 I'm going to just pick, I'm just going to pick someone at random, now I don't want to penalise the people here at the front because I want to encourage people to come to the front, so what I tend to do when I do these things is go right to the back, the people who aren't expecting me to just walk all the way up here and ask them any kind of questions, so I'm going to get about three quarts of the way up here as I do on kind of ants and dex Saturday night take away if you watch that, and I'm just going to randomly go Leslie, what social networks do you use? Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Diego Good interesting use of Pinterest there, anyone else want to just chime in as I'm coming down here, maybe Ross? Facebook and Twitter Good choice, anyone else apart from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, put your hand up, any very kind of exotic ones, we've got an REF guy up there, what do you use? A pub Very good, excellent So bearing all that in mind, Mary mentioned the graveyard shift, this is probably the graveyard shift because I'm between you and beer I want to take you through some thinking, so I've been on board with Moodle since about October I guess, it was just after Martin asked me to lead this project And so I want to kind of walk you through some of my thinking, and my hope is that this sounds like the most obvious thing in the world ever to you And really simplistic, that's what I'm hoping because then I've kind of done my job, if it seems complicated and a bit confusing, I haven't done my job I'm happy to answer your questions at the end and we might even have to take them to the world's best social network, i.e. the pub Okay, so the way that Martin describes or the brief that Martin gave me I guess was this A new open social media platform for educators focused on professional development and open content Now that's quite a wide brief as many ways in which you can interpret that And so some of the things that Martin was talking about yesterday, some of the things that Mary's been talking about All of these things are things that we want to be in Project MoodleNet But we can't build everything straight away, we can't just kind of build Facebook in a week, you know that kind of thing Not that you'd want to obviously with today's revelations in this weeks So Martin shared this diagram here from my good friend Brian Mothers Stick your hand up if you've ever seen Brian's drawings before, a few of you, thank you Now Brian's a good friend of mine, he's doing some consultancy with Moodle at the moment And you can see some of the landscape of things, and as Martin said, not everything's in here But it gives you a flavour of the kinds of things that we might want to eventually have in Project MoodleNet So on the left hand side, if you imagine at the moment, if I link to you, where do I link to? If you've got your own website, I might link to your website If you've got a LinkedIn profile, it might be that, it might be your Twitter bio But it's problematic as educators, where do we link to? We tend to link to things which we're appropriating for education Rather than things which are education specific So some kind of profile which hangs everything together, that's what we're thinking about But it's on the right hand side some really cool stuff Things like crowdfunding, things like supporting each other using local currency Things like tuning your dashboard and your feed and using openly licensed resources So this was kind of the starting point and just kind of to take you through some of the thinking Now you might wonder why I haven't been talking to all you guys Why have I been talking to people kind of outside of the current Moodle community And I guess one of the reasons for that is because as Henry Ford said If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses I need to make sure that this project ties in with all of your needs But if I start right in the middle, then we don't go wide enough And kind of blue sky thinking enough to get to where we need to be So I want to start way over here and bring it into the middle to meet your needs I don't want to start in the middle, I want to start over there So bearing that in mind, I've been talking to some of you while I've been here And I've added in some slides based on some of the conversations I've had yesterday and today and things like that And one of the things I was talking to Andy, so where's Andy? Andy Field over there, I used to be a history teacher and Andy used to be a history teacher And I know from when I used to use Andy's fling the teacher activities in my classroom And we were talking about some of this and I was trying to explain the kind of social network that I think we need to build here And I was saying, well, we don't really want to build a social network which is for YouTubers and Instagram stars That's not the kind of social network we're trying to build here We're trying to build the opposite end of the spectrum where the reason you want to use it is because of curated, interesting and useful stuff So an example of that might be someone like Stephen Downs' OL Daily, which I get every single day from Stephen Downs Stephen Downs is a great guy and he's going to give us some advice on this project as well But I don't follow Stephen Downs because he's a celebrity or I want to know the intimate details of his life I follow Stephen Downs because he curates on a regular and ongoing basis really good stuff which is useful for me And I'm sure all of you follow people like that And the reason you follow them is because they're cool and doing interesting stuff But also because they're immediately useful to your life and your role I can't believe that this blog post was over a decade ago But a guy called Hugh McLeod who's best known for drawing on the back of business cards as gaping void He said that social networks are based around social objects You have to have a thing that you're talking about So you can imagine on Twitter it's often Donald Trump Facebook it's often what you were doing last weekend Or whatever it is, you have to have something that you're talking about So I want you to bear that in mind when I go into some of the next stuff here Have any of you come across the social network thingyverse? Any of you come across that one? Okay, what type of social network is thingyverse? I don't know what type it is but it's used for sharing models of objects for 3D printing and stuff like that That's right, so before Christmas I was in the Netherlands And I saw some really cool stuff in libraries on 3D printing And I've been thinking about getting one for ages