moodle

Most Marvellous Moot

Reading Time: 6 minutes

During the two days I spent at MoodleMoot Dublin last week, I had an overwhelming sense of information overload which made it all but impossible to blog during the conference. However it was clear at the time that a number of key themes were emerging from presentations and discussions: responsive design and usability, learning analytics, application performance, and Moodle’s place in the fast changing  world of higher and further education. Now that I’ve had a few days to reflect on things, I have been able to start to make some sense of it all.

Moodle Mobile Apps

Reading Time: 2 minutes

iActive

Moodle has a new official HTML5 app due out in the coming months. it looks like it will do some pretty interesting stuff including:

  • select or capture an image, audio recording or video from your mobile device and upload them into Moodle
  • view their fellow course participants and associated contact information
  • use Moodle messaging if it is enabled
  • access to push notifications

2012 – a year of learning technology failures

Reading Time: 4 minutes

It’s that time of year when all the movers and shakers attempt to predict what will be big in 2013. Well there are no such predictions here. However, they do say you can predict the future by learning lessons from the past, so I’m going look back over the past year instead and ask: what was crap about 2012? (I should reiterate that these views are, of course, entirely my own…)

Understanding Tin Can API

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Tin Can has been getting lots of people in a twist lately. Early adopters are tweeting and blogging about it and anyone who’s anyone seems to be dropping it into conversations to prove they’re at the cutting edge of learning technologies. It is certainly doing the rounds as the Next Big Thing. But ask anyone, “What is Tin Can? Explain it to me” and more often than not you’ll just get a shrug of the shoulders and a quizzical look.

MoodleBrighton September roundup

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Sept saw the launch of #MoodleBrighton, a monthly meetup for Moodlers in Brighton & Hove. At last year’s UK and Ireland MoodleMoot in Dublin I met some of the guys from the Sussex University eLearning Team and we hatched a plan to start up a monthly event in Brighton. It took a while but this was the first such one, and is set for the first Thursday of every month at The Skiff in Gloucester Road, Brighton. The Skiff is a freelancer hub and provides space for regular software group meetups, as this is an open source event they donated the space for free every month, for which we are really grateful. Thanks @theskiff!

Open Source LMS Landscape in 2012

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I’ve been meaning to generate an up-to-date list of open source learning management systems for some time. A recent trawl of Sourceforge, Github, Google Code and Codeplex for the term ‘learning’, as well as the list published at  http://list.ly/list/1Vt-opensource-learning-management-systems-lms-elearning, resulted in nearly 100 viable projects. There may be more, of course. Many thanks to my colleague, Duncan Croucher, for his substantial help in establishing and refining this list over the past week.

Reflections on 12 months at Epic

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1 today!

Wow. This week marks 12 months back at Epic for me and what a year it has been! A slew of awesome Moodle sites, high growth in our open source services, a fantastic new open source team, getting stuck in at MoodleMoot and iMoot conferences and loads more exciting stuff. It’s been a jam packed year for sure. it was always going to be a bit weird rejoining a company I had been part of for 11 years prior to my three years at a competitor. But that three years doing a high growth startup (launching Kineo’s open source business) was a massive education, albeit one that went off in a direction that wasn’t a comfortable fit for me.

Moodle Moot UK – Day Three

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Keynote panorama by James Clay

Day Three at the Moodle Moot started with a sore head! The previous night saw a drinks reception hosted by Remote Learner (thankyou for the wine!) followed by an excellent Gala dinner with good food, nice wine and great company.  I headed off at 10pm but the tweets and video footage continued into the small hours so this morning started with sore heads all round!