Drafts, restructures and endless revisions – a book is born!

/ mobile, moodle
Reading Time: 3 minutes

So, it’s been nearly six months since my last blog post and it’s no coincidence that this post announces the impending arrival of my book! What little time has been left over from work and family life over much of past year has been spent hunched over a laptop late at night and taking numerous Moodle screenshots on my phone and tablet, all in aid of an upcoming Packt Publishing book, Moodle for Mobile Learning.

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Drafts, restructures and endless revisions – a book is born!Read More »

Drafts, restructures and endless revisions – a book is born! Read More »

Moodle 2.5 preview – bootstrap, badges and more!

/ moodle, open source
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Moodle 2.5 will be released in May 2013. Since the 2.x series was introduced we have seen lots of incremental improvements but not much in the way of major new features for end users. Moodle 2.5 changes all that and has a number of major feature changes including a couple of real treats.

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Moodle 2.5 preview – bootstrap, badges and more!Read More »

Moodle 2.5 preview – bootstrap, badges and more! Read More »

The rise and rise of mobile learning

/ mobile, research
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have been collecting together examples the past few weeks of when higher education institutions started rolling out these ‘iPads for every student’ programs. While the world read those attention grabbing headlines, a larger number of institutions have been sliently spending vastly more money, but with much less exposure, on supporting Bring Your Own Device strategies and building out wireless networks across their campuses to support this. These huge investments in mobile learning technologies in higher education – for both free devices and BYOD – appears to have really started gaining momentum from 2008 onwards.

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The rise and rise of mobile learningRead More »

The rise and rise of mobile learning Read More »

Re-entering the world of MOOCs at LAK13

/ data, learning analytics
Reading Time: 3 minutes
IMG_20130227_205107

So, here I am on the Learning Analytics and Knowledge MOOC again, or LAK13 to use its abbreviated name. It is one full year since I aborted LAK12 and 18 months since I aborted the famed Stanford AI MOOC. Determined not be a perennial MOOC dropout I have decided to have another crack of the whip. Not that being a MOOC dropout is necessarily a bad thing, at least not in my book although the MOOC bashers will no doubt beg to differ. People will enter into open courses for many reasons and the success of a MOOC shouldn’t be determined by the number of finishers. I gained a lot from LAK12 in the limited time I was on it and it gave me a great primer on learning analytics which has been really useful in my work over the past year.

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Re-entering the world of MOOCs at LAK13Read More »

Re-entering the world of MOOCs at LAK13 Read More »

Most Marvellous Moot

/ data, lms, mobile, moodle, tincan
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.

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Most Marvellous MootRead More »

Most Marvellous Moot Read More »

Moodle Mobile Apps

/ lms, mobile, moodle, open source
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
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Moodle Mobile AppsRead More »

Moodle Mobile Apps Read More »

2012 – a year of learning technology failures

/ lms, moodle, reviews
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…)

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2012 – a year of learning technology failuresRead More »

2012 – a year of learning technology failures Read More »

How open source development processes impact software quality

/ research
Reading Time: 2 minutes

This article is part of a series of blog posts reviewing academic studies into open source software quality.

Exploring the Effects of Process Characteristics on Product Quality in Open Source Software Development, Koch and Neumann, 2008

Koch and Neumann from Vienna University published this paper in 2008. It built on prior published research into open source development processes and was a landmark study in terms of scale, extracting metrics from over 2 million lines of code. Prior published research in this area analysed data from code repositories and bug trackers, however Koch and Neumann were concerned that the resulting metrics focused too much on product rather than process. Their study would review both product AND process, with the particular aim of  assessing the impact of software processes on product quality.

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How open source development processes impact software qualityRead More »

How open source development processes impact software quality Read More »

Understanding Tin Can API

/ lms, moodle, scorm, tincan
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.

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Understanding Tin Can API Read More »