Reaction to the 2008 Australian Moodle Moot

One of the most impressive presentations that I went to was that given by Stuart Mealor. His basic message message was that we might be able to give each student their own Moodle course which could be their personal social networking site within Moodle. Their role would be as owner of the site (redefined teacher role) and their friends would be redefined student role.

With the use of the HTML block or creating HTML pages the owner of the profile could republish parts of their face book or MySpace site or their latest tags from delicious.com or photos from flickr.

You can see an example by going to http://www.freemoodle.org and then looking for a course titled “Moodle, Web 2.0 and social-networking”. You can find this by clicking FREE COURSE in the course category then clicking “Moodle, Web 2.0 and social-networking”.

This is a proof of concept and there may be problems to do with roles and capabilities.

The take away for me was that instead of trying to make Moodle based community sites more compelling for students, we can give each student a Moodle course which they can own and can control. The idea could be extended to allow the student’s course to become their ePortfolio. The advantage is that they will be using a single environment for all their work and thus we will realise synergistic advantages from all.

I’m imagining three levels of Moodle courses;
1. The academic course owned by an individual teachers in a subject area
2. A program or special interest community e.g. first year education students which would be facilitated by a community manager
3. And the student’s personal Moodle site which could be their social networking site or their personal learning environment or their ePortfolio.

Again, I highly recommend Stuart Mealor’s site at http://www.elearning.org.nz/

[Source: Peter Evans Blog]
Last modified: Sunday, 27 November 2011, 1:53 PM