Learning the World » Conferences & Events

Tagging Moodle Hack/Doc Fest

Kenneth Newquist — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:05:45 +0000

I’m currently at Kenyon College attending Moodle Hack/Doc Fest II, a liberal arts Moodle coding and documentation ad hoc workshop. We’re tracking our posts/bookmarks/photos etc. using the tag ‘moodlehackdoc’.

You can find my del.icio.us bookmarks for the event here:

http://del.icio.us/tag/moodlehackdoc

ITS Coffee Break for 10/26/2007

Kenneth Newquist — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:11:30 +0000

On this edition of the ITS Coffee Break, Ken Newquist and guest host Jason Alley (filling in for Courtney Bentley) talk about the HighEdWebDev conference, innovative ways that schools are using GIS on campus and announce a new brownbag about understanding the Interent. In Tech News they fill people in on an update to the popular Quicksilver fast application launcher for Mac OS Xand contemplate a CSI-spawned murder in Second Life while in Help News they offer suggestions for getting more out of search in Firefox and streamlining your Del.icio.us bookmarking experience.

Download the MP3 directly
Subscribe to the Soapbox podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
Subscribe to the Soapbox feed via iTunes

iTunes U Presentation at MacLearning.org

Kenneth Newquist — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:53:53 +0000

I participated in a webcast on authentication and authorization to iTunes U at MacLearning.org today. Presenters included:

Eric Bailey, Senior Engineering Mgr. iTunes U, Apple Inc.
Ken Newquist, Web Application Specialist, Lafayette College
Paul Edminster, Web Manager, Gonzaga University

I focused on how we tied our Novell eDirectory-based LDAP into iTunes U while Paul talked about how his school integrated iTunes U into Blackboard via a building block. Finally, Eric talked about basic structure and credentials within iTunes U as well as the nifty new web services.

A video of the webcast will be posted to the site in 2 weeks or so; I’ll post a link when it’s available.

Moodle: Student Reactions

Kenneth Newquist — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:16:22 +0000

Humboldt State

Forerunner in Moodle work.
Conducted student survey: Blackboard vs. Moodle: A Comparison of Satisfaction with Online Teaching and Learning Tools

Experiences at Amherst

Some students liked having everything e-mailed to them, others hated it.
Students said documents were easier to find in Moodle than in Blackboard, because it was easier to figure out where teachers put things.
Students strongly liked the idea of using a learning management system.
Students liked Moodle more, but not overwhelmingly so.
Results mirror those elsewhere. Students generally like moodle more, organization is better, makes more sense to them.

Moodle: Faculty Perspectives

Kenneth Newquist — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:52:35 +0000

Faculty perspectives on Moodle from Smith Colleges.

German Instructor

Upload image galleries – zip, then upload, then upload.
Used German glossery — items submitted by student, edited by teacher. Useful for correcting student errors but time consuming.

Psych Instructor

Students tend to ignore side columns.
Time outs uploading files from off campus via dialup.
Problem with calculating percentage grades in moodle because of optional grades.
Fractional grades also a problem, but may be solved in Moodle 1.7.
Problems with excel export.

Moodle: Introduction & Highlights

Kenneth Newquist — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:47:57 +0000

UCLA, Open University are now using Moodle.
Moodle support offered through Moodle.com, which is something I need to look into. Having a Moodle authority to talk to would be great.
demo.moodle.org provides a working test version of Moodle that gets initialized every hour. Good place to go break things.
Lesson module looks very interesting, allowing for students to assess one another. I need to try setting up one of these.
The wiki module is much more robust than I thought, allowing for detailed histories and most of the wiki tools you’d expect.

NERCOMP: Moodle Interest Group

Kenneth Newquist — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:38:00 +0000

Just in the nick of time (since we go live with our Moodle pilot on Monday), I’m attending a Moodle Interest Group conference hosted by NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computing Program). It’s a mix of basic introductory information (much of which we already know) with good experiential information from faculty and IT people who have it deployed.