~ MoodleMoot New Zealand 2013 - 22nd to 24th April 2013, Waikato University Hamilton Campus ~ 

WCEL are proud to be a part of organising this year's New Zealand Moodle conference in April. 

The conference is run over three days with workshops on the Monday followed by two days of keynotes, conference presentations and open spaces which are organised into three 'tracks' - technical, teaching, and everything else!  

Hosting this event is a fantastic professional development opportunity for the University and we encourage teaching staff to keep an eye out for internal communication about the opportunity to attend.

There are spaces available in the programme if you are interested in presenting.  Share your Moodle experience and help make this year's Moodle Moot a great one! Remember attendees are at all levels so even if you are new to using Moodle you can contribute. Create an account on the Moodle Moot website and submit a Proposal today!

This year's WCELfest took place on Thursday 31st January 2013 and was another successful day. We had over 150 registrations and feedback so far has been fantastic.   

In an excellent keynote address, Dr John Hinchcliff examined how we should approach the future of learning and the pressures forcing change on the academy while finding a careful balance between our engagement with technology and engaging with the person.

Recordings of the day's events, including Dr John Hinchcliff's keynote, are now available online.

There were only a few main highlights for me on day two of MoodleMootAU.  These were Elisabeth Ellis and Solua Middleton's keynote on how the ABC connect with their staff learning community and an introduction to ABC Open, and how the Australian National University assessed their courses to inform staff professional development.

Elisabeth explained to us how the ABC have a huge mix of staff with roles you I know I don't really think about when I watch the telly like hairdressers, human resources, accounting and truck drivers in the warehouses. As with any large organisation these staff have various technological skills and attitudes towards online learning.  Elisabeth talked about how they ensure the range of learners is catered for in their strategy and how they keep things simple to ensure those who have difficulty with navigation can cope. Along with others in the room, I liked how Elisabeth had several images representing parts of her presentation on the slide and ask the audience to choose which story she choose to tell next by choosing an image.

Solua Middleton then introduced us to ABC Open.  This site is full of user generated content providing regional Australians a voice.  There are some wonderful stories here that will keep you engaged for hours and some great tutorials for generating your contents.

Luke Powter's presentation on how the Australian National University (ANU) used the sophistication of their Moodle courses to inform their professional development was food for thought.   I have talked to several other delegates this year about how they ensure courses go through assurance processes and I’ve seen rubrics before and always wonder if we need to do this more.  Having a snapshot of which parts are not used to it’s full potential can help determine what topics to provide in our monthly PD workshops.

Wednesday was a half day so there were only three presentations before the keynote (which unfortunately I had to miss).  The two highlights here for me were Shane Elliott's demonstration of the External Tool LTI and Renee Lance's practical and helpful advice on customising a Moodle theme.

Shane Elliott - The IMS LTI External Tool has huge potential from sharing a basic resource or activity from one course to another and pulling in sources from other external sites.

Tuesday was a mission for me as I became more and more tired...  Highlights included another demo of the new Assignment module which I put on the big screen for the others in the office.  It’s a huge improvement where the individual assignments are bundled into one activity.  This has all the options you need to determine what you require which allows staff to change the assignment type without the need to recreate it.  

After a bit of actual work and some lunch a couple of colleagues and myself watched Recording Audio and Video with PoodLL with Justin Hunt (Japan).  Justin demonstrated the capabilities and we had a play on demo.poodll.com.  This has potential for our language learners as an audio & video tool for student submissions and our staff for providing feedback.   

Day 3 started with an introduction to FreeMoodle.org by Staurt Mealor. FreeMoodle.org provides completely free Moodle hosting for completely free Moodle courses and hopes to change the world for the better through Moodle-enabled free education! Later in this evening I was impressed by the collaborative success of Anna Krassa, George Chalatzoglidis and Vasilis Palilis (Greece) with their Greek courses within FreeMoodle.org.

I watched another couple of sessions between normal Monday morning work then repeated my presentation after lunch. I was (understandably) not present during Chad Leaman & Ben Young (Canada)’s 4:30am Making Your Moodle Mobile session so watched the recording in the afternoon. This was an interesting experience... after attending 21 live sessions my brain was wondering why I couldn’t ask questions via the text chat!

It was an early morning for me (for a Sunday!), up at 7:30am for another 4.5hr marathon of sessions in my dressing gown! A few pots of tea later I had listed to Gareth (United Kingdom) talk about The Collapsed Topics Course Format which reduces the dreaded scroll of death, Michael de Raadt (Australia) from Moodle HQ talk about how Moodle gets from HQ to us and how we can help.  I was pleased to hear in this session that my Moodle Testing was appreciated and that I was currently the top tester :)

My good friend Stuart Mealor (New Zealand) from HRDNZ talked about Using Moodle in Business.  I liked the way Stuart used a Moodle course & lesson to present rather than by PowerPoint. Someone else I know well is Joyce Seitzinger (ex New Zealand, now Australia).  Jouce presented on the Moodle Toolguide for Teachers and Personal Learning Networks (PLNs).  Joyce gave us homework to draw our own PLN and tweet - see mine uploaded here...

Today is the second day of iMoot2012, a four day online conference running 24 hours a day around the world (Saturday 26 May to Tuesday 29 May 2012).

This is the third year I’ve attended iMoot and I love the concept of a global group of Moodle users coming together to share, learn and collaborate.  Each year there are many MoodleMoots held around the world but these tend to mainly have only local or near visitors.  I have many international Moodle connections and it’s nice to be able to get together at the same and talk to each other, if only via live text chat.

WCeLfest 2012 is now a dim memory even though it happened less than a month ago. On reflection, it's worth noting what a coup it was to get Gilly Salmon 

as the keynote speaker and she was approachable and interesting both personally and with her presentation. All the resources and video recordings of sessions are available from this page. 

Good to catch up with elearning practitioners from the region - participants included people from Wintec, Bay of Plenty Polytechnic, Te Wananga o Aotearoa, and Waiariki Institute of Technology. 

 Nigel, StephenH and myself attended the inaugural eLearning Futures Conference at Unitec in Auckland last week. The opening session was conducted after the powhiri in the very impressive Te Noho Kotahitanga marae and Steve Wheeler was his usual entertaining self in addressing the conference with his ideas on how social media, mobile technologies and pervasive computing are being and could be used to extend and enhance learning. Having just filled in the evaluation form, I'm left pondering whether there is room in the crowded eLearning conference landscape for (yet) another eLearning conference ...

A Day In The Life Of A Digital Learning Resource

This post is woefully late but it's an account of the sessions I attended at this recent symposium.  Originally put together as a Google doc, I've cribbed it to post here.  It's created from my notes and tweets so there's not much of a narrative to it.  The presentations from the day are now available and these include the parallel streams that I couldn't attend (maybe I should cloned an avatar or two and sent them!)

A day organised by the Ministry of Education looking at Digital Learning Resources and how they can be discovered, accessed, used and reused. The day was developed on the back of an international Standards meeting for digital resources being held in Wellington.