and I finally got one It's not expensive one but I needed to find somewhere where I could download stuff to print off with my kids So I searched and I found this social network thingyverse And there's all kinds of these networks There's ones around crocheting and knitting and all this kind of thing And they're not based around massive celebrities They're based around people sharing useful stuff So this person here you can see at the top left with his wonderful pose and his beard He has shared lots of stuff including this stackable battery holder Which he has 3D printed in two different colours And you can see that actually I don't know how well it's showing up on contrast at the back of the room But you can see that 15,345 people have liked this Just like you can do on Twitter and Facebook and stuff Some people have collected so they put it into a collection Some people have commented on it Some people have said that they made it and maybe taken a photograph of what they made and how it was different Some people have remixed it so they forked it You know if you use GitHub that kind of forking feature And some people have tipped him They've not only kind of said this is great and liked it But they've kind of donated money to him as well So if you look at his profile You might follow him because he's a really useful person to follow And you want to know when he designs new stuff But you're not following him because like he's a YouTuber and Instagram star You're following him because he's curating and making and doing really useful stuff And it seems to me that that's the kind of social network that we want We want to follow each other But not just because one person's an influencer We want to do it because they're curating useful stuff Now often I used to work for Jisk I used to work for Mozilla And often I see people providing technical solutions to what are essentially social issues Or pedagogical issues So I used to work on OER at Jisk I used to work on mobile and digital literacy And I'd see people saying well the reason why educators aren't using OER Is because we haven't got a good enough meta-search engine And I'm thinking I'm pretty sure I've seen about 15 projects That provide a meta-search engine for OER Now the problem isn't that there's a technological solution The problem just like when I was working on Open Badgers at Mozilla Is that it needs to be technological enough But it also has to have that pedagogical and social component So it needs to be a balance, the kind of sweet spot between these two things These two circles So when you do any kind of product management The advice that you get is that you should start with a cupcake If all of the things that Mardin and Mary and other things that people have said about Project MoodleNet Are like a massive wedding cake A massive three-tiered wedding cake With all the stuff that we want We definitely want to get there eventually But we can't get there by just providing users with some icing Or with just the board that we're going to build the whole cake off We have to provide something which is useful right from the start Otherwise no one's going to use it And so the metaphor I want to use is the humble cupcake The humble cupcake comes with three parts It comes with the cake, the icing and the decoration on top I love cupcakes, they're fantastic So what type of cupcake are we going to build here Because the brief that we've got for Project MoodleNet Is wide enough that we can start in multiple places So imagine that we start with social networking Is anyone here part of the OERU network? Has anyone heard of the OERU network? Okay a couple of hands there OERU network, especially in higher education Is trying to encourage people to use open educational resources in higher education And they last week launched an instance of Mastadon Which is a distributed decentralized social network Which I use, I use Twitter less now and I use social.co up a lot more And until about last month as Martin and Mary and Baz and other people will attest I was convinced that this was the right way to go We were going to build on Mastadon on open standards and all this kind of stuff We were going to build Project MoodleNet on Mastadon And we were going to build start on social networking But I quickly realized that if you throw people into just another social network On top of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and everything like that People come in, have a look around, see that there's not much stuff there And then kind of leave until more people are going to be there But of course you never get that traction because everyone's doing that So perhaps that's not the best place to start We could start on the right with professional development We could build a whole kind of area marketplace Where people can share courses And they can rate them And then people can kind of, we can build up from there But actually I think the best place to start And I'm willing to be wrong here because I was wrong last month Is with resource curation And I want to explain why Resource curation sits in between the technological and the pedagogical solution It's a technical solution But it's based on us having social relationships with one another Just like Thingiverse So imagine this kind of workflow The graphics are intentionally terrible because I did them Imagine that you search I used to be a history teacher, let's say you're searching for something to do with the Russian Revolution So I type in Russian Revolution into the project MoodleNet search There we go, I've just typed that in And I've got a million resources because it's searching across OER repositories It's searching YouTube, it's searching paid resources It's searching everything that we think might be useful to educators Once you get there you can do what's called a faceted search You'll be used to this from things like Amazon So on Amazon, let's say I'm searching for a pair of new genes as I was recently So I search genes and I click Prime Delivery 34 inch waist and blue And it comes up with fewer options And I find the one that I want and I buy it Similar kind of thing here I search Russian Revolution, I kind of narrow it down by Oh, I want a PowerPoint, I want it to be about Lenin And I want it to be about the October Revolution And I find the resource I want And the key thing, this is what we're thinking at the moment Is that you click that button, add to collection Which is such a simple thing It's a bit like Pinterest, like this lady up here was talking about You add it to a collection Because this is the kind of sweet spot between doing this meta-search Of all