Peter Hinds has been Synergy Learning’s Senior Networks Engineer for a few months now – this week he attended his first Moodlemoot. Below is a record of his experience.
MoodleMootUK 2010
“Having only joined Synergy Learning at the start of February the world of Moodle is still relatively new so I headed to MoodleMootUK full of anticipation but not really sure of what to expect. Being a Linux user for quite some years I’m a strong advocate of the open source community and was curious to see an OS gathering in action.
“The first keynote was delivered by Professor Sugata Mitra and was based around the Hole in the Wall education experiment which was cited as an inspiration behind the Slumdog Millionaire film. This was a fascinating presentation and demonstrated how much people can accomplish even when in a less than ideal situation. The progress some of the children had made was incredible especially considering the lack of formal teaching available.
“I attended the ‘enhancing Moodle with E-Portfolios’ workshop as well as the ‘moodle showcase’ in the afternoon. It was great to see how other people were using their Moodle applications and to gain an insight into features such as gaming that Moodle may be able to fully support in the future.
“On day two a live video link over Skype was established with the New Zealand MoodleMoot and Martin Dougiamas presented the road map for the future of Moodle. A beta release is slated for this summer even if this means cutting features to meet this self imposed deadline. The main driver behind this appeared to be so that it could be thoroughly tested before the start of the next academic year in September. Although it’s been a long time in development there was still a significant buzz surrounding Moodle 2.0.
“The second day of workshops featured Tim Hunt’s impressive work on the Moodle Quiz. The most relevant presentation for me came from James Strong who presented enterprise hosting of Moodle. This was very interesting for me on a personal as well as a professional level.
“The final workshop was from Alex Büchner which focused on large scale Moodle networks. It was great to see how well Moodle scales with the correct configuration across multiple schools and colleges. It was also explained how the upcoming Moodle 2.0 hub feature would work and how beneficial this would be to a large scale Moodle network.
“Overall I very much enjoyed my first MoodleMoot and it was especially nice to put some faces to names from our client base.”
Peter Hinds (Synergy Learning Senior Networks Engineer)
Tags: Moodle, Moodlemoot, Synergy Learning