Moodle the Internet and learning

If like myself you are very much a VLE'er in you course delivery then you will also know the many advantages and to some extent the issues that can become apparent and very real when you encourage students to connect to all those digital resources out there on the Internet. If this is in anyway reminiscent of your experiences, then you may like to have a listen to Radio 4'S Beyond Belief where Ernie Rea and his guests discuss whether the Internet is a gift to humanity or a threat to civilized values.

Mahara first time user

If you have read the previous blog posting, then you will have seen that in the session for Moodle training we had one of our members of staff, who is a Moodle user keen to tryout the Mahara ePortfolio for the first time. While we now have Mahara integrated and ready for the new academic year, I currently have no training notes ready to go for our staff; that’s one of my jobs for this summer, so it was a case of, here’s a link to the online user guide material at WiKi Mahara material see how you get on. All in all, the outcome was very good, some small glitches with sharing resources, but that was down to our understanding of the system and not Mahara. One of the real acid tests for any new applications that you would like to roll-out to staff is always going to be the ease of use; something like the 20/10 rule; 20 minutes getting into it yourself then 10 minutes to feel you could get something out there seems to be a reasonable touch. From this first user experience I think Mahara is going to fit the bill, of course there also the consideration that other ePortfolio systems that I have seen appear to have some considerable overhead with financial charges!

If you are intersed in looking at some tutrials for Mahara then try the Wiki of there is a nice 2007 PDF here alternatively there are soem nice movies at YouTube.com

Mahara Moodle

The rollout of our Moodle VLE has continued at a reasonable pace this year with the agenda of having as many staff as possible able to use the system to deploy a single course. Now that we have reached the end of term some extra sessions are being arranged for me to run and I am pleased to see that a request from one member of staff for Mahara has arrived. We now have the ePortolio running in Moodle and it will be of some value to get the impressions of use from a first timer, so stay tuned for updates on this