[Server-devel] MoodleMoot It/Bcn / Mozilla Camp report

[Martin Langhoff]

This is a brief continuation of the MoodleMoot report 2 weeks ago.
Lots of interesting material on the educational and technical tracks
(so it's cross-posted to educators@ and server-devel -- pick and choose :-) ) :

- Architectural discussions v2.0 - Discussed XS and general
Moodle-in-the-XS architecture and how Moodle v2.0 work fits with OLPC
plans with Petr Skodak and Martin Dougiamas. The content repositories
work in 2.0 is an area of special interest to us, and Petr is the man
on the job. We also discussed simplified user interfaces, a topic that
interests many in the community so we are likely to find help in this
area.

- Mahara & Portfolios - Spent time with developer Penny Leach (former
colleage, now UK-based). Not clear yet if Mahara has a place in the XS
but the APIs developed for Moodle/Mahara integration allow Moodle to
publish individual works by a student, which is very interesting to us
mid-long term.

- Moodle's Wiki - The wiki tool in Moodle has historically been good
pedagogically but buggy and unmaintainable. A team in the UK has built
a simple but solid replacement (ouwiki), while in parallel a team in
Catalunya has built a different implementation (nwiki) with very good
teaching tools which made it enormously popular with teachers (but
alas, with a much weaker technical implementation). Now the Catalunya
team is working on taking the core of ouwiki and adding their UI and
educational tools magic on top to make the best of both. Ludo and
Jordi Piguillem are the key people here, and we discussed how to best
tackle this.

- JClick/XOClick - I had chance to sit down with the XOClick
developers. XOClick is a pygame-based player for JClick content.
JClick is a format for educational quizzes / puzzles that is  very
popular in Spain and Latin america.
http://www.google.es/search?q=jclick - I've encouraged them to publish
their current code ASAP as there is interest from Uruguay teachers, as
seen in the OLPC-Sur list. Maria Jose Casany leads this team, and I'm
sure we'll see more from them!

- Offline Moodle - The team in Catalunya involved in xoclick and nwiki
is keen to help with Offline Moodle. One of their developers - Ruben -
will be helping part time for the next 4 months on this :-)

- K-12 techniques - Spain (specifically the Catalunya region) has an
important uptake of Moodle in K-12 and secondary schools. I had long
talks with some very active and insightful teachers -- and learned
quite a few things (before this I was more familiar with moodle in
tertiary environments). One teacher (Irene Pelegrini) has given me a
particularly compelling overview of her 'learning to use moodle and
social constructionist techniques effectively' that she teaches using
moodle. Her students are k-12 teachers and she reports that they
engage with young students fairly well using moodle, she is hoping to
send me samples and notes. I asked her about these courses being more
effective in urban areas (with more e-literate kids) and she clarified
that she works in an area that is rural and small townships (still,
this is Spain :-) ).

The content of the course is under CC license and exists in Catalan
and Spanish. This will be the base of my talk to the education team at
1CC. You can see the course at http://www.aulatres.net/campus/
'Elaboracion de unidades didacticas con Moodle'.

Also very recommended is her "Didactic uses of Wikipedia"
(unfortunately only in Catalan, but with a bit of encouragement we'll
probably find eager translators).

- More teaching moodle resources - In related news, there's a
fantastic thread in moodle.org bubbling right now on "how do you teach
moodle using moodle". Highly recommended (though it helps to know a
bit about how moodle works). Follow the link, use "login as guest" if
you don't want to register:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=96012 --

- Desert - Another highlight was Desert, a (hacky but wonderful) game
built by David Pinyol (a maths teacher). Desert is a multiplayer
strategy game, a cross between Civilization, Simcity and Starcraft. In
the game, one of the main inputs is "points" earned by participating
in moodle-based activities. However, this strategy game is chock-full
of mathematical / social machinery -- so playing the game has a life
of its own.

We often complain how the focus on education tools is sometimes in the
"look! it's in 3D!" -- I was floored by David's work which ties
together a ton of smart ideas, some maths, good imagery and good old
html forms. David reports the kids do all sorts of exploration of what
strategies can be used to beat the game, including how to maximize the
benefit of bugs they find :-)

The code will quite a bit of work to be turned into something
supportable -- and I am considering reimplementing it as a "proper"
moodle module with David's help on the game design side. Another
challenge will be to make it easy for teachers to understand and
manage.

David's homepage --
http://www.xtec.cat/~dpinol1/

Game "manual" in Catalan - mostly readable for Spanish speakers
http://www.congresointernetenelaula.es/virtual/archivosexperiencias/20080525200704explicodesertfotos.doc

- Mozilla XUL, Gears and HTML 5 - I accidentally gatecrashed mozcamp
europe and had the good luck to talk with a XUL developer about
offline webapps (google-reader style). According to him HTML 5 plus
some additional HTTP caching smarts means we can do Google-Gears-style
tricks without requiring GG. And apparently most of it is in current
gecko -- so it might pay to explore what's in the Gecko we have (and
the one we target for 9.1) and how well it works.

- Apache, mod_proxy, rproxy - In Mozcamp I met Santiago Gala from
Apache Foundation and discussed mod_proxy as an alternative for the XS
(and what we need to make itwork as a transparent proxy) and also who
would be interested in helping with rproxy (as a mod_rproxy). Talking
about moodle he talked a lot about how impressed he was with moodle
(as he was using it for a course he was teaching) and specifically
with its performance in his tiny underpowered server, handling lots of
users. Most the performance work in moodle over the last 4 years has
been mine so I was pleased :-)

  --

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff