The road is open

In spite of the trials and tribulations of international travel, I actually had a wonderful time in Elmshorn, Germany this week during the two day Moodlemoot event. I met a lot of smart people, and engaged in some very valuable conversations about learning, technology, culture and life in general. The Sounds of the Bazaar Internet radio guys were also present and I managed to squeeze in a live interview on Day 1 with Klaus Rummler on the 'future of learning', as we stood outside in the spring sunshine. My opening keynote focused on openness in education, and I made a call for more open scholarship and open educational practices. Because I was 'preaching to the converted' (the audience was made up of around 300 teachers and other professionals who were already sold on the idea of using open source tools such as Moodle and Mahara in their work), my presentation was very well received, and there were some excellent, thoughtful questions at the end. My slides are here.

It was also a great pleasure to hear two other keynote speakers, Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder, who spoke live via Skype from Perth in Australia, and Max Woodtli, a Swiss academic who spoke on 'Visible Learning' - highlighting the work of New Zealand academic John Hattie. Although Dougiamas's presentation was marred by technical difficulties, he was nevertheless able to make his point, via a series of technical illustrations, including the announcement that a set of new mobile phone apps for Moodle will be released in the coming weeks. Max Woodtli was more pedagogical in his focus, talking about the most effective approaches to securing good learning outcomes. Although he spoke in German, I had the excellent services of Stephan Rinke, translating simultaneously for me. Woodtli showed how through a vast range of metastudies ranging from primary to tertiary education research, distance education and online web based methods have no more impact than traditional teaching, and in some cases have poorer outcomes. It is only when teachers forge strong working relationships with their students, and promote the use of methods such as concept mapping, reciprocal teaching and other active forms of problem based learning, that learning outcomes are strong and long lasting. How we transfer those methods effectively into digital learning environments will determine the future of learning platforms such as Moodle, he said.

My thanks go to all who organised Moodlemoot, and in particular, Sigi Jakob-Kühn, who invited me to speak at such an enjoyable event.

Image source by Stephan Rinke

The road is open by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.