 Good afternoon and welcome to Getting Social with Moodle, version 2.0. Okay, just a quick roadmap this afternoon folks in terms of where we're heading in the next half an hour or so. Certainly we're going to kick start with some trends both I guess national and global social demographic trends. I think it's a very appropriate platform for the things we'll then discuss and that being I guess social tools, social services on the web and I guess how we might be able to apply those in the context of effective learning. Effective online learning and that'll flow directly into a demonstration of Moodle 2 and some of the tools that we've got at our disposal. Again as we said Q&A along the way and feel free to drop your thoughts, ideas, questions, comments, observations as we go along. Perhaps a quick poll as a starting point. There's a multiplicity of social services on the web. They're popular, they're common, people enjoy using them, some more frequent than others. We'll just push a poll your way. If you could quickly indicate and we'll give you 30 seconds or so to do this, which of those social web services you personally use at least once a week I think most of us may have heard of some of all of those services and if you could indicate if you're using one or more of those. Thank you for your response there. We'll just close the poll. Shalona's going to share the results so you get an idea there. It's fairly obvious. It's the most traffic side on the planet full stop. It's got 600 million members most of them are very active so effectively 1 in 10 people on the planet use this social networking service. It's more traffic than Google. It says a lot for social search where people are actually searching for media or people or friends and groups and connections via a social network versus using a search engine so it is a sign of the times. LinkedIn, some of us use that. I guess it's kind of Facebook for business people. No one's using Twitter or Flickr or not at least in the last week and YouTube it gets plenty of eyeballs as well. Very good. I guess this notion of a technology revolution is what I would call it. The first four stats I've just put on the slide there. They're local Australian stats and they're fairly recent as in the last 12 or so months. The latter two are international stats and if we just step through those very quickly it's fairly obvious technology is very pervasive in our country we're a vast land and our population is scattered across broad areas but I guess we're a constant threat in cities and regional centres for the most part. The majority of households are fortunate enough to have a computer and in turn most of those households are connected to the internet. Broadband connectivity is becoming more prevalent so we've sort of evolved beyond the dinosaurs and dial up and the majority of us are now on 80s L or 80s L2 and there's this talk of this national broadband network that will deliver optic fibre internet connectivity to our doorsteps so that's not too far away. Not surprisingly there's more mobile phones owned in Australia than there are people and if you like Shlona and myself you've got a smartphone in your pocket it's kind of your mobile office and you've got one or two spare mobile phones stashed away for safekeeping. Internet as well as far as how we're being entertained and spending our time communicating, collaborating, shopping we're now spending more time surfing the internet than we are absorbing entertainment and information and media via television. So we reached that tipping point about 18 months or so ago and Nelson online tells us in Australia. So you might be part of that demographic you may not but on average that's where Australia is at. The last two stats are international and again they tell a similar story. Probably these stats are more pertinent to the conversation today. There's more global users and usage of social networks and email we're at that stage now so it's becoming a very big part of our lives and what we do in terms of how we go about our business and global internet is tip to outstrip desktop computer use by 2013. So that is very significant particularly those last two stats when you think about the way we can work and socialize the way we shop, the way we access information and are entertained and I think more importantly as educators the way we can teach and train and learn so it's all very significant and I guess in a nutshell it sort of says potentially with the right software and tools and technologies anyone anywhere can learn at any time about anything the options are limitless if we engage this revolution for the purpose of effective learning. So what are the point in terms of web services again these are very popular services and we indicated that before in that initial poll these recent stats as well going back less than 12 months WordPress it's a free blogging service over 150 million blogs, YouTube as we said we know it gets a lot of eyeballs, 2 billion videos watch today more than 35 hours of video content uploaded per minute so it's pretty staggering. Flickr is a photo sharing site, it's sort of to photos what YouTube is to videos it currently holds 5 billion photos and you can see there it's getting many photographic uploads per minute by amateurs and professional photographers. Twitter in a nutshell is because no one indicated that they're using it, Twitter is you pretty much share your thoughts in 140 characters or less you might share your ideas or follow others on your computer and or your mobile phone I think the power of it is the mobility aspect. Facebook we've mentioned already 600 million users and growing and Wikipedia it's a massive free online and cyclopedia and you can see there are over 3 million articles in English and 400 million edits so they're all collaborative spaces, they're fun, they're engaging, they're effective. So if we can harness some of the popularity of these sites and services and some of