Janine’s blog

Came across the product Community Server (a .net based product) this evening- noticed that Hobart College are using it. Interestingly,  some Google searching quickly found some blog and forum posts about SharePoint integration with this. The site itself has a product development roadmap which full integration with SharePoint (ie install SPS then community server on top) scheduled for 2006. 

http://communityserver.org/i/roadmap.aspx

Discussion http://codebetter.com/blogs/paul.laudeman/archive/2005/05/16/63246.aspx

Later…..

I thought this looked familiar. Turns out the www.hive.org is based on it - I remember this from a Net*Working conference a few years ago. This is exciting!

Individual sites are listed by self nomination on the Moodle site. A search on “k-12″ reveals the following results

http://www.google.com/u/moodle?q=k-12&domains=moodle.org&sitesearch=moodle.org

From here I have so far found these to be useful as feeback from users:

1. Themes for Primary schools http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=41224

2. Implementation model for introducing Moodle into K-12 school http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=42562&MoodleSession=882ffb62f70882aee9a7266a9159dec3 (March 2006)

3. From Mr Moodle himself “As you know I was cautious about starting this forum [K-12]because 90% of how Moodle is or can be used in younger-age schools is covered by other forums on this site. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=28568 (August 2005)

4. And this one which is a work in progress being developed in the Moodle wiki http://docs.moodle.org/en/Teaching_Best_Practices_(K-12)

5. Teaching Ideas - Primary platform by Miles Berry (May 2006) - from a practitioner who has successfully implemented Moodle in a grade 6 classroom
 

An 2005 article written by Stephen Corich for a New Zealand journal comparing Blackboard and Moodle from the perspective of a long term user who is facing migrating courses. In a nutshell, he found that Moodle could do what Blackboard did and in some cases more. Importantly, 80% of students preferred it. An excerpt from the paper sums up thus:

“During the evaluation, the writer moved from being a skeptic, who believed that Moodle adoption would be an unwise move, to an enthusiastic supporter of Moodle, despite its relative immaturity as a product. The way that Moodle encourages instructors to organize materials sequentially and the tools that Moodle offers instructors and students to encourage regular student participation in course activities, make it an attractive proposition as an institutional solution for supporting e-learning. The claims that Moodle was developed from the ground up with the principles of social constructivism in mind seem to be justified. The writer was so impressed with the Moodle approach that he has decided to stop developing the LMS that he has been using successfully in an intranet environment and move to Moodle.”

http://www.naccq.ac.nz/bacit/0303/2005Corich_LMS.htm

Published in January 2006, this article cites the Blackboard/WebCT as a monopolistic move, mentions Moodle’s potential K-12 and lists other trends such as podcasting. A useful list.

http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=122

Following on from visitor this week. London Grid for Learning - echoes a lot of the learning communities within learning communities concepts. Interesting to see their newly designed homepage compared to the previous version. The new one is very simple - resources, staffrooms and communities, with an overarching personal menu bar across the top.

http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/

I came across this article by Michael Coghlan from a couple of years ago - it appealed to me as an interesting short read that highlights some very pertinent points about facilitation and using LMS environments for constructivist learning.

http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/nz/ICCE_paper.htm