CanMoot 11

I’m a virtual attendee at the Canadian Moodle Moot in Edmonton. Connecting via Elluminate from my classroom in the NWT.

First day of http://moodlemoot.ca was a pre-conference. Great prezi re on-line learning by George Siemens and Terry Anderson this morning from AU “Soft is Hard & Hard is Easy”. Here is, greatly condensed, my take. Hard-coded technologies are constrictive, relatively easy to program tightly structured learning. Once students have learned navigation, they are generally comfortable for the duration. Soft is open, offers vast options, does not lend itself to defining linear progression, and tends to be difficult to design. Soft allows learning to be responsive, go in any direction learner needs, and relies more on open tools and resources than “hard” LMS. Students are constantly faced with adaptations and new tools and technologies that interlink, however the affordances are much more numerous with this approach.

In the afternoon I joined the Social Media Boot Camp with a few people sitting by my computer to see what we could learn. Think Boot Camp as in military. In rapid succession we rushed through a whirlwind tour of Several Things Google, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and Delicious to name a few. Right off the top we were sent off to create a new Gmail account – to pretend we didn’t already have one – and shown how that gave access to Calendar, Reader, and Blogger. By the end we’d covered an awful lot of social media sites, to my delight FB was hardly mentioned. Impossible to do it all at once, but a great eye-opener to what’s available. The last part of the session turned to a discussion of moodle plugins and 2.0 migration.

To borrow a phrase from the Canadian Prime Minister, we greet the news of a Conservative Majority with “somber satisfaction”. – yes that has nothing to do with Moodle. Just goes to show how twitter got it wrong.