Technorati Tags: moodle moodlemoot conference sanfrancisco
Overall, I had a great time at the Moodle Moot in SF. I don't often get a chance to "get my geek on" and it was nice to hang out with some truly great people (and did I mention our stellar dinner at Boulevard?) as well as be an adult (comparatively speaking of course) and not sit in the kiddie section for awhile.
The conference itself was great. My only complaint (besides the fact that my East Coast body clock was done with learning by 3pm) was the unreliable internet connection at the conference center. It was amazing to me how frustrating that was. I guess in the future I should BYOB (Bring Your Own Bandwidth like Wes Fryer suggests) if I need to depend on getting things on the internet done.
However, I did get a chance to see some really great people talk including the man himself, Martin Dougiamas who gave a great Keynote. I was trying to describe the transition to Moodle the other day to someone and I'm glad it jived with what Martin had to say. I think that other LMS tools were created in a vacuum as it were, they knew they wanted online courses, but had not the experience to know what actually worked. This is why I like Moodle, at the heart it is a social constructionist epistemology (which was said more than once in the keynote). In other words, it took the pedagogy of how people learn and built a tool to help facilitate that rather than the other way around. The tool fits the way people "should" teach online, rather than the other way around. I like that Martin is not only concerned with the tool itself, but how people teach with and want to better education.
And on that note - this is the end of my Moodle Moot postings - onto my next conference - NECC.
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