legt daarbij ook uit wat er in de Moodle community allemaal gebeurt om het mensen makkelijker te maken zoveel mogelijk leereffect uit Moodle te halen.

De keynote wordt gevolgd door een debat waarin een aantal prominente Nederlandstalige Moodle gebruikers discussiëren over Moodle en (digitale) didactiek. Het publiek kan door middel van SMS en/of Twitter mee praten.

De rest van het programma is opgedeeld in vier tracks met ieder vier sessies. Wij hebben hiermee geprobeerd om voor iedereen wat interessants op het programma te zetten:

1. Moodle 2.0 – In deze track wordt er vooruit gekeken naar de nieuwste versie van Moodle. Wat voor impact zal deze versie hebben op het onderwijs in Nederland en waar moet je allemaal aan denken voordat je kunt upgraden?
2. Moode in de non-profit – Moodle is als open source product uitermate geschikt als leeromgeving voor allerlei projecten in de non-profit. In deze track delen een aantal organisaties hun ervaringen en wordt er gekeken naar wat de Moodle community kan doen om dit soort gebruik nog makkelijker te maken.
3. Moodle en strategie – In deze track zullen een aantal organisaties laten zien hoe ze Moodle strategisch hebben geïmplementeerd. Er wordt onder ander in gegaan op informatiebeveiliging, internationale implementaties en over omgaan met competenties.
4. No Moodle – Naast Moodle zijn er nog een aantal andere populaire open source tools die zeer geschikt zijn in een onderwijs omgeving. Elgg, WordPress en Drupal komen sowieso aan bod.

De voertaal van de conferentie is Nederlands.

Waar, wanneer, hoe laat, etc…
De Moodlemoot wordt gehouden op woensdag 26 mei 2010 bij het METS Center op de Rembrandtlaan 1c in Bilthoven (dat is vlak bij het treinstation in Bilthoven, zie hier voor een routebeschrijving).

Vanaf 13:00 kunnen bezoekers zich registreren en om 13:30 begint het programma. Bij een Moodlemoot hoort een goede maaltijd en we zijn dan ook pas om ongeveer 21:00 klaar.

Inschrijven en kosten
De inschrijving is nog steeds open, schrijf je dus snel in via: http://bit.ly/inschrijvenmoodlemoot2010.

Leden van Ned-Moove betalen € 25. Niet leden betalen € 40.

Twitter
Ned-moove heeft sinds kort een Twitter account en zal via die account verslag doen van de moot. De hashtag voor deze bijeenkomst is #mootnl10.