Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Software Freedom Day 2011 is officially Saturday 17th September, but in New Zealand we’re spreading our celebrations over the week or so around that date. Check out the website to find out what’s happening near you.

The principles behind FOSS are underpinned by the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve he software. You can read more about the four freedoms on the GNU website.

Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business – in short, everywhere!

Guest International Keynote Speakers:

• Martin Dougiamas – a man who needs no introduction in the Moodle community; Martin will be presenting remotely on “Where 2.0 now?”
• Gavin Henrick of Remote-Learner in Canada and Enovation Solutions in Ireland – Gavin will be sharing his experiences with us in his keynote “Moodle from multiple perspectives”

There will be a great range of presentations throughout the conference, including technical sessions like Dan Marsden’s talk on “Crot and Turnitin: plagiarism detection tools” and school sessions like “Moodle and Teaching as Inquiry” with Mark Osborne.
Perhaps the best bit on the programme – “Open Space” – time for ‘user generated’ discussion – it’s led by you! and the conversation can go anywhere.

As usual, we will have workshops running the day before the two day conference.

• Mobile Moodle workshop with Thom Cochrane and Vickel Narayan
• Beginning Moodle Administration with Teresa Gibbison
• Moodle foundation – essentials for newer users with Miriam Laidlaw
• Using Moodle in NZ schools with Anton Coltham and Jacqui Land

The conference dinner, a not to be missed experience, will be held at “The Floating Pavilion” at the Viaduct.

If you haven’t already registered this is really the last chance, so go to the online registration form here now. I look forward to seeing you there!

There is a bit of something for everyone in the conference programme this year. Today I have listened to Julian talking about his passion for Moodle, even calling it “married to Moodle”. I have heard Sue Dark talking about Totara, catering to corporate Moodle users. I have heard Tomaz talking about Mount Orange School, the demo site, which is a great way for people to try out Moodle 2 and for getting tips on course design. Miriam talked on Moodle and Second Life, and the Moodlebites talk from Stuart helping those who need to do staff development for Moodle 1.9 and newly available for Moodle 2.0 (in English and Spanish!).

If I could handle staying awake until 1.30am I would attend Shane’s talk about the history of Moodle; luckily I can replay the session at a more NZ friendly time.

Anyway, three more exciting days to go, and I think/hope I am all ready for my presentations. :-/

Te Uku is near Raglan (West coast) in the North Island of New Zealand, about thirty kilometres from Hamilton. Project Te Uku is a 64MW generation site built by Meridian Energy and WELNetworks Limited. After spending a few years in the energy industry I have quite an interest in renewable generation and in particular like wind farms, so enjoyed the chance to visit another one.

So there are 28 Siemens 2.3MW turbines on 80 metre towers with 45 metre blades. That puts them at quite a bit bigger than the first wind farm I went to (and worked at) which was 1.65MW NEG Micon turbines on 70 metre towers with 35 metre blades. The Siemens nacelles are round, long and thin. The blades have a very unique curvature to them which I was quite interested in seeing in action after seeing them in photos.

Like many other wind generation sites this one is working farm land with both sheep and cattle grazing amongst the turbines. There are wetlands and a lot of plants were added as part of the project (something like forty thousand plants).

Te Uku was not particularly windy today which made it hard to hear the blade woosh at all even standing directly under a turbine. The blades rotate at 16rpm so they are quite a slow graceful looking turbine.

Eight of the turbines have aviation lights on top which looked like satellite dishes from a distance. The tails of the nacelles have what look like plane fins on them, a top of which sit the anemometer and wind vane.

Although Te Uku is small compared to some of the other sites I have been to, it is no mean feat to build. I think they said there were 26 km of roads built on the site over 8 months, 18m wide concrete foundations were made on site (lucky one of the farmers owns a quarry to supply the two hundred tonnes of aggregate required), and over eight hundred people worked there during the build (just over half were local I believe). So the project certainly put a bit of money into the local economy.

The bus tour was $5 per person and 100% of that was pooled together for the local schools which is a nice way for us “tourists” to say thanks to the locals for having us for the day. There was a community gala at the domain in Raglan with some impressive kites being flown. It was great to catch up with some of my previous colleagues of Meridian Energy. We had a lovely lunch in Raglan before heading home.

We had a great Manaiakalani meeting tonight. We did our usual update on where we are at with issues and current development objectives, but then we revisited our design principles. This was a very useful exercise as there have been changes since the design principles were written. These changes were made because of indepth honest discussions that we have had over the last six months at our meetings – rowdy, passionate discussions where lots of points of view were brought to light and thrashed about.

We had lots of guests at our meeting and we were given feedback which was very useful. Helen Barrett in particular as she gave us her feedback in terms of a change process as well as suggesting we invite teachers to come to the meeting. Also really useful feedback came from Erin Barrett who said something along the lines of: everyone in this room has got it (the process, the risks etc), we need to educate the stakeholders (connect them to what we are doing). There were others who gave feedback so it was a really rich opportunity.

