Google Wave today, Moodle Wave Tomorrow?

I am just about to dive into Google Wave (just could not resist the association here). From what I have read and seen so far this seems to be a really fascinating concept and from the hype anyway, what would appear to be a one size fits all for many applications, in a way I hope that it is when you consider features like

• a replacement for those WiKi’s, great as they can be, and I have used the Moodle version for some time now, it does present some degree of challenge to my students.
  
• Just like the view in demand services that are appearing for TV and Radio, we will have the Wave playback facility, wow.
• 
  How about the ability to have concurrent editing of group owned documents, wow again
• 
  Simultaneous private as well a public communications
• 
  The ability to publish to a website, Face Book and soon I hear even Blogger.

If you are yet to get your head around Google Wave, and I anticipate that being a learning curve in itself, there are some really good video’s out there that I have been taking the time to look at. You may like to start with this two minute plus quickie, and then go on to the one hour twenty minute coverage preview, both are worth the time to sit and watch. For sure there is going to be a lot of new stuff here, not to mention the terminology like waves, wavelets, blips etc.
Well to help with all this I came across a great free book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave actually you can buy the book but the net version of it is free and very nicely presented and readable.

I will be back in due course, to let you know how I am getting on, but if you already have any experiences of the Wave, then please feel free to post a comment.

Phased Moodle training

If you have been following this blog, then you will have read that last year marked the start of a new rollout strategy for our Moodle vle to staff at the college. While there has always been a steady though often less than regular stream of staff attending my training sessions, the strategy this time around has been more of a drip feed approach rather than the former one of empowerment. In past years the training course has been delivered over a three-hour session that covers a whole raft of exercises accompanied by a substantial user guide. Looking at the resource take-up however proved that in the main, teachers while being prepared to utilise the system for assignment hand-ins and uploading of content for distribution, and in so doing removing much of the need for printing, little use has been made of facilities such a forums, glossaries, quizzes etc. The core of our new phased approach, has been to offer in the first instance a shorter training session covering those more popular practices, with other more ambitious uses becoming the domain of later phases. Of course we shall always need to retain an introductory course for new staff, but this will now be running in parallel with our phase 2 course.

The new course includes some features such as forums, chat and glossaries that have been removed from the introductory session, but includes new training on the setting up and use of blogs and RSS feeds. My first phase 2 training session is due to start this next coming week and it will be interesting to see if resource utilisation in the specific areas finally starts to lift off. Please stay in touch for updates on this one.

OpenSim and virtual worlds

Apart from my work here at Bromley Colleg with Moodle and all that that involves, some time ago, I think it must be about 7 or 8 years now, I discovered 3DML and started to do some developing with buidling 3D worlds or Spots as they were called back then. Anyway I built a Spot, and trialed it with my students with really encouraging results. But then the world moved on, which is when Second Life appeared; if you look down the left side bar you will see the link or slurl to one of my sims.



If you pay a visit (teleport) over to my sim at Shimmer Island, you see that essentailly all I am trying to do here explore and develop Second Life as an extension to any other learning technology. Anyway more to the point, the other day I came across an interesting video on Second Life ‘surviving the hype curve’; if you are not familiar with these things heres a link you should find useful. Its certainly true for me, at least I like to think it is, that any new technology, no matter how seductive, is going to have to survive this curve before I give it serious buy-in, otherwise it could just be just a steep time consuming learning curve that takes you effectively nowhere. I must confess actually that I have not always taken my own advice on this one, so plunging head first into Second Life was for me anyway a somewhat high risk investment back then. So if you find yourself teetering on the edge of getting onvolved with SL, this video should give you some confidence in the likely persistent nature of the product.

For us here at Bromley College and for me in particualar, the use of virtual worlds is starting to play a regular part in course delivery, two projects last year 08/09 and more planned for this year 09/10. One issue that your institute may face however is in access to the resource, SL requires a number of ports to be open that your network admin people may respond to by simply shaking their collective heads in disbelief. But again be reassured, we have been running SL in one lab for around 18 months now and no problems.




Of course there other likely obstacles, such as the cost of Second Life, particlularly in the endless cash strapped world of FE. So we started work on OpenSim, or at least my collegeue Clive Gould did and we now have two regions running, one as a test and the other which will become live. Apart from the obvious fact that OpenSim is free, its other benefit is in only requiring one extra port to be open, 9000. If you would like more information on setting up OpenSim then please feel free drop an email or alternatively Clive runs a blog that holds all his install notes.