Today we’ve gone live with TBS at mediatemple… and due to my dodgy work… the site isn’t really here ;) The move was prompted by a number of factors… predominantly:

• Hostrocket shared plans being rubbish and

• mediatemple being amazing!

Mediatemple hit the radar for us a little while back… but it was really this TalkCrunch podcast about their new GridServer system… really cool - and perfect for our various sites - particularly Sydney Storm Chasers, Two Brown Shoes and Tales From the Box. The GridServer product sounds cool - the benefits of shared hosting, but like a scalable virtual server solution. The other great thing is that they have support for ruby on rails… meaning that much crazy innovation is soon to follow! We’ll be sure to keep recording our observations - but in this early stage the signs are very positive.

Got back from the third day of the Sydney Moodle Conference this afternoon… chock full of massive ideas to take back to school. The conference actually provided a high encouragement to me to think creatively about Open Source development and software in general. One project we’ll be closely following is the Mahara ePortfolio system, being developed mainly out of Catalyst IT in Welllington, NZ. Those guys really are the stuff when it comes to developing and supporting OSS. They’re major users of Git too – can’t wait to get into my dev environment and start managing my source with git – seems like a really funky tool – and its ability to properly manage merges with Moodle CVS is absolutely GOLD!

Over the next little while I’ll be looking to profile some elements of our school’s transition of Moodle from Windows Server 2003 and IIS to Linux. I decided today (mainly under advisement from some who know better) to look at shifting our environment to PostgreSQL. I think as we move forward its better stability etc will be very strong assets to us.

Off to Flinders Christian Community College in the morning (at the airport at 6am!) to present to them on using Moodle and LMSes in general.

The to-do list keeps piling up… but it’s all so damn fun!

This year at SCIL I’ve had the opportunity - and the "challenge" - of thinking through the challenge of delivering a course in Software Development completely online.

The students in the course are Year 11 (16 and 17 year olds) and while the initial class size is small, the challenges have nevertheless been significant - although helped by some very eager students.

A real problem in the course has been the difficulty of overcoming fear and the conceptual blocks in the early stages.

Those of us who have ever learned programming know just how challenging it can be. The field is so foreign - new concepts, new vocabulary, and many new problems - that seem so hard to fix!

My initial steps led me to create code samples, screenshots, step-by-step walkthroughs… and even made heavy use of a stack of animated webcasts demonstrating the concepts… but for school students the solutions that often worked in my own learning (a Masters degree studied entirely in distance mode) just wouldn’t cut it.

In an attempt to deal with the challenge, the students and I have recently commenced a regular Monday evening Skype conversation. Initially I was hugely skeptical - hoping really just to use it to stay in contact with the students and encourage them.

Rather than that, it has actually proved to be a pivotal tool in the students’ learning. I’m able to send them an initial file for them to start from. As we work, students are able to try their code and use the text chat to exchange code samples. The synchronous ("live") nature of the discussion means that we’re able to quickly respond to the inevitable problems - that early in a developer’s learning are so difficult to solve.

At this stage it all looks positive… I’ll keep you posted!

To Moodle or not to Moodle

Friends of Two Brown Shoes would of course be familiar with our extensive support of the Moodle open source Learning Management System (LMS). Moodle has enabled thousands of educational institutions access to a near-enterprise-grade system - with an incredible and ever-growing feature set and a passionate support community.

So I guess this ringing praise begs the question: if Moodle’s so great, why are the main commercial providers (notably Blackboard) still gaining so much traction? Why is there still so much hesitation when one speaks to many so-called "experts" in the area?

One possible answer is the thinking of key educational decision-makers. All too often in the education community (particularly in K-12 environments), open source software is derided as cheap, unsupported (and unsupportable?) children’s toys. This is interesting given that Two Brown Shoes’ contact with many commercial software providers in the education sector has left such a bad taste in the mouth… why do we assume that it’s all about the software?

We know that it’s all about support

As an elearning systems manager at a Sydney school I know only too well the importance played by training and support. Merely acquiring software is never the answer to any educational need (although in many schools it perhaps temporarily satisfies some marketing need). Rather in our organisation we have had to carefully graft a scheme to train and equip teachers… and to delicately move through the selection and adoption of tools that will best meet our specific educational goals.

??? So what’s this got to do with open source vs commercial/proprietary software? Nothing… and yet everything!

…we’re still not getting it right…

The ongoing debate in the UK over the DfES position on learning platforms highlights the significant flaw in the thinking of many decision-makers in the industry. As Miles Berry points out, the DfES position emanates largely from their supplier-dependant approach. It’s true that it’s all about support… but then that’s the point, isn’t it?. Why is the belief prevalent that decisions about decisions about support are only discussions about vendors?

Separating platforms and services

LMS providers have in recent times highlighted that their systems are "platforms". That is, for them to accurately address the needs of a specific institution they must be tailored to those needs.

What is needed now is a shift in the thinking of decision-makers. The rhetoric of open systems (interoperability, freedom from vendor lock-in, etc) must be progressed to its natural end-point. Thanks to the open source community, many areas of technology are rapidly developing to the level that we can think of software as a "commodity".

The decision then for schools and universities gets back to which platform will provide the simplest, least-expensive options for configuration, customisation and support - either by in-house or external staff. Vendors seeking merely to "lock in" schools to proprietary platforms will find themselves locked out. Is there still a market for commercial software suppliers? Perhaps there is - but I think it is really time for the entire thinking on the topic to change…

So now it’s finally agreed… and my Two Brown Shoes colleague (Dann) and I will next year be at different schools.

After much thought, prayer and deliberation I’ve accepted an offer to next year head to Northern Beaches Christian School (http://www.nbcs.nsw.edu.au) to further extend and develop their e-learning frameworks.

We’re not imagining that it will hugely affect things for TBS, but it has certainly given me an increased sense of urgency in terms of getting things finished with our Moodle site (currently at http://elearning.stpauls.nsw.edu.au) and the Sharepoint-based intranet too… At this stage there’s no thought really about hand-over of things - there’s just too much still to do!

Two Brown Shoes is going to the Association of Independent Schools (AIS) ICT Integrators’ Conference on Monday… will have to remember to blog some of the key things I discover.

After being excited on the back of Marco Torres awesome presentation at the 2005 AIS ICT Integrators’ Conference last week I decided to explore more global e-learning literature.
Last week’s EdTech Brainstorm #3 (grab the podcast file here) provides a really interesting discussion of Learning Objects - and really highlights that a lot of people really don’t have a clue about LOs at all! The guys at EdTech also provide an interesting comparison of two Learning Management Systems (LMS) - Moodle and Elgg. Elgg is apparently heavily blog-based… a more "organic" structure to Moodle (which I heavily use at the moment).

This perhaps leads to an interesting discussion about the extent to which so-called *structured* LMSes overly structure the learning environment. Are systems like Moodle (and commercial alternatives like WebCT and Blackboard) constraing the learning and interactions between students??? Similar issues will no-doubt arise soon with regard to the extent to which we are able to protect the online lives of our students - particularly from each other. Will our eagerness to allow students freedom to express themselves and reflect on their learning through blogs also provide unmitigated opportunities for electronic bullying??? Will the necessary monitoring that we must provide actually mean that students aren’t interested in blogging at school???