E-learning Curve Blog at Edublogs

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of the E-Learning Curve Blog, I strongly advocate the Constructivist approach to learning, and the use of open-source technologies to develop and distribute e-learning materials. You’ll also know that my Learning Management System of choice is Martin Dougiamas’ Modular Object-Orientated Learning Environment (Moodle), as this particular platform tick both those boxes.

As we come to the end of 2008, I have finally gotten around to do begin undertaking some essential housekeeping tasks on my website, michaelhanley.ie.

Among those activities is a long-overdue upgrade to Moodle 1.9 -  I’ve been itching to get an opportunity to investigate and use these new features and enhancements:

• Social networking functionality (i.e. tagging)
• The user blogs facility
• The improved wiki

And most especially:

• Learning Outcomes

The enhanced backup and restore features and new DB module will also assist management of my implementation, as I’m the kind of person who feels like they’re performing open heart surgery – without anesthetic – on a patient, on those occasions when I have to perform some sort of customization on a production system.

By coincidence Packt Publishing recently contacted me and asked me to review Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development, by William Rice IV. The publishers describe the text as:

A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle, focused on course development and delivery and using the best educational practices. …Moodle E-Learning Course Development shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance teaching.

In my view there are certain publishers – Packt, Friends of Ed, O’Reilly and so on, who can generally be trusted to provide hands-on expertise for IT professionals, so I already own a couple of Packt’s texts. But before I hear you shout “Canyonero!” I will undertake to review this text on it’s own merits, in an equitable manner. There’s no point in me saying that this book meets the needs of its potential audience if it doesn’t.

Since my reviewer’s copy of the text just arrived in the post today, I’ll be taking the opportunity to review the book in the very near future, so watch this space.

In the meantime if you’d like to take a look at the book yourself, Packt Publishing have given me Chapter 6, “Adding Interactive Course Material” as a 3.4MB PDF for you download.

• Click here to download the PDF from my website michaelhanley.ie

or

• click here to get the chapter from Packt Publishing.com 

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References:

Rice, W.H. (2008) Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development Available online: http://www.packtpub.com/

Wikipedia contributors, The Last Temptation of Krust. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, [Internet] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyonero [Accessed December 12, 2008]

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