ENDAPT - Electronic Mentoring

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Research Presentation by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach on "Electronically Mentoring to Develop Accomplished Professional Teachers."

• Choosing your mentor based on posted background for 1-to-1 or group mentorship
• Providing Mentor-only space for them to collaboarate
• Almost all asynchronous and a closed community - with "guest speakers"
• Heavily facilitated in begining, then became behind the scenes - need a good community leader
• Mentors were well versed in online communities ffrom TLN
• Started with structured questions then evolved to Just-in-Time Q&A
• Did alot to build trust and building a community of practice
• Multiple directions of conversation and support
• 110 is when they met critical mass

Edubloggercon Social Networking & Professional Development

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I enjoyed the first session on Social Networking & Professional Development. Steve Hargadon did a great job of sharing what he has gone through with Edubloggers & Classroom 2.0 as well as Wes Fryer with K-12 Online. I'm glad they didn't just talk about the tools, but the opportunities of a community to come together. However, I wish they could have elaborated a bit more on how they keep a social network thriving? Do you just wait to reach critical mass? DO you have to constantly be the mentor? When can the community take over or will it just fizzle out.......

Edubloggercon - The Beginning

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Its weird to be in a room full of strangers - but yet they are somewhat familiar to you. I was so excited to be at NECC early for the Edubloggercon, yet I am so intimidated by a room full of people and the fact I have no one to sit next to. The morning starts out well, except for the tone of "fight the man" against the Person recording team. Several people, including Ewan McIntosh & Wil Richardson are upset about the "corporate presence" at our fringe festival. I'm not sure what I think, except that they are a bit of a distraction, probably more so for the edutech celebrities than myself.

I trying to upload pictures to my flickr account of the day - so far the hotel internet is not cooperating. Will try later...

Traveling to NECC

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I have finally arrived in San Antonio. Its weird to travel by yourself, I don't do it that often. If I'm not with family, at least I am traveling with people from work - so it is a bit strange to be doing all of this by myself. Now, please do not get me wrong, I am not one of those people that can't do anything by themselves - according to my family I am fiercely independent - its is just weird to eat dinner by yourself. I have no idea how some people travel so much and do this all the time.

Anyways, I was thinking of the last time I was at NECC - in 2006 (I missed Atlanta due to the arrival of Evan) when it was in San Diego. I did all the typical first-time things. I overbooked myself, I went to every single session I could and wore myself ragged. I had a great time meeting so many people and became so inspired by what I heard.

I look forward to the conversations not only at NECC, but at all the "fringe offerings."

Closing thoughts on Moodle Moot in SF

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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.

Moodle and Social Networking

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Since the focus of my research lately has been Social Networking - I was intrigued to see a presentation on how Moodle & Social Networking could be brought together. Now I believe Social Networking is bigger than just one tool (i.e. Facebook) and I align it more with the PLN (Personal Learning network - see great post by Jeff Utech) way of thinking and I was happy to see that this session took that same viewpoint.

One of things I worry about is "throwing" too many tools at my faculty. It takes so long for them to overcome some of the hurdles of tool acquisition, that I would rather use an existing tool to do some things. However, forcing a tool to do something it is not intended to do does not always work out.

So Stuart Mealor (whom as I mentioned previously was my favorite speaker from the conference) decided to use Moodle as an aggregator of sorts (reminds me a bit of something like pageflakes or iGoogle to a certain degree). He uses a Moodle Course to "house" all of his social networking or PLN info. Since I am constantly looking for a way to encourage our students to create a web presence for themselves (and not necessarily only through html coding) I really like this idea - but how did he do it?

• He created a new role for students as a very restricted teacher and called this "owner" (I like this idea, because in the past (like with the Student Portfolio Project) I have created another instance of Moodle and stripped out some of the tools to acomplish this)
• Each student gets their own course to use as a homepage

The following blocks or add-ins are used:

• Shared bookmarks add-in (like del.icio.us)
• Polls
• Multi-movie
• Quick Mail
• iFrames (displays a site inside of Moodle - just an html trick)
• Flash
  
• Lightbox Gallery
• Explode (2.0 update - feed aggregation library)
  

Here is his example course - you will need to view it with Guest Access http://www.elearning.org.nz/course/view.php?id=19

Moodle Teacher Certificate

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The Moodle Teacher Certificate Program is very similar to traditional technology certification programs (think MS Office). However, it looks like a great way to get to all the guts of Moodle (although I wish they would offer a Train-the-Trainer, it is always good to see things from the perspective of your students).

The Basics
Cost - $400 AUS
Time - Approx. 12 weeks (8 weeks of classwork - 4 weeks of exam prep)
Who - Moodle Partner (in the US this is Remote-Learner)

What I like about this program is that it assigns a "Mentor-Assessor" to help you through the process. The classwork mainly consists of creating an entire class that demonstrates your understanding of the "Moodle Standards" of the curriculum. You also have to write a reflection on the pedagogical reasons for doing certain things inside of Moodle. I like this because it seems to elevate this certification above your standard certification program.

I'm seriously considering going for this, not just for myself, but to see what I can pull from it to teach my faculty.

Stuart Mealor (the presenter) is also the Global Certification Manager for the MTC. He was probablly one of the best speakers at the conference. He obviously knows a good deal about Moodle, but is really trying to take it to the next level.