Moodle Conference
I’ve been picking up several references pointing to a recent Moodle conference in Graz, Austria. Graz seems to be a hive of industry at the moment, with the Technical Institute being once of the first universities to adopt Elgg. The conference had several interesting presentations, including one by Martin Dougiamas (the developer of Moodle) where some of the additional functions in the forthcoming v 1.9 (we are using v.1.8) were discussed. A view from someone who attended can be found on Alja Sulčič’s blog, which includes an interesting discussion on the way Moodle is edging closer to a community approach, utilising more social networking functionality.
Does this mean that Moodle will ultimately cherry-pick the best bits of Elgg, Facebook, Flickr, Bebo, MySpace, etc.? I don’t think that’s likely – Moodle links reasonably well to other software that share a common LAMP foundation (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). It is also flexible enough to allow both teacher-centred and student-centred approaches – whatever our own educational philosophy may be, Moodle is less scary to ‘traditional’ teachers than Elgg, yet provides space to allow them to be encouraged to adopt other approaches. I’m also sure that Moodle doesn’t want to become ‘bloatware’ – full of functions few need. There is certainly a lot of interest in a more collaborative approach using Moodle – eg here and here.
It’s always dangerous to second guess where e-Learning will be in 5 or 10 years time, particularly when deciding on which tools to invest in. Moodle seems to be a wise choice for us as it has the advantages of being open source and reasonably standardised (SCORMs/LAMS, etc), and most impotantly having a large user and developer base. To a lesser degree, the same goes for Elgg and Drupal and the other extensions we may add to the online learning environment – although they each require an investment in personal development time, knowledge gained is frequently transferable to future work.
John