these millions and millions and millions of resources And randomly finding resources because you follow some people on Twitter Serendipidion Twitter is great, but I wouldn't want to base my teaching and learning kind of career on it And searching OER repositories is great But again, I can't always spend the time that I want to find the right resource So curating stuff is a really valuable thing to do within networks The thing to say about this is eventually This add to collection button might be a little kind of JavaScript bookmarklet Or it could be a browser button So that you don't have to go to Project MoodleNet to find the resources Or to add the resources You can just go around the web a bit like Digo or something like that And you can add them from wherever you are So it's not like you have to go somewhere to start your workflow You can just have your workflow wherever you start as it happens to be So how is this going to work? That's useful to me as an educator I can imagine when I was a teacher I can imagine doing something like that And creating little resource collections That would be fantastic But how is that social network? Well there's a difference between a people centric And a resource centric social network Like we were showing with Thingiverse And so the resource centric social network starts with something like this So you've got somebody, let's say this is me And I've collected three collections of resources there And you probably can't see but there's some little hashtags in there Made those a little bit too small maybe But there's little follow buttons on there There's a follow the person And someone comes along, let's say it's Mary Because Mary's wearing orange And I'm kind of wearing black Mary comes along and she looks at my resource collection one Mary's learning Russian So maybe she's interested in the Russian Revolution And she comes along and says this is great I really like these resources And so she's clicked on me to follow me And she's clicked on the resource collection To follow the resource collection And she starts asking some questions And she says this is a great dialogue Not about like hey what's the weather like Like oh isn't you know Justin Bieber cool We're saying stuff about the resource We're having a professional conversation About this particular resource collection So this could be anything It could be oh you seem to have tagged this With stuff to do with UK or English education I don't understand what level this is You know what kind of ages are you teaching here And we're having a conversation And it might lead to me then re-tagging this Or adding new tags on To aid discoverability So you can imagine now That when I don't know Martin comes along And searches for the Russian Revolution Now it's surfacing stuff Which are within collections Before you get to all the results So all of a sudden it's immediately useful to teachers Because they can find resource collections Which have been pre-curated By people who have been teaching this for Maybe a long time The other thing to say Is that the profile can be What we call an MVP An MVP dashboard So let's say that when you're logged in Now this is Mary now She's logged in to her profile She can use this as a very simple dashboard So here are her collections Resource collection A, resource collection B She's only just signed up So she's got a resource collection one She's following mine And you can see that she's following Some of the people there And the idea would be that she would use Her profile when she's logged in And to keep tabs On what's being added, removed, updated Within the resource collections This is a really super simple thing But right now I'm very convinced That this is a really nice place to start Because it's immediately useful to teachers So the question that everybody's Asked me today and this week And this month has been Well when can I start doing this If it was a cupcake When can I taste this thing And the answer is I'm using it for a technical lead Pretty soon And we need to make sure that we have The right people on board We're gathering people's feedback So we can build stuff and get the kind of Use that we want And then build things out from there I don't want to build this giant Wedding cake that isn't actually Immediately useful to people So we're starting with the cupcake Now then I'm not sure if this next image Actually works So we're actually starting With the resource curation And then we're going to put that inside a Russian doll But the Russian dolls aren't Russian dolls They're actually cupcakes I'm not sure if that completely worked And I said well the profile could be the person eating the cake I'm not sure that metaphor works But you can imagine what it is It's basically starting with the resource curation Getting that right as a use case And then building out the social networking features And the professional development from there So that's the thinking at the moment If you're interested in this project The canonical URL Is Moodle.com forward slash Moodle.net Which takes you to the wiki There's going to be a community call Which is linked to From that particular link And on the Moodle blog Next Wednesday And I've purposely had this after this Moodle moot So that you might want to come along As some questions bring some people along The idea is to have these community calls Every month As we kind of get people's ideas So that's the idea My email address is dugatmoodle.com As you'd expect So it is now 10 to 5 This session is supposed to finish at 5 o'clock I've got some time for questions I've also got a bit of a fog on my throat Excuse me So if you've got any questions Any observations Any comments about project Moodle.net As it currently stands in the conceptualisation phase Please let me have them I've been working with the university years ago Before that I had no clue at all About the existence of Moodle So on top of developing I could say the useful stuff I think how could you make it also The awareness of this outside of this network So the question was How can you make this Grow the awareness of this outside the network Now Martin and I have had conversations About the name that we give to this So the first thing I did Was to put the word project in front of Moodle.net Which Martin and I have had lots of discussions about But we need to kind of test this out Whether Moodle.net is going to be the right word for it There's huge benefits in calling it Moodle.net Because it's something which is first and foremost For Moodle users But also for the whole world, the public But some of the people I've spoken to Are saying well actually