iPardigms, the provider of Turnitin® have a useful website plagiarism.org which provides useful information including a great resource on Types of Plagiarism that is worth a read.

~ 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.

ASCILITE 2012 was held this year in Wellington on November 25 - 28. This is probably one of the premiere e-learning conferences in Australasia, and so having it happen in New Zealand (instead of Australia where it usually resides) was a bonus for Kiwis with an interest in e-learning. To be fair it isn't always in Australia - there have been two conferences in Auckland and one in Singapore. Nigel Robertson, the WCEL team leader, myself, and several other University of Waikato staff attended (Katherine Brown, Diane Forbes, and Noeline Wright - apologies if I've missed anyone).  

It’s Digital Literacy Awareness Week at Waikato and I’ve been forced to think about how to describe digital literacy.   For me, digital literacy is about the way that we approach our use of technology and the meaning it brings to us.  

About 4 years ago, I had taken my son (who was eight at the time) to his swimming lesson.  Afterwards, he wanted to know if Mum had gotten something ready for him.  I said that I wasn't sure but that we could phone her.  He immediately replied, "But you don't have a phone Dad"...

You probably haven’t heard of the Digital Literacy for Staff project yet and that’s why we are having a whole week of activities and events to raise awareness.

The Digital Literacy project team have been working hard over the last few months to organise the first Digital Literacy @ Waikato week, 3 - 7 September. We have a number of speed seminars and workshops for you to attend, quick activities to do at your desk and printed resources too. Get enthusiastic and win some great prizes, including a state of the art 7 inch tablet. Keep an eye on our site for the details of how to qualify to go in the draw.

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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.

Read the full post to see my highlights of the day which included Martin's keynote, Integrating BigBlueButton, Using Moodle & eReaders in prisons, a plugin to detect similarities of computer code assignments, making Moodle accessible and 'tricking' staff into learning during training sessions!

You can keep updated via the #mootau12 hashtag on Twitter

There are a lot of really useful rules that apply to email and here are a few that we think are the most helpful.

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.