Today is a special day for Moodle – it is 8 years old (well, 11 actually from the very first trial)! A lot has been written about Moodle, less about its founder and lead developer Martin Dougiamas or ‘Moodler‘ as he likes to nick himself. I work with the guy and I thought I’d share a few things about him (no, I am not trying to suck up to my boss, he’d spot it and wouldn’t like it anyway).

With my teaching DNA I can’t avoid an analogy. If he were a school teacher, kids would really like him. He knows his stuff, he is fair, modest, doesn’t fuss and knows how important people are.

Martin has overseen something incredible over the past 8 years and the constant highs and lows have gotten bigger. Of the highs, the huge growth of Moodle users, and the vibrant, healthy community doing exciting things and supporting, caring about, developing something that was once just an idea in Martin’s head is no doubt incredibly pleasing but probably quite overwhelming at times. On the lows, he has endured a lot over the past years. First the hordes of ‘this won’t work’, then when it did start to work well, the hordes of ‘this is so yesterday’, then the hordes of ‘is 2.0 out yet?’ and more, all while juggling a growing number of balls. No one here at HQ has been under more pressure or cared more not just about the beautiful beast of Moodle 2.0 but the entire Moodle project  and its multiple aspects over the last few years than Martin.

He is passionate about and deeply respectful of the community of Moodle users, developers and Moodle Partners. As the anecdote goes, when offered ten of millions of dollars for Moodle by the largest commercial competitor, his immediate reply was: How do you buy a community?

To many he is a rock star (and with his drumming skills he probably could be one). To us who work with him every day, and anyone who has probably chatted to him at a Moot or other places, he is a calm, fair, relaxed, smart and quick-witted boss, colleague, family man and a friend who knows his stuff, drives a 15 year old bomb of a car, mucks around with  iPhone apps, makes a mean mojito and for whom Moodle, the stuff millions around the world use today, is the stuff of life.

Happy 8th Martin & Moodle. Here is to many, many more!

Our first demo course for the new Moodle Educational Demo Site has wrapped up nicely. Thanks to 40 participants from around the world, we generated some useful sample data and activities for people to see, dip in, even download and play with (now available at ‘standard’ Moodle Demo site ).

Most importantly, we hope that this course, and others like it in the future, helps people make the cognitive, personal leap from ‘this is just a piece of software‘ to ‘hey, that’s how I could (use it to) solve the X problem/realise the X idea/make X happen‘.

Here is the story, told in a clip.

Now, you are kindly invited to have your say in building resources like this, together with people who participated in Water!

Hear what the plan for edu-demo site is, then help us make it better in an ‘open microphone’ and shared whiteboard Elluminate session this Sunday/Monday (depending on your timezone).

I for one want Moodle to be the shining light not JUST in providing an awesomely flexible, #1 LMS but also in generating great ideas and examples from and for its huge community of users about of how to use it well where and when it matters most  – ‘on the ground’, with people.

Join us !

Huge thanks to Gavin Henrick and the team at Enovation Solutions (Irish/French Moodle Partners) for providing the use of Elluminate room for this occasion.

Session date & time across timezones

Session details (including technical)

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deqalb/1497728891/

It’s finally here … but with a great twist!

I have been meaning to write a cookbook of recipes for using Moodle in education for nearly two years now (just ask Julian “Moodleman” Ridden!) Last year, I suspended writing one with Packt Publishing about halfway through (personal reasons) but I remain eternally grateful to Packt’s Acquisition Editor and a ‘master of succinct’ David Barnes for his advice and insights along the way.

Why recipes? Because we can see ourselves cooking, serving and enjoying the product of our labour, usually with others too. And guided by a mouthwatering title, maybe a picture, short list of ingredients, description of the cooking process (where you can maybe always add a little of your own take on it), a tip or two, then a cool serving suggestion – we actually want to get off our butt and try to do it! Even if we stuff it up a little and the thing we make doesn’t look EXACTLY the way it looks or sounds in the recipe we are happy to have tried and made it (well, most of the time 🙂 )

And how many of you working in ed-tech field have muttered, exasperated: “If staff could only get off their butt and try to do it!” Well … let’s give them some recipes that they will understand and want to try and cook!

