scholar @ jklmelton

Since I was away from teaching and researching in Japan for a year, I have missed out on seeing what’s new with the learning management system (LMS) moodle (most tertiary institutions in the U.S. have a commercial LMS like Blackboard already in place; no need for people to look for their own solutions). JALTCALL 2007 was able to fill my moodle jones in a positive way.

There were three moodle workshops on Saturday and a moodle reader presentation on Sunday, and I’ll try my best to do them justice here. The morning workshop was put together by William (Bill) Burgos of manabu3, a moodle partner. He talked about adding multimedia files to moodle’s quizzes (the quiz function is one of the modules in moodle). Bill described some of the basics for file sizes and manipulation, and recommended some freeware and/or open source applications to help out. He demonstrated uploading multimedia files of various kinds and showed us how to link to them for particular questions in quizzes. He showed a nifty trick by adding a space character so the file is embedded into the question itself. This trick is on my list of things to try out. We were all able to log into a sample course and try some things out for ourselves. We were also provided with a helpful handout and a CD chock full of material. Thanks for the cool workshop, Bill!

The afternoon session started off with a great workshop on adding to/modifying/tweaking moodle for your own purposes. This was a fast-paced workshop, so my notes (and often the handout) do not include a name for an attribution. At one level, modules can be added, deleted, and modified to suit users’ needs. Some of the modules with an English-teacher-in-Japan background include Hot Potatoes, lecture feedback, project, and self-study. I do not understand why a Hot Potatoes (HP) module has been created. HP restricts users to quizzes which are open to the public only; why bother with this when the moodle quiz module works fine? Paul Daniels talked about his development of several modules. The presentation module allows teachers to convert their PowerPoint presentations to Flash for easy viewing. The media blog module adds voice recording and other media support to the blog modules. He also talked about seating chart and freemail modules. I believe none of these are quite ready for primetime, but they are well on their way. Gordon Bateson then took the floor to show off some of his very, very cool tweaks. How many times have you spent teaching your students to register with moodle using a capital letter for the first letter of both first and last names and ended up with all small case or all large case? Gordon’s cool tweak not only changes it to the proper format, but it also eliminates the long vowels that are unnecessary in romanized Japanese. Gordon got a big oooohhh during the workshop for that one. He also had a tweak for unique cell phone addresses that is a kind of override for moodle’s email address check. To be honest, at this point, my head was spinning from all I had seen in this workshop, and my notes come to an abrupt end. But if you want to see some of this stuff, the workshop materials are available at: http://englishforum.sgu.ac.jp/downloads/jaltcall2007/. I have to conclude this section with a two thumbs up on this presentation, as it was the first that I saw that went far beyond the “moodle has forums, and quizzes, and…” so typical of recent JALTCALL conferences. At the party on Saturday, I put in a request to the JALTCALL powers-that-be to have more of these higher level presentations and workshops. I am always ready to take my skills to the next level. The future indeed looks bright for the moodle platform.

The final moodle workshop of the day was by Peter Ruthven-Stuart on how to get moodling. We got two handouts on moodle and one for a reading activity, and lots of hands-on time with moodle; my notes are sparse on Peter’s presentation for that reason. The first handout (sorry, I cannot find a link to it) describes in clear detail (without the technical parts) what one should do to get a moodle installation up and running. If you don’t know how to do this, you might want to contact him to get his handout. The second handout walked everyone through logging into a moodle course that was already set up. Peter set up accounts beforehand with user names, passwords (that were the same as the user names), and some fake names. For anyone setting up their own workshop, this seemed to be a great way to do it. Once users logged in, they could change both their fake names and their passwords. I’m guessing these were all created in a text or spreadsheet file and uploaded later. We were then led through some of the many activities that were set up for us: various pre-reading activities for a short article, vocabulary-building activities, quizzes, and many others. All in all, it was a great workshop, jam-packed with lots of hands-on activities.

On Sunday, Tom Robb, of Kyoto Sangyo University, talked about the development of his moodle reader module. This module, not yet ready for prime time, is designed to help students keep track of what they have read as well as give teachers a way to check students’ progress. Students will be able to use the module to choose the book they read and take a quiz on the book’s content. Students scoring more than 60% will receive credit and be awarded points based on the level of the book. Tom is working with publishers to use the tests that publishers have already created. This module could go a long towards helping students and teachers keep an eye on reading progress.

Whew! I guess that’s about all I have on moodle for now…