the social demographics that we just identified, it can make us better at what we do as educators online. I think the thing to note here importantly is that these services and sites are so popular, not simply because users can consume information but more to the point the users are the producers or the constructors of knowledge. So that leads us to this concept of social construction isn't very quickly and this is going to jump in our demo in about a minute. It's I guess an educational or it's a school of thought and it says a few things, you know, above all else that in an online learning environment we're all potential teachers as well as learners it's a known fact that we learn very well through the art of expression and through the art of observation. Context, learner context that is, can help us as educators to teach and train in a more transformative fashion. And it's important that our learning environment be it physical or blended or virtual is flexible and adaptive. I think Moodle is a software, it chills well with this philosophy of social constructionism. Okay so this is what we're here today. Some of the tools that are in built to the Moodle Learning Management System software, you know, we're at our disposal, you may and may not be using all of these tools but they're there and again this is the essence of how we harness the social web for the purpose of online learning. So we'll look at some of these tools now. I guess if we had to pigeonhole the tools and it's really the dichotomy is this, you've got synchronous tools so these are real-time instant tools such as chat and messaging or instant messaging and the others fall into the latter category I would say they're asynchronous or there's some sort of time delay between when I guess the sender or the initial user communicates and then when the recipients read or respond or collaborate so the asynchronous tools to mine a blog, forum, commenting, wikis and tags. Okay I think we're ready for a demo. So I've just logged into a test instance, this is Moodle version 2.0 and I'll go straight to our Sandpit course. Initially at least we'll see the system through the eyes of the administrator. This could well be the teacher or the trainer or the course manager and then occasionally we might toggle also to the student view to give you their perspective as well. So this is pretty much a plain vanilla Moodle installation and just a basic theme. So it might look a little bit like yours, it could be somewhat different. Okay now I'll turn the editing on. So we'll kick start with the chat model I said this is a synchronous tool. It's pretty much the same time, different place for the connected users so there's one place instant. So we're editing on, we add an activity and this is a chat. So what we'll do, we'll name this chat, it actually says name this chat room. It's sort of a virtual room where we tee up a session for a future dating time with our online course participants. So we'll give it a name and an introduction. What you can do you can indicate the next chat time. So you can specify a date and time. You can also publish the chat time. And in fact if it's a repeat session, if it's not a one-off, if it's I guess a recurring session you want to hold with your online course participants you can do it at the same time every day or every week indefinitely. So what if we say the same time every week. And what we'll do as well, we'll allow, in case people miss a live session, we want to archive the chat dialogue that's only text-based. But I give everybody the benefit of being able to I guess retrospectively view the online conversation. Say yes there. Save and display. So this is purely text-based. As I said there's no video, there's no voice. But it's a very instant tool. Great for collaborative group work or great for Q&A or web-based supervision or support. So there's a variety of ways you could use it. The idea would be that you would click the link to enter the chat room now. It pops up a separate window. I'll just bring that into the center of the screen. So I'm in there, it's just myself at the moment. I'll give you the idea. You type your message in the bottom area and just hit enter and that sends it off. Naturally as other people enter the virtual chat room, they'll appear on the right side of the screen and they can start to communicate with you as well. It works very well for a small group of people, maybe 10 or so. Any more than that, the conversation flies off the page very quickly and it's kind of hard to keep up and work out who's saying what and to whom. So just be aware of that and naturally you could act. I guess it's kind of a web-based syntax. You can be referring to app student and you're saying, you know, I agree. So I'm kind of not speaking to everybody but it will be a public message. But we're sort of saying it to the student, this student in particular if in fact the student was there. So we're using I believe the compact theme, the bubble theme for those using, you know, Mac products and the iPhone for example. That should look fairly familiar. You can see what we've got there, kind of a little bubble theme. If you want to exit, you simply close the window or you can minimize it or enlarge it. There's a more accessible interface as well because, you know, not all web browsers were created equal and you've got to be mindful of that not just for yourself but other people might be on different computer configurations. So it's a more accessible interface, not using Ajax and you pretty much send your message, submit it and you would have to keep clicking refresh to see if there's been any updates to the conversation in the chat room. So that's pretty much how it works. There's a variety of options and configurations. Very useful, powerful tool as I said for instant communication that's text based and like I said, for users connected online at the same time but in different geographies or locations. As we said, if you