If you call it anything to do with Moodle Will other people use it as well So it's a really good question How can you funnel people in So that they join our community Rather than just use it over here And continue doing whatever they're doing It's an open question If anyone's got any answers to that That would be great I think we need to build it And respond to users both within the current Moodle community But also outside as well Before So this is just off the cuff But I think if it's called Moodle.net And it's great Then people may want to use it No matter what they're using anyway And that is great for the Moodle branding So why not make it Moodle.net Make it great Make people want to use it No matter what systems they're using And make it So it's got the name of the system in it But actually it's much more than that Thank you I think I like to postpone decisions Until I absolutely have to make them But we'll see And it's also Martin's call as well My counter argument is If you saw something called Blackboard.net Or canvas.net And you're a Moodle user You probably wouldn't go there looking for resources So that's my point about that And the other thing is Is that are you hoping to repurpose Any of the existing resources On the line And the other one is that So my gut reaction to what you said Is that's very nice But how do I get to the One, how do I get to that good free stuff to download And two, you didn't sort of touch upon the idea And I know it's part of the plan To allow content creators to Using that horrible phrase Monetise some of their effort Yes, so the crowdfunding element The eight different elements Which you'll see if you go to The crowdfunding element The crowdfunding element kind of requires that Everything else is built Because if you want the crowdfunding element I don't know how quickly I can go right back to the start To that landscape This one here, surfacing the collective needs So a bit like the blended learning consortium You put some money in There's a bit of a walled garden And you get to build some stuff The open version of that So someone says, hey, we need a course on this thing You spec it out as a community You raise some money and someone builds it That kind of thing You need the community You need all the tools You need everything there So absolutely, that's correct I've forgotten your first question already What was it? So I don't want to build I don't think we need to build Another repository And base MoodleNet of that Having said that There are Moodle specific resources That maybe don't exist in another repository That we might want to build That's kind of coent thinking You need to have a word with Brian I genuinely thought that was an advert For McDonald's restaurants You don't recognise the MoodleNet? No, perhaps we need the little hat on the corner Okay, fair enough We need some colour on that as well It was just a quick sketch you did Any other questions? I'm looking at the people at the back I'm going to come up there again I know you've talked about linking educators I think it's a really good idea I'd also like to see there's a really nice model here for bridging that gap between the development community that's a Moodle There are people as developers that we follow because they develop good stuff that we use And I'd love to see maintaining that sort of crossover between that And actually making that a lot easier to follow That developer is cool I'm talking about David Smith pretty much Yeah, absolutely I think we need to build this first and foremost for educators But then definitely, as Martin said yesterday We need to make sure that we've got everyone in a similar kind of place We're not artificially separating people That's a really good point Another question over there I love that I'm doing my own running here Moodle HQ The relation between MoodleNet, Moodle.Net and Moodle.org How is it now and how will it be within a year? So we've seen a lot of the rings Especially the bit where there's one ring to rule them all Martin mentioned Moodle.org And maybe folding this into that eventually I think we've got a lot of work to do before we build out the social networking features of MoodleNet To get to the stage where we could do that Moodle.Net, as it currently stands, allows you to share courses And that's based on kind of some I think I might use the wrong words here Deprecated Moodle hub functionality Would that be a fair way of saying that Martin? So Moodle.Net right now is a Moodle site with some plug-ins It was this idea 10 years ago, 7 years ago That didn't, you know, this is the new effort at it, so a new stab That Moodle.Net will go away obviously when this is out Moodle.org forums I anticipate will be sucked into this as well But the Moodle.org will be the open source development community if you like So it's the tracker, the documentation, all the git information All of the plug-ins, that stuff is just .org And .com is all the commercial stuff and the overview of the whole project So I want to call it just Moodle.Net And we should reuse that domain Moodle.Net for the main page of this And I might have to do what my boss says at some point But what I was going to say, it's really useful actually If you've never met me before, it doesn't matter And it doesn't have to be a wonderfully crafted email Just say, hey Doug, have you seen this? I'm really interested in design patterns I'm not talking about even the UI I'm talking about workflows, I'm talking about have you seen this really niche community over here that does this Anything that you think will be interesting and useful for this One of the really valuable things I find from talking to people and just running this by people time and time again Is that it helps me kind of refine what it is that we're doing Sometimes I completely have changed my mind through talking to HQ stuff and the community and stuff So this is only going to be as good as the whole collective effort If it's just coming out of my brain it's going to be very good So we need to make sure we're surfacing all of that collective need And if you've got a very niche use case, don't hide your light under a bushel Come and tell us about it so that we can help and support you We're going to have to start small, we can't build this massive thing I need to build out my team, if you know someone who would be a great technical lead for this We're not necessarily going to build it in PHP So you know, I know it's shocking isn't it? Do let me know, so come and have a beer, have a drink, I'll be here tomorrow And just shoot me an email or find me on a social network that already exists Thank you very much