Laptops are only half of the equation

Someone got it: ‘laptops are only half of the equation’  Quote: “I think we’re on the edge of a real inflection point where the hardware becomes so cheap that Web learning is really throughout the schools,” Hastings said. “But what I noticed is there’s really not that many people working on the software.” BTW Hastings is an interesting person …

The blog post about Hastings endeavours made me think about where ‘educational software’ is going to come from in the future. It’s quite clear that dealing with an open source product (eg Moodle) is different to dealing with a proprietary product (eg PebblePad) or Web 2.0 services (Matthew Allan’s list of applications). Will be interesting to see which form is going to dominate the market in 10 years and how universities adapt to these changes.

Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios – Beginner’s Guide

This could almost be considered a second beginning – last post is already 10 month old. Well, I am not necessarily less busy now but I agreed to review a guide for Mahara 1.2 – and here I am giving it a go …  Interestingly enough, I had to revisit Mahara over the past day’s anyway and therefore skim reading the guide was a useful refresher. There were also quite a few things I hadn’t been aware of or at least not in the context the book talked about it. Hence, a first conclusion – even though the title says “Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios – Beginner’s Guide”, chances are you find something new regardles of whether you are a beginner or not.  Anyway, most people would acknowledge that there are many shades of gray between beginners, experts and masters – and according to Dreyfus, the latter wouldn’t even need a Guide.

The book is nicely structured, which means (for me) that the book cares about readers who have questions and cannot read a book from cover to cover to find the answer. Every chapter combines some prose (purpose of a given ePortfolio, benefits you can expect if you do x, y or z, etc) with some hands-on action. You could even do a quiz in each chapter – but then I am not a big quiz fan. However, it seems a good feature if you just skim read a chap and want to know whether you missed to understand an important concept.

Another useful thing is the way three different case studies are build up throughout the book. Each case study is used to look at Mahara from a different angle (school, corporate training, and vocational training).  Personally, I was looking forward to learn more about the possibilities to drive assessment and I found an 11 step process on page 195 … The more important thing, however was an explanation on how to use course groups as a way by which learners can submit parts of their ePortfolio which can’t be changed until a tutor or lecturer has given his/her feedback and released it back to the student. In the end I believe it’s a highly recommendable book for beginners and one can only hope that there will be a similar guide for more advanced users of Mahara soon.

Disclosure:  I got a free copy of this book to review but you could browse the book on Amazon    ;)

Does your LMS talk to your ePortfolio?

Hello all (and Happy Easter), Seven month ago I had some interesting discussions about the differences and interdependcies between a Learning Management System like Moodle and an ePortfolio. Now we are a step closer to the possibility of giving students their own space and simply pull parts of their ePortfolios (eg Mahara) into Moodle for marking and feedback. If you had already some experience with putting together a course in Moodle you will appreciate the familiarity of configuring an ePortfolio (Mahara) assignment. This has also a big impact on managing ‘Assessment ePortfolios’, ie there is no need to manage things twice, i.e. only one list of students, one way of accessing assignment submissions and one place where to calculate final grades. If this sounds interesting you may have a look at mark’s screencast http://www.markdrechsler.com/?p=144  

And there is good news for the PP ePortfolio as well – students can now send their postings, blog entries or assignments directly from Moodle to PP. And if you haven’t seen it yet – Shane made a screencast for this: http://www.pebblepad.com.au/moodle.block.html  

Bottom line, in the future we need two way communication between Moodle and the ePortfolio. Teachers want to use only one system for grading and managing their classes and students should only have to type a blog entry once and be able to re-use it in their ePortfolios. So far Mahara does the first thing and PP the latter … Of course, Moodle 2.0 will change all this but then, it’s not like I will get my hands on Moodle 2.0 in a ‘near’ future