missed the conversation you can come back at a later stage and view the past sessions. So they'd be archived in there. Alright, so that's chat. Instant messaging. Again, enough synchronous communication tool and as it suggests it is instant. How this works, there's a few different ways we can go about this. I'll just turn editing off for a moment. Okay, I've got the messaging block enabled up the top right. That may not be added to your course page by default. So if that were the case you may need to in fact turn editing on and add this block. There's a few different ways we can message people and then trace messages as they go back and forth between online course participants. To have the block pinned on the course page is pretty convenient. So with editing on you'd have to come in down to the bottom right, there's a drop menu where you add a block and you would add the messaging block. Naturally it doesn't appear there for me because I've added that block instance to the course page already. Now I'll just turn editing off. So the way this works, we've got a people block that will likely be added as a default block on your course page. You or any other course participants can click the participants link and you'll see who's enrolled in the course at any point in time. And you should be able to filter your view by user role say teacher or student for example. So for argument's sake you might be the teacher wanting to send an instant message to a particular student. So what you do, you click there the link next to their user profile takes you to the user profile page and you can see there's a link that we've sent a message. So this will be a private instant communication between you and the recipient. In this case just one student. It's not public like a chat room and it's unlike a discussion forum and we'll get to that in a little while. But you might say something like hello how are you finding the course so far. So you send that message. In fact I can add them as a contact, a bit like a friend or a connection. So they're there for ease of reference down the track. I'll return to course page. Now the idea is if that person were online at least in the last five minutes they would be indicated here in the online users block. And a window would pop up essentially almost instantaneously when you've sent them that message they receive the pop up. They can read the message and respond or it will choose to ignore it. If they're not online at that point in time the message ought to get piped to the mailbox that's been associated with their login account. That's the way it works. And naturally if the message arrives in the rim box they click at the link log into the learning management system and they can then respond. So I'll sort of show you how it would work from a student point of view. If I log out momentarily and I'm going to come back in as that student who just received the message you can see here down the bottom right. I've just had this little label pop up. Two new messages I could ignore or go to the messages. Okay. So it does indicate a message of comfort people who aren't on my contact list. I can certainly add them. I could block them or choose to ignore them if I wanted. And naturally over time as you get a big list of people you can search through your contacts by conversations and courses and also message history keyword searches. I'll just respond to the person who sent the initial message remembering this is for the eyes of the student. So I'll send that message back. Okay. So look again logging out and I'll come back in. So that is messaging and as I said with the block it makes very easy to monitor the communication. You can click the messages link and you would be searching for people or messages or run an event search. Naturally over here in the navigation block as well on the left side under my profile expand that out. Messages. Same thing. Okay. I'll return to the course page. Just bearing in mind I'm now logged in. We're seeing the course through the eyes of a teacher or a trainer or an editor. Okay. Not the admin. But again we should be able to see and do everything now we've got in mind. Okay. So that's instant messaging and it is exactly that I guess the only other thing worth bearing in mind you might in fact want to send an instant message to more than one person at a time and this is where you can come in and on the participants page select all and with selected users choose to send an instant message. You know the thing I'll be mindful of here though you are now creating this 10 recipients of this instant message. You're creating 10 private pipelines with your recipients. They might choose to respond. It's 10 private conversations. You have to ask yourself is this the appropriate tool or would this bulk communication be better handled in a chat session or via a discussion form and we'll get to that in a short while. I'll just go through this in any case. So we're asking about their project and there's a preview of the message to be sent and we've sent that now to 10 recipients. Returning to the course page. I think it's a good opportunity to move on to the discussion form and that's essentially a public space where people can ask questions get answers help one another. It's really the forum is part of the staple online learning diet. In fact if you add a new course to your Moodle without doing anything it's automatically given and used for one of these at the top here. It's a bit of a monologue bear that in mind. This sort of discussion form isn't a two-way conversation. It's really more an opportunity for the teacher or the person facilitating or moderating the online course to make general news or announcements to broadcast. And this in fact may be more appropriate than sending a bulk instant message to all the course participants because you won't get back 10 private communications. So look we're going to use this topic we'll give the discussion topic a subject and a