The MoodleMoot in Oklahoma, sponsored by Metrotech, was a good conference. I met John Isner, Jonathan Moore, and Anthony Borrow. I already knew Matt Campbell and Michelle Moore, and I was glad to see them again. I saw Nicholas Connault and Martin Dougiamas on Elluminate, but missed Helen. She was on at the same time I was giving a presentation, so I was disappointed!
With respect to Martin's presentation, we heard some interesting information about the roadmap and some general statistics about how moodle was used, growth patterns, etc. I just thought it was interesting to see him and hear his voice. I was glad to get a little more info on 2.0.
We got an important heads-up from Anthony Borrow. Moodle 2.0 will be using some new libraries that will require some re-writes of 3rd party plugins. Since some are not as well maintained as others, there is a potential for affecting a lot of moodle sites around the world. Anthony did say that he did not think the required alterations would be extensive. We depend on the maintainers at our institution, not having an in-house developer, so we will be watching this issue with a keen eye.
I saw a copy of John Isner's new book on roles management. I am not sure it is available yet, but will post here when it is. I would expect it to be an excellent resource. We are not too into roles, since we don't use much/any other than default. But that is something we might want to experiment with.
I think our big interest this year is going to be outcomes. We will have to figure out how to get sitewide data out of it through queries to the database. Moodle has few reporting tools at this time. I might mess around with myodbc. I don't know how to use it, but I should learn!!
Two posts about the moot on my blog:
- http://awyatt.edublogs.org/2008/06/24/moodlemoot-oklahoma-day-1/
- http://awyatt.edublogs.org/2008/06/25/moodlemoot-oklahoma-day-2/
This wasn't part of the conference, but I noticed that Dmitry has recently released a 1.9 attendance. You might want to take a look. That is a 3rd party block that we want to continue to use. We will be installing and bug testing on the 1.9 server between now and August.
Keywords: attendance, moodle 2.0, moodlemoot, roadmap
Comments
This gives me a horrible feeling of foreboding. I'd like to use some new plugin modules this year such as Feedback and Attendance, but having been badly burned in the past with modules like ULPGC Assignment which thoroughly bust the subsequent Moodle version I'm loath to shoot myself in the foot again :-<