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!
Every year Jane Hart runs the Top 100 Tools for Learning survey over at C4LPT. Here is my personal 2012 Top Ten which I have submitted, in no particular order.
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.
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.
I attended and presented at my first iMoot last week. For the uninitiated, Moodle Moots are regional conferences and the annual iMoot is a 4 day online conference extravaganza with round the clock sessions! I did two sessions on building and deploying mobile learning for Moodle which you can view on Slideshare.
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!
So today was my induction into the world of Moodle Moots. Despite working in Moodle for the last four years this is the first time I’ve managed to attend the annual UK Moot and today was thoroughly enjoyable. I missed the keynote from Martin Dougiamas as I was in the air at the time but arrive for the start of the first session at about 11am.
