Moodle
A little more time has passed, and I’m still not Moodling. I ask myself if I should be upset about this, and/or if I should do something about it.
I attended a faculty development workshop today in which Bill Thompson gave a nice introduction to the concept of open source, and Leunda Hemphill showed some Moodle coursework. Pretty good stuff. But I found myself wishing that folks were more adamant (political?) about using it. Two of the campus computer geeks attended, and it turns out they were both Moodle advocates. Last year, when decisions were made, they argued for trying Moodle instead of or even with WebCT. Of course, the powers that be nixed that; they would rather throw millions at the problem than run the risk that our information technology will change too quickly. (It’s the Microsoftophile conservatism applied to courseware.)
But there’s good news here, because now I know that I’m not alone in wishing for Moodle. And ITT is setting up their own server, so that’s a small step in the right direction.
If this semester’s wiki and blog experiments are successful (and I imagine they will be) perhaps I’ll force myself to make course webs in Moodle in the Spring.
September 11th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
I attended a needs assessment meeting for my campus’s computer labs, and they were talking about mostly hardware but software as well, with a couple of unnamed folks stressing the trend of single-sourcing and pointing out that with the newest version of Microsoft Office, there are all these capabilities that facilitate single-sourcing (I wouldn’t know; I’ve used OpenOffice for the last three years. The only advantage Microsoft Office has over OO is that format painter.). Anyway, I asked why we weren’t even CONSIDERING open source software and using the money we’d save to buy better and/or more hardware, and I was promptly told that the price of the software was negligible compared to the price of the hardware, so they wouldn’t save enough money for it to be worth the risk of using open source. Besides, Microsoft is what they use at home, blah blah blah…
September 11th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
“They” meaning the students, sorry. and “the risk” meaning the risk of using software without company tech support, I imagine.
September 11th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
I would hesitate to believe any claim to single-sourcing from MS. I also wonder what advantage MS Office would have over OpenOffice, given the latter uses XML as its native data format. Um, why not build out from that? Finally, how many student are even interested in single sourcing? Most just type out their papers and print them. OO can handle that, to be sure.
They are lying, flat out, about the cost of the software. It is not cheap, especially for course management stuff. Or for things like Photoshop.
Aside one: OO style sheets blow away the format painter (and MS style sheets too, IMO).
Aside two: feel free to make an account–that way you can edit your posts