edna Manager, Mark Tranthim-Fryer and I are delivering the keynote address at the Inaugural Sydney Moodle Conference this Sunday (15 October) and last week I gave a similar presentation at ACEC2006.
edna Groups was upgraded from Moodle 1.4 to 1.6.2 successfully on Sunday 24 October and although you do a mammoth amount of investigation and testing prior to such an upgrade, you get very little chance to play. There are a number of differences between the two versions and I’ve been unearthing new and exciting things in my explorations this week. For example it has a blogging tool where users can either make their blog available to the whole world or confine it to edna Groups community. Mine is at http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/blog/index.php?userid=26
We passed another milestone this week too- the 1,000th edna Group was created only yesterday. There are now nearly 1,040 owners and 9,400 registered users. People are doing some really exciting things with Groups and they are serving a variety of purposes right across the Australian education and training community.
We will be using wikis to collect discussion points from the ’roundtables’ at education.au’s Global Summit next week. That is a good illustration of how we are implementing Groups as a collaborative tool. There is really no end to the possibilities if you think laterally.
3 Comments
Morning Kerry - this post jumped out of my RSS aggregator this morning and really helped to clarify my understanding of the difference between (A) the ‘blog’ functionality of moodle and (B) ‘real blogs’ like this one!
I think this mornings ‘happy accident’ provides a clue to the secret of how edna can really add value in a ‘Web2.0′ sense. Let me try to explain what happened:
1. This post from Tue Oct10 came into my RSS reader because it was posted ‘in public’ and is part of a community (or rss feed) to which I am already subscribed.
2. The personal tone and language of the first sentence caught my eye ‘Mark Tranthim-Fryer and I are delivering the keynote’ - because I care about people more than topics and I know ‘Mark Tranthim-Fryer’ I wondered who the ‘I’ was…
3. That caused me to take the unusual step of opening the post in my browser, and for the first time, something of the context of your sentence was revealed - and education.au blog, Kerrie Smith.
4. That got me interested enough to read the second paragaph which talks about a topic I am interested in - blogs in moodle for edna. Since you provided a link to your moodle blog, I opened it in a new tab, and for the FIRST TIME actually discovered the blog interesting enough to subscribe to from inside the moodle environment.
5. Once I had your edna groups blog open in a browser it was fairly easy to find the RSS feed I want to subscribe to, although its URL is a tad long (do I really need to care which version of php it runs on???) - http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/rss/file.php/1/1/blog/user/26/rss.xml
So what can we learn from this little rant?
- edna group’s new blog functionality from moodle already provides a comfortable and safe place for people who are used to the structure and ‘private by default’ nature of things to begin experimenting with ‘blogging’.
- education.au and edna are in a unique position to provide services that will help such people move into the scary, disintermediated, chaotic and public world of ‘Web2.0′
- education.au and edna are also in a uniqe position to reach a whole new audience by providing some of its fantastic features to citizens of the Web2.0 world.
The trick is to get some discussion going around the types of services that could make this magic happen. Here are two ideas from what happened this morning to get things rolling:
- Promotion / Discovery services for ‘public blogs’ inside the moodle environment.
- RSS feed services for subscribers (short, memorable feed names)
- RSS feed services for publishers (too many great ideas to write here!)
OK thats three things but Im on a roll.
Good post Kerrie, lets try to get some discussion going around this little rant.
Fang - Mike Seyfang
Thanks for the comment Mike
The blog in Moodle reminds me rather of the ‘boundaried communities’ that Nancy White refers to.
The one obvious drawback - which I hope is addressed in further development in Moodle - is the fact that you can’t respond to (comment on) a posting. So in a sense it’s a bit like standing on your soap box with an audience you can’t see with sticky tape over their mouths.
Kerrie
Hi Mike and Kerrie
Thanks for your comments both
Disappointing that the toolset is just like the soapbox you mention and not like the comfortable and safe start wanted by those who are unsure…
Looking forward to seeing that change sooner rather than later as I am reluctant to encourage folk not to respond to others’ comments when the web 2 world is already upon us and surrounds us…
Phil
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