iMoot 2010 – Day 3

Day 3 of iMoot 2010 continued much in the same vain as Days 1 and 2, where back to back presentations continued thick and fast!

The majority of live sessions, however, have now been delivered, so today has been more about watching recorded sessions and then heading along to a separate chat window (rather than the Elluminate one) to ask the presenter questions. Whilst it is unreasonable to ask presenters to deliver the same presentation three times, the recorded session don’t have the same vibe as the live ones, especially you can’t ask ‘live’ questions.

The key highlights from today included:

• ForumNG – A Modern Forum for Moodle 1.9 – Sam Marshall from the Open University gave a useful introduction to this alternative Moodle forum. This activity is not part of the ‘core’ Moodle code, but is available to anyone who wishes to use it. It includes a variety of features that are currently lacking from the default Moodle version, such as sticky posts, email subscription to individual forum posts (rather than to the entire forum) and time released forum posts. Additionally, utilisation of Ajax has meant that page refreshes are reduced. I really like the work that Sam has done of improving this key feature of Moodle, but would be reluctant to run two different forum types side by side within a single installation. My hope is that ForumNG (NG = Next Generation) gets adopted as the Moodle forum engine from version 2.1 onwards, thereby keeping to a single engine and ensuring an upgrade path for existing discussion forums, and the posts that they contain.
• Making Moodle Funky by Bending the Code - Leeds City College are one lucky institution! By having someone as skilled and inspiring as Lewis Carr onboard, their Moodle installation looks absolutely stunning. Lewis has developed a number of additions to Moodle by tweaking the code here and there, and including a whole range of additional functionality. These have included items such as developing a Moodle dashboard (or enhanced user profile screen) which includes an Xbox Live style points system, Ajax based user and course searching functionality, a Moodle stylesheet for the iPhone and new Moodle course layouts! I came away from this session absolutely buzzing, and determined to start doing more innovative and useful things with Moodle at the University of Bath. Both Andy Ramsden and I are really keen for the Software Developers in the e-Learning team to do more development work (rather than lots and lots of maintaining code), so this presentation might help steer some of the work than we do. It has to somehow fit in with our Moodle Development Plan for 2010 though!
• Stories from the Moodle Community – Led by Helen Foster, Moodle’s Community Manager, this session gave a fantastic overview of some of the things that are going over at Moodle.org. From encouraging people to vote for items in the Moodle Tracker to giving a background to the community driven effort to develop a better wiki activity for Moodle 2.0, the far reaching session gave an insight into how the Moodle community really functions. The fact that Martin Dougiamas, Moodle’s Founder and Lead Developer, was offer $20million (US) some time ago for Moodle was rather amusing to hear!

Right, that’s enough for today I think. Another report will follow tomorrow no doubt