But this time, instead of going back to solo slavery of writing a recipe book (oh, I do admire those who persisted!) I thought “why not simply create a space and format for a community cookbook?” More heads know a lot more than one.

Today, such a community cookbook (Moodle Recipes for Educators) was launched at Moodle.org, in a brand new section called Teaching and Learning with Moodle, a space I maintain and moderate. Feel free to visit, you can enter as guest if you don’t have a login at Moodle.org (a good one to get anyway!).

How does this cookbook work?

Educators can add their own magic Moodle moments in a given, easy format (‘format sets you free’ as David would say).

Firstly and MOST importantly, they state the pedagogical purpose of the recipe (a simple ‘who’ did ‘what’ and ‘why’) in a single sentence. This gives us a title like “Students jointly build a list of useful websites to improve their understanding of water use” rather than “How to combine the use of Moodle Forum – Single Discussion and Moodle Wiki Page Splitting function”. Yeah, I know which one of these you or that reluctant colleague of yours would like better (or maybe I got it all wrong!?). This strategy is repeatedly reported as by far the best way to meaningful change. Why not use it?

Next comes a broad description of the task (does it help to collaborate, communicate, evaluate, compete, create or organise – can select more than one) and which Moodle tools they used. This helps the search process immensely later on. After that, educators are asked simply to describe what did the participants, and that includes the activity creator (usually teacher but not always) DO. Brief context, major settings, how did it all work, what happened, maybe a screenshot … all in teacher language. To finish off, we ask the educator for any tips, tricks or warnings, links to any external tools or resources (could be a goldmine that one!), select the educational setting this recipe would work best, area of learning and subjectively select the degree of difficulty of this recipe. Link to a tutorial document and even downloadable version of the activity is appreciated but entirely optional.

I have written a few of these recipes now to kick things off and each one of them took me about 20 minutes. I merely described, told a story of what happened with a few key pointers and clicked a few options. That’s it.

While the educators with more Moodle experience will probably contribute more (and more complex) ‘recipes’, it will be those perfectly simple, useful ideas that will make the most difference, particularly with new moodlers who are just starting out.

My brother is hardly a good cook but his simple jam recipe makes the best jam in the world. Same goes for teachers using Moodle.

When browsing the recipes later on, they are easy to search by whatever the parameter or perhaps keyword you choose. Just examples of collaboration? Sure. Primary school only? No problem. Natural sciences? OK. Uses of Moodle wikis? Here they are. Combine a few of these things? You got it.

Over and over again, I keep hearing phrases like ‘pedagogy before technology’, ‘people before technology’ yet we so often end up in these boring, counterproductive ‘correct clicking’ sessions where the focus inevitably shifts to the tools, their precision and functionality rather than the messy, imprecise, (counter)intuitive thing called humanity that will drive it. Clay Shirky once clevery observed that “revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when it adopts new behaviours”.

Show them a travel destination they like and they will save for the fare to get there. Show them a mouthwatering recipe they can master today and they’ll step in the kitchen. Show them a desirable behaviour or goal enabled by technology and they will click and stumble their way to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we need your recipes please (difficulty, size or setting don’t matter)! Thank you 🙂

Enjoyed the 2 minutes of one of the greatest scenes (and cuts) in film history? The classic of “technology as an extension of human power”…

I have long been interested in the debate about Learning Management Systems (LMS, often called VLE in the UK) and have read several papers and many (ranty) anti-LMS and pro-LMS blog posts and comments (the binarity so misses the point…). Recently, two papers (Lisa M. Lane‘s ‘Insidious CMS – how CMS impact teaching‘ and Ofsted’s (UK) Evaluation of use of VLE – thank you Tim Hunt for the heads up) and a complaint by a frustrated friend using Blackboard at his university made me get on this puny little soapbox of mine.

