I’m becoming more and more enamored with Moodle the more I dig into it. And the discussion of late on the Moodle blogs forum has been nothing short of amazing, I think. (Here’s the feed address if you want to follow it.) For instance, the idea that we could use Moodle as a platform for eportfolios has been making the rounds of late, and Eastern Kentucky University is doing just that. Here’s a snippet of the conversation:
When trying to envision how to set-up an eportfolio for students from within Moodle, I kept running into problems until I stopped thinking about how to set this up for Moodle “students” and started thinking about setting it up for Moodle “teachers”.
What we will be doing this Fall is creating a Moodle course for each of our students to use to create their eportfolio. We will make each student a “teacher” in his/her own course and will not enroll students…access to the eportfolios will be via guest access and each eportfolio owner can require an enrollment key or not to view their eportfolio. We are in the process of customizing the language files…renaming “course” to “eportfolio”, “Teacher” to “Portfolio Owner”, “Student” to “Portfolio Visitor” etc.
Now I know that may not have much relevance if you’re not a Moodleite (Moodleist? Moodler?), but the semantics just blow me away. It comes close, I think, to this new model of learning that we’re looking at, the idea that as learners, we are all to some extent going to be the teachers of our own courses, take ownership of our own learning within the context of a larger social network that supports us.
Have I mentioned lately how much I love the transparency of all of this early thinking about how we can use these tools in new and interesting ways? Way too much fun.
I’ve been having my students create Moodle courses for a couple years now. Several have spontaneously also wanted to use them as portfolios. You can see a few of them here: http://moodle521.occ.utk.edu/course/category.php?id=40 It’s worked pretty well. The other tool that I’ve become excited about for creating web stuff is Drupal. With tools like Moodle and Drupal (http://drupal.ord). I’m very nearly convinced that Normal People don’t need to learn to use tools like Frontpage or Dreamweaver (or NVU and Bluefish, their OSS cousins). Though Drupal is a blog, I’ve been using it as a general purpose content management system (http://learn.occ.utk.edu/).
Will, I believed in Moodle until I saw a new content management system called “Plone.” Plone (www.plone.org), while also being free, is incredibly easy to setup and navigate. You can read about our efforts in using Plone in educational settings online at http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/blog/archives/02-11-2005_02-10-2006.htm#323
as well as find some examples. I’m particularly excited because Moodle–as wonderful as it is at first glance–can be clunky and get in the way of sharing information. Plone on the other hand, is incredibly easy to get started with, customize, and more. I urge you to take a look at it before making a final decision.
Keep up the awesome blogging!
A recent convert to Plone,
Miguel Guhlin
http://www.mguhlin.net/blog