Moodle has been claimed to be based be a Social Constructivist pedagogy. It aint. Niall Sclater summed it up, when talking about the OU’s adoption of the eLearning platform, by pointing out that “It can also be argued that LMSs are relatively pedagogy-neutral and and are merely shells in which to place content and activities”. [...]
Today (while editing a student handbook) I am listening to Curtis Bonk author of the World is Open talking about the open movement and its potential impact on Education. He mentioned an alternative to Wikipedia (for wikipediaphobics) the Wikisource project. Actually it is a sister project (all part of the Wikimedia foundation). It aims to [...]
Image by Enrico Fuente
Clickers are great for adding interactivity to the classroom. The best thing is they allow some interactivity but not too much. They scale. Like Twitter does. However they cost lost and can be fiddly to set up and annoying to mind and maintain. What are the alternatives?
Online polling: Most famously the free system [...]
There is a certain type of data you never get from academic surveys. Or at least that you never hear about in the published results.
Now, with the advent of realtime web serach, you can find out what student’s are thinking about VLEs right now
Image by aussiegall via Flickr
The growth of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a classic example of Institutional Learning. The size of the the feature set of VLEs, taking Moodle as an example, is explosive. The complexity and growth of Moodle occurs at many levels. From hardware right up to software through an application [...]
Open Source VLE Moodle is an example of Bazzar architecture.
Consider a simple yet crucial feature of Moodle: Notifying participants about new postings.
In early versions of Moodle the choice was simple - email. As of Moodle 1.9 however the following are the ways you can be notified of new forum postings:
Get alerts via email
Track unread posts [...]
Image via Wikipedia
If you live in Europe you know that the mobile operators are serious cash cows. If you live in Ireland you feel this pain pretty acutely as everything has become ludicrously dear here (isn’t this what happened in Iceland towards the end?).
The problem is that the mobile operators, like the broadband ones, have [...]
Update: I put the wrong link in earlier to the GM script, oops!
Putting a large cohort of students into specific Moodle groups can be tedious and error-prone (if you need specific students in specific groups).
I’ve written a Greasemonkey script to help assign specific people to groups in Moodle. It simply hides people already assigned to [...]
Because I am lazy I always have a list of things I would like to blog about but never seem to get around to. I may write about some of these things in the future but I will need to chose which one(s). Here is today’s list - anything grab your fancy?
Why the top of [...]
I have been thinking about Moodle and Twitter lately. They share something in common. From a certain vantage they both look like a stream of babbling data. People frequently complain about the amount of emails they get from Moodle forums or how they can keep up to date with active Moodle forums and not get [...]
