The reason why I raise this question is firstly because I see moodle as being of immense
benifit to our educational institutions.
The age when a group of people ("students") sit around in rooms listening to a person
("a teacher") speak must surely be coming to an end. It is now possible, with the aid
of this system, to arrange for students to receive a transcript of our "lectures" (in document,
power point presentation, audio and even video forms), to assess the access to such
materials and more importantly to the subsequent discussion of these materials both
inside and outside of class. Armed with a tool such as this, MOODLE, we can bring about
a revolution in form and meaning of education, make education available to a much
wider audience, increase learner participation, increase the quality of education measured
in (new) terms of the reduction of the gap between the learner and the "learned." Not
meaning to sound overblown, we stand at the door to a new era, redefining what it is
to learn and to teach. (Yeah!) And largely thanks to the efforts, in our case, of one man:
Martin Dougiamas.
More specifically, there are over a thousand educators at my institution alone that could be
benefitting from the use of this system. There are a innumerable ways in which these
educators alone could, through cooperating in MOODLE course development and in
educating each other in the use of this system, advance the education that we provide
in equally innumerable ways. And that is only at one institution. There are tens or hundreds
of institutions that are and will become involved in participating in what could be a global
MOODLE revolution! The exclamation mark is for emphasis - I am kidding no one here.
More specifically and prosaically, I would like to consider the ways in which which we
might facilitate our cooperation since that is really going to be the deciding factor in the
the progress of the revolution that we are participatining. The following suggestions are
really about knitty gritty. But all the same, facilitating cooperation is so moot....down to
the details.
1) Who are the people that are experts already? By reading through all the posts one
can get an idea but is there any way that this can become clearer? Would anyone like
to nominate the experts, and in what fields?
2) Are there ways in which experts might be ranked, through the use of mutual grading,
the number of posts, to specific forums, that might give and indication to learners here,
and an incentive to experts here?
3) Would it be beneficial to Martin, to assign roles, to create or allow for the systematic
creation of "administrators" - perhaps as simple as people who have posted more than
X times, people that have successfully answered user questions. And then, or otherwise,
to encourage and invite such members to recieve enquiries from multiple topics on
multiple forums, in such a way as to increase such members expertise, kudos, and our
benefit from their knowledge. By the way I use the word "kudos" thinking of the systems
in place at
http://www.proz.com/
and affiliate sites.
4) Are the categories of forums here representative of the categories of questions? Is there
a demand for new categories? New forums?
5) Do participants know of other communities from which we can learn? I am thinking of
that supporting (the much less revolutionary weblog software) movable type
http://www.movabletype.org/support/
6) All in all and in sum, what can we do to contribute, while protecting Martin's position?
(I will be getting out my credit card...of course!)
With due respect to the wonderful MOODLE community, in the hope that it grows and
grows.
Tim
Timothy Takemoto
Yamaguchi