First, a talk by a Photography teacher called Tim Schroeder, a self-confessed total non-techie, which was about his experience setting up Moodle (and an open source photo gallery called Coppermine) on his own. The good news is that he did manage both of them (using a web host that offered cPanel with Fantastico). He did say that he found the Moodle forums particularly helpful, so well done everyone. I guess this validates Martin's insistance that we keep Moodle as simple to install as possible.
The second one was called "CATs in the classroom" and was by Jean Runyon adn Thomas Gorecki from the College of Southern Maryland. This was nothing to do with Howard Miller, or Helen Foster
* These techniques were all to do with encouraging reflective learning by the students (and teachers) in very Social-Constructivist ways, and they had convincing evidence that using these techniques helped students.
* However, becuase the system these people were running (a relatively old version of Web CT), most of these activities had to be done my the studnets emailing their submissions to the teacher, and the teacher then posting a summary of all the responses to the site. (A few of the techniques did actually use a forum instead.)
* I was sitting their thinking why??? and also, that most of these activities could be implemented really well as Moodle database module templates.
* So then I thought, would this make a good Google Summer of Code project? Probably yes. And it would be really great to get some teachers who use these techniques on board, as well as a technical mentor for whatever student we get to do this. Just writing database templates might not be enough in itself to keep a geeky SoC student happy, but is someone smart was creating a bunch of templates, then they would probably have some great ideas for making the templating system easier to use and more powerful, and should be encouraged to do that.