Some research seems to support a few things that the “VLE-is-dead” voices say. Here is the gist of of the LMS critique, in point format:

• LMS mostly started as submission of assignments and posting of content.
• They reinforce routine work and the predominant instructionist, transmission model of education. In other words, they are a mere translation of the dominant pedagogical style into online environment.
• The way they are deployed and used is mostly content-centric and institution-centric.
• While students use LMS and appreciate creative, innovative use of LMS, they place no great expectations on them to replace face-to-face instruction or become their ‘Facebook’.
• Most teachers using LMS have been top-down drafted into it under, broadly, two fears: of irrelevance (a kind of technological left behind) or of losing their job.
• LMS are not really consistently quality assured. If/when evaluated, they are studied for their ease and frequency of use, not the ways they influence and guide pedagogy.
• Cost of staff development in using LMS is of higher concern than the direct cost of the system.
• LMS have increasing number of features that allow more open, constructionist approaches but these are underused by teachers.
• Despite being rolled out in increasing numbers, the use of LMS at curriculum level is more of a cottage industry relying on enthusiasts rather than a (much touted) revolution.
• The use of LMS is usually not comprehensive across learning areas across organisations. The pockets of activity and exemplary use are regularly linked with overall good teaching and good use of technology by enthusiasts.
• Within LMS, teaching staff mainly use their own developed materials, little sharing and use of external sources occurs
  
• Novice LMS users (staff) use only the aspects they understand from non-Web context (much like email is the old venerable memo). They use what they are comfortable with to reduce cognitive load. They are generally satisfied with such use more than they are with experimenting with less or un-known features.

Well, firstly, all of these points above are really just an eloquent confirmation of the bunch of anecdotals observed on the ground by many of the above mentioned enthusiasts, myself included. Check the forums at Moodle.org and you will see my point. Talk to Moodle Partners around the world who are training hundreds of teachers every year and observe these things. And more…

So, nothing new. But is that it? No good can come out LMS? Do we just give up and go home to embrace the e-nirvana of the LMS-bashers or perhaps even swing the other way and listen to the ‘traditionalists’ who think such systems and computers in general are the digital hemlock of of quality education.

What do we do? Get rid of LMS? That would be missing the point and a monumental waste.

I can only speak for Moodle, not other LMS which Moodle often gets bagged together with, when I say that it changes for better by the day. Seeing it as a static, monolithic system is simply neither fair nor accurate.

On the design part, with the support of community of users and philosophy of developers, Moodle has been and continues to evolve into something that can incorporate so many of the things critics are pointing out as lacking. Moodle is essentially an immensely versatile and free platform (seen the Lego clips 🙂 ?) .

We surely can and we are making it easier to grow into something organic, flexible that people (individuals, groups) literally grow, not pay for to be ‘administered’ by the top banana.

But just what can we do on the use(r) part to make LMS like Moodle really go and realise the pedagogical ‘oomph’? (I borrow a couple of points from Dave Cormier’s excellent ‘Buying tech for learning‘ post and Lisa’s paper.

1. When using it, focus on solving problems. Student problems, predominantly. With a little creativity and simplest of tools, Moodle can do that brilliantly. A humble three-click-set-up forum or not much more complex wiki can do that, not to mention other activities teachers and students can set up and run. Sure, they can that using external tools like Google Groups, Wikispaces and hundreds more but a quality, familar platform full of equivalents (highly modifiable, if needed) is kinda hard to beat.

2. Aim for perfect simplicity, complexity is easily added later. Most activities in Moodle run just fine with defaults, but you can always add things and layers of complexity the way you, the user want not how the system is set up. As Lisa points out, unlike Blackboard’s bells and whistles from which you then have to opt-out (but must look mighty impressive in a sales meeting), Moodle in an opt-in system. Start with bare bones then add what you need. Think of it as a toolbelt.

Chances are that solutions on the fly with free, open source system like Moodle (can be run by a single teacher) are also cheaper in money and time than using a very expensive, institutionalised, locked-down systems for which a ‘clear’, yet rigid idea (no matter how misguided) had to be produced before parting with tens of thousands of dollars to buy it then have it justified madly.

3. Now we come to the heart of it…

Pay most attention to the hardest and most rewarding thing to examine and change – pedagogies. I deliberately use plural because the ‘right one’ is only right in the context of a class, a student in front of you. Sometimes it takes a collaborative approach of wikis, sometimes a more ‘traditional’ quiz does the job beautifully.

