Comparisons and advocacy

Word got out that the new version of the OLPC School Server is ready and it includes Moodle and look at what happened: http://blog.laptop.org/2008/11/18/g1g1-the-xo-is-the-best-selling-computer-on-amazon/

Hmmm, correlation... causation?

Anyway, people here excited at being able to run more deployments like the one in Ethiopia - http://www.reactivated.net/weblog/archives/2008/11/one-laptop-one-child-change-the-world/

In more actually Moodle centered news, in the last few days I've had a good chance to talk to several people in the OLPC education team. Several of them were quite anti-moodle, having seen it used in very directed, instructional ways. Exploring their concerns took quite a while, and a lot of effort.

From those discussions, I am now drafting plan of what changes I need to make to Moodle for it to mesh into a social constructivist practice... with kids 6-12. The education team here is a hard-to-satisfy client but I think now have a good idea of their requirements and general goals, and they are now confident that Moodle can do this too.

Interestingly Moodle's general flexibility means that they've used it as part of very directed instructional practice. They were surprised to hear about MD's paper and general approach, and it took some good effort to convince them that it wasn't just talk.

Once they got into saying "well, if it could do X, Y and Z then it could work for us", that the mood changed, because they were all the time asking for things that moodle could do with some configuration or with a small amount of hacking.