As Steve has comprehensively blogged on this already: day1, day2 I’ll just add a few comments on e-portfoilos and some more stuff coming our way from the OU.
E-Portfolios
These have always been on the edge of my radar but they were highlighted in Martin Dougiamas’ keynote for v2 and again in Niall Sclater’s excellent review of the thinking on the future of VLEs / PLEs. Without really planning to I ended up spending most of day 2 looking at portfolios. The idea with regard to Moodle is that external E-portfolio systems will plugin to Moodle allowing for data to pass from Moodle to the E-portfolio.
So what is an e-portfolio and how might it be used? For me the best starting point is how the OU have named their own home-grown system: MyStuff which is an open source plugin to moodle to be released soon. It is intended as a personal space for students to create, organise & store their ‘stuff’: files, links etc and allows students to make them available to who they wish. The other system featuring highly at the Moot was Mahara (open source from NZ) which seems to go further and includes a CV Builder and social software tools. I liked the way the Mahara team were talking about developing links to other systems such as YouTube & Flickr, so not everything has to be in Mahara.
I went to a Moodle-Mahara integration session and Enovation (an Irish Moodle partner) have already developed this bridge. It has added “Add to portfolio” links to Discussion posts, assignments and quizzes and will be available to all in v2. I like this idea of being able to provide students with their own spaces, linked to, but separate from the VLE. Mahara pilot anyone?
Coming soon (from the OU)
I attended a couple of sessions that highlighted stuff the OU have developed. Firstly they have done lots of work on the Quiz navigation / submission. This will eventually be included in the core code (for v2 I think). It includes a WebCT-style panel showing you which questions have been answered and a summary page before you submit and better options for instant feedback.
Also available now from the OU is a new Resources Page – a Moodle resource that allows an editor to setup an index of files, links, feeds etc. This would allow you you take stuff off the homepage and i can see this working well. The other good one I thought was the “Calendar / Planner / Study” format for the homepage that they have developed, it just gives you more options for structuring your homepage.
The first e-portfolio system that got integrated with Moodle was Elgg. The integration was made through a block developed by the same team that developed Mahara, but they decided to quit and develop their own portfolio tool, closely related to Moodle: Mahara.
Right now, I think that Elgg is a better tool for the students to build their own space with their own communities, and what is more: their own “personal learning environment” (PLE). Elgg is a e-portfolio tool including blog, social network, and integration with other tools with rss/atom feeds. The Mahara team started just linking Elgg to Moodle, and then decided to build a similar product, with very similar features. Anyway the Elgg project started in 2004 and has an online community of thousands of users, admins and developers at http://elgg.org and more than 50 plugins. The Mahara team is a governmet project in New Zealand involving 4 universities, and much money.
Hi David,
Thanks for the comments on Elgg. I remember reading about the Moodle-Elgg integration http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/clt/?p=123 but haven’t seen one in action and I didn’t come across it at Moodle Moot but if the same developers have moved onto Mahara that might explain it!
We piloted Elgg here with some PhD students in 2006. However the feedback on the interface wasn’t great but from my perspective at least, this was dealt with later that year in a new version. Coincidently, someone was showing me OREMI this morning – an Elgg installation at Swansea University: https://oremi.swan.ac.uk/