Good teacher, just like a good parent, can and has to be behaviorist, instructonist, constructivist, connectivist or any other -ist in the given moment for the benefit of the students. Just like a parent, you don’t have to be perfect – just good enough. But just like at home, good enough primarily for the kids, your students, not the principal or the Minister for Education.

As an LMS, Moodle can help support all of these -ists. I don’t quite buy the technologically deterministic argument that certain technology has the power to change pedagogy on its own, that it has certain philosophy embedded into it. A knife, LMS, phone, car, Facebook or lawn mower may lend themselves to perhaps a more common use but they are not precluded to be used in different ways. Does that mean LMS can be used in way we don’t want it to be used? You bet. And it is, often. Yet it isn’t either. Often.

Moodle has and will be built with social constructionist principles in mind but one can hardly make people use it that way.

Unless we adequately provoke, stimulate, and guide novices (still the vast majority of users) to increasingly varied and flexible LMS like Moodle with samples of pedagogical approaches first, we run the risk of these novices slipping into mastery of a couple of tools that will simply allow them doing thins they have always done, just maybe a little faster and more efficiently. They will be happy but hardly stretching in the way the LMS like Moodle affords them to.

Before creating help desk for ‘how and what tools can do’ in an LMS, create a help desk to offer and consider what pedagogical goals can be achieved with it.

“It doesn’t matter what tools are provided if teachers don’t have a suitable philosophy of teaching to exploit fully the tools. An instructor well versed in constructivism can teach in a learner-centred way with an LMS such as Moodle, but a teacher with only a transmissive model of teaching will be lost with Facebook. So without a suitable understanding of pedagogy, it doesn’t really matter what tools you use.” (Tony Bates)

4. Do it as a community, with others. Walk the collaboration talk. Why?

Apart from the world valuing such approach more and more, because it is the easiest and the most lasting way to change the hardest things to change, mentioned above – the pedagogies and their underlying, internalised and normalised assumptions of what should be or happen in class (or not).

But when it comes to talking pedagogies, teachers are a lot more likely to put the walls up and say “don’t you tell me how to teach” (similarities with parenting again).

It’s “all that fuzzy philosophy stuff yet all I want to do is just teach, normally.” Pedagogy goes deep with people and it is best seen at moments of stress, when we reactively fall back probably on the ways we were brought up and familiar with (enter ‘little change’), unless we have the knowledge of alternatives, and the context, opportunity and safety to deploy them. Technology throws up many of such stresses, daily. Yet wise use of technology can also help us relieve them, even thrive on them.

Let’s look at the very useful TPACK model above. Now imagine you work closely in a team together with technological ‘experts’ (eg an experienced and creative Moodle user, let’s not forget students themselves here!!!), content ‘experts’ (eg a great historian with deep knowledge of Russian History you are working on in class) and ‘pedagogical experts’ (eg great at supporting and ‘provoking’ teachers to try a range of approaches and question, examine their philosophical approach to education). The roles here are purely illustrative because they morph constantly.

You are far more likely to change when challenged AND supported this way.

Then, let’s look at just one particular feature of soon to be released Moodle 2.0 – Community Hubs, described by Mark Drechsler. These are designed to support exactly what you see above among Moodle users (32 million registered worldwide and counting..)! Imagine being a part not of a Learning Committee but a Learning Community (more on that another time, have a post ‘in waiting’).

Not to mention the talk of Moodle 3.0 (few years away) that will again transcend this and adapt to be a platform supporting…whatever the trends may be then. I invite you to flick through Hans de Zwart‘s excellent presentation from the recent iMoot on this.

Yes, LMS designed and used in the way that my colleague showed me two days ago (Blackboard at a local university) should be dead.

But uncritically bunching LMS/VLE together and dismissing them as ‘dead’ is naive at best.

By all means, unlock and give teachers the freedom and funk to choose their tools. But no matter how shiny, ‘buzzy’ and ‘bleeding edge’ the tool – if they don’t know what the learning aim is, if they don’t have or see the need for the kinds of pedagogies most valuable to students, or they plainly don’t know what they are talking about, the chances of reaching the ideal, central intersection on the TPACK graphic above is remote.

Moodle ‘Teacher Apps’ anyone? A tool to drool but wasted on a fool?