Making life a little easier

I was looking arond the net the other day for some images that I could make use of, a task complicated by the issues of copyright of course, and came across Yotophoto.com. Its a search engine for free-to-use stock photographs and images. After running a search, the returned thumbnails are accompanied by the terms of licence , making life a little easier, yes

Across the chasm

The end of this term will mark the completion of phase one for our Moodle rollout and staff numbers are currently just over 100. I always had a concern, borne out of experience I must add, that the numbers just would not materialise to make the second and third phases a going proposition. Basically you have to get past that minimum, which is what you may ask? I guess the answer is often that it depends, but as part of my original proposal I cited Moores curve as my favoured model. The theory predicts that a chasm will most likely occur following uptake by the innovators and visionaries; our college has around 300+ staff, so these two groups represent around 25, that’s an estimate. The next big group are the pragmatists and numbers show that they are certainly coming on board, in other words I am confident that we have successfully crossed the chasm this time. If you are not familiar with Moores chasm, I have reproduced an updated page from my report here, or simply key the term into Google. Whether you are selling products or ideas it makes some thought provoking predictions with regard to the adoption of new technology. And please feel free to get back and share you own experiences on this one.

Content harvesting

To complement our VLE at Bromley we have a Content Repository, DSpace. As content repositories increase in popularity, harvesting services such as OAIster (Open Archive Initiative) are becoming available. Using OAIster, you can carryout searches on metadata and associated resources. If you are running a repository, just register with Oaister and then each week or month, your content details will be updated in the systems catalogue. As of November 23rd 2005, the OAIster harvester has some 6,073,500 records from 572 institutions. You can take a look from here or from the side bar Site Links. Please feel free to get back and let us know what you think.

One busy week for Moodle

Lots happening this week. Ran a Moodle training session for staff on thursday morning, seven made it and it really went down well.
My plans to hold a Moodle conference at the end of term seem to be taking shape with the 19th December looking promising; you can expect some photos and pod cast from that, maybe even video. Our ILT support Danny dream't up the idea of creating a Moodle area for staff as a means of getting more people invloved, featuring: college and Moodle newsletter, photos, Social events like theatre trips and items for sale, it seems to be growing, could be good.
We have started to forge links with another Moodle user locally and will be having a meeting soon to compare notes and plan some future co-operative projects.
I have been running a not very scientific survey among my students with regard to printing over the last couple of weeks; how many print handouts from the VLE and how many leave them in electronic format?
Well it seems somewhere between half to a third will keep material electronic, these were all level three students, interesting. Finally staff accounts on the system topped 100 today, thats out of around 300, and sooner than my end of term estimate, so a little bit of Christmas came early.

No filing cabinets please

I was having a look at the types of resource users have uploaded to our new Moodle system the other day. At first I was surprised to see the total of just over 700, but then encouraged somewhat by the realisation that this would not have included lesson plans, as the drive remains for these to be stored on the Intranet and maybe my frequent warnings of not allowing the system to become a dumping ground for filing cabinets is working. If you would like to take look at our distribution of file types click here how typical is this I wonder, I would interested to know, so please feel free to comment.

Moodle Newsletter issue 1

If you are interested in all things Moodle, did you know that now there is a Moodle newsletter available. Its a pdf format file and issue 1 can be downloaded from here.

Lets try that again

My idea of running the Moodle training as a self study pack seems to have fallen on hard ground, after I discovered virtually zero activity on the training accounts, and of course quite reasonably the problem is time, or lack of it for everyone involved. So the next move is to run 30 minute support drop-in workshop slots each week, where at least candidates get to work together for a while . Please stay tuned on this one.

A good read

I have been having read of the report from Becta "ICT and e-Learning in Further Education", click here. The report the assesses progress and provision of ICT and e-learning within further education (FE) and sixth form colleges since 1999 to 2005. It contains really comprehensive statistics on the many aspects of provision and planning, including VLE'S, with findings like: 76% of colleges compared to 59% in 2003 now have a VLE. If you have yet to read this report, its really worth a look. Please feel free to get back with any comments.

I came across the “Study of Environments to Support e-learning in UK Further and Higher Education” report produced by Education for Change Ltd produced by The Research Partnership for JISC recently. Published in April 2005, the report is based around survey results that have been returned from FE and HE institutes in the UK on the current and future developments in E-learning and support processes. The part I found of particular interest though was the analysis on the use and uptake of VLE’s, so if have yet to see the report Click Here for a worthwhile read. Please feel free to feedback on your own comments