I want to come back to the inviting teachers feedback. Dorothy and I spoke about this later in the evening and she reminded me that it is voluntary to attend. When she said that I saw that it is the same problem as we experience with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) community. There are lots of developers in the olpc community but not anywhere near as many teachers. No matter how much OLPC emphasise “it’s an education project” not a laptop project, many people still perceive OLPC to be about laptops and perceive that you can only contribute if you know how to write code. The reality is very far from the truth. There are lots of other ways to contribute, whether that be translation, distribution, funding, education, promotion, research, the list goes on. I am not a developer and I am contributing to Manaiakalani and OLPC. In both Manaiakalani and OLPC the voices that need to be heard and need to lead the decision making are the voices of learners and teachers, and I think the role of the developers is to facilitate the changes, so technology is developed to be appropriate to the pedagogy desired.

An absolute highlight of the meeting was having three students with us. They were invited to participate as equals to us, to raise questions and put forward ideas, but I think they were quite shy. We had some time at the end of the meeting which we used to talk with the students and we ended up talking about their career aspirations and fields of study in science. I look forward to seeing their blog posts about their experience attending “the Manaiakalani Hackers meeting”.

What made last Tuesday special was that it was camp week at Pt England school and we got to mingle with the students at dinner time. I asked some of the students about life with the netbooks. They told me they liked to play games, read each others blogs, do writing. They were interested in who the people were and what they did for the project.

Pt England students camp at the school (some Monday to Wednesday, some Wednesday to Friday). They enjoyed the activities they had been doing, particularly dunking (where someone throws a ball and if it hits the target someone else gets dunked). They liked to be the one who got dunked. The students sang for us, they are just great.

I was impressed with their dish washing system and asked permission to take some photos for my blog.

There was also a concert which we watched a little of after our meeting. There was some singing and dancing, as well as guitar playing.  There sure is talent to be found in Pt England school.

The programme included:

• iPadagogy – an intro to the iPad with a three day loan of the iPad to each participant
• Twitter for Collaboration Collating Student eportfolios via RSS
• Communities of Practice – a year in, where are we now and what is the next phase for us in our elearning communities
• Digital Storytelling, e-Portfolios and blogging
• GMail – students use it, we need to now how to use it to better support them
• The Matrix (course evaluation tool) and our Moodle Roll-Out Process – having evaluation conversations with our departments
• Educational gaming – games you can use and how you can create your own games
• Moodle Break-Outs (a time for asking questions and talking about best practice use of Moodle tools)
• Using and creating EBooks (session led by an eLCC for his peers, yay!)
• Moodle 2.0 – overview of the exciting new features and opportunity to ask questions
• How enrolment works in our institution
• eLCC Show and Tell

eLCC Workshop 2011

There was lots of talking with other eLCCs and sharing which was fantastic to see.

The absolute highlight for me was the eLCC show and tell time where quite a number of eLCCs took the stage and showed the peers something they are doing in the elearning space. Each eLCC really did offer something quite different too, with Chris talking about making his first movie with his phone and iMovie (thanks for the offer to help others Chris) and Ganeshan talking about how he used self directed blended learning to learn wind surfing (giving his perspective as the learner). The only disappointing thing in the whole three days for me was the invited people who did not come and show their support of  eLCCs and the eLearning strategy. It was great to see Ray and Peter there and I hope to catch up with them to get their feedback.

The eLCCs who attended seemed to get a lot of out this time together and the feedback has been positive. One of my personal aims this year is to help eLCCs build confidence and their perceptions of their capabilities and I think these three days were a good step in this direction. I am going on maternity leave in June and I am hoping the eLCCs can support each other more this year so they are stronger as a community and can improve their ability to find resolutions amongst themselves, relying less on the elearning team and eLDAs. If they can do this, they will be in a better position next year when the funded positions supporting the eLearning strategy end.

The Google docs, Picasa, Youtube and Wikimedia repositories were easy to setup, but it took a bit longer to get Flickr working (had to get the callback settings right).

To setup the Mahara integration we used instructions that we found on the Mahara wiki called Mahoodle. If you follow the instructions make sure you don’t skip ahead! There were quite a lot of steps and it took a while but we got there eventually. Playing with all of these now I am so glad we got it all setup, they are great! It is much easier to put images in if you can use the repositories.

This week I am going to be showing quite a few people some of the features of Moodle 2 so this setup is “just in time”.

One year on, it is an opportunity to move into a new phase as a community. We have had some exposure to some elearning initiatives and have now the task of working out how to progress from here.
I hope that our next phase is on developing our sense of community and how we support each other. I would like us to work on changing our own perceptions of ourselves so we feel more confident and capable of trying new things. More on that later.

So we opened the workshop with a karakia. All our minds are still on Christchurch and the earthquake so it was important to recognise this and offer our prayers and thoughts to those impacted.

We gave everyone an ipad and spent a couple of hours trying out different applications, getting everyone trying twitter and using #elcc11 as a hashtag for this event.

After lunch we are just starting to talk about communities of practice.