message. You can attach files if that's appropriate we'll just pass that off and that is being done. So the idea would be your course participants, students in particular could visit this discussion form and go to that particular topic or thread and read what you've had to say. Again it's a monologue they won't be able to respond to this particular forum post in this sort of forum. They might be able to start their own discussions. But this is very useful for general news and announcements. So that's the news forum. For the other sorts of forums that you might have in mind you've got to add those to your course. So what we do from the course page turn editing on add an activity and this is a forum. There's a few different types. In fact there's five different types of forums. A standard form for general useful suit us nine times out of ten because it's multi-purpose. Anyone can start a discussion. Anyone can respond to somebody else post. The others are more specific. You've got a standard forum with a blog like display Q&A is exactly that. You've got each person post one discussion. So you speak, you only speak once or you've got a single simple discussion. So it's really one thread, one topic of communication in that particular form. So it's very focused. We'll stick with the default forum type. So this is in fact a dialogue which is what we want. We want teachers talking to students, students talking to teachers, students talking to other students. So it's not a long way street. It's more like a multi-lane roundabout I suppose. So we give it an introduction. Again, this is a public space. There's a few options here worth knowing about. Subscription. This can be pretty handy because it might be a big expectation that your students are going to on a regular basis log into the learning management system, go to your online course, go to the forum, go to the thread to see who said what day for day. Subscription can actually make it convenient for your course participants where the system will send the posts or at least a digest of the posts directly to their mailbox instead. I think most people check their mailbox at least every day if not every other day. Optional subscription, that is probably in terms of netiquette, that's probably a good thing. You give the users a choice. They cannot doubt of the subscription. If you force it on them, they kind of force fed the news and they can't subscribe from the forum communication being popped in the mailbox potentially. Retracking can be useful as well in the sense that if a user does log into the system and go to the course they can see that the forum may in fact have some new posts that haven't been read since the last login so they know there's a bit of reading and catching up to do. The other default settings are pretty okay. RSS feeds can be useful as well in terms of people subscribing via their web browser and having the other discussions fed directly to their web browser as opposed to being piped to their mailbox. Forums can also be used and I've seen forums use very effectively sometimes for assessment purposes. It can be just a participation grade of 5 or 10%, but look in any case whatever it is if you apply ratings it can in fact improve or motivate I guess the forum posters to think about the quality of what they're saying in a public space. We'll save and display and I think you get the idea how this will work. As a teacher we start the conversation so we'll give it a subject. So a few words to perhaps sum up the subject. This will be the first thing that users see and then the message or subject. So we'll post to the forum. So the idea would then be if we momentarily log out and we'll come back in as a student and go to that forum we can read what the teachers had to say there and potentially respond. Okay so that's discussion forums. Again a different tool. It's an asynchronous tool. I guess it's more for delay communication. A little bit like voicemail or email. The sender communicates with the recipients but doesn't expect an instant response. The recipient will respond when they've had time to think about it when they're ready to. I'll come back in as teacher. We're being presented by the way. This is the My Moodle page and your learning management system may or may not be configured this way. It personalizes the learning experience for the end user and you can actually redirect your non-admins to this particular page. It'll look a little bit like this. This is what I'll get upon login. It'll be a list of the courses that they're enrolled in and I guess the activities that are relevant to them be it assignments or chats discussion forums and so forth. And things again like their files, their messages, their calendar. That's right. So this will be for students and again it's students and teachers and lesser roles. It's for non-admins essentially. Now commenting is something that's pretty new to Moodle 2.0 and you can comment in a variety of places throughout Moodle Now including databases and glossaries and wikis but the obvious place you to set up commenting is in the comments block and again this will likely need to be added to your course page. We've got one here on the right hand side. It's been added already. It's like a shout box. So anyone can make a comment publicly at any point in time in that state of time stamp. I guess one thing to consider is it's kind of licensed for any course participant to say anything. At any point in time we've got all these tools and it doesn't just hold true for commenting but for chats and messaging and blogs and the like. These things need to be moderated and I guess there's a shared responsibility there. Naturally the teachers and the administrators need to keep close eye on the course and the content in the course as the learning is being facilitated but I think it's fair to say and it's a fairly sensible thing to ensure your users understand what's appropriate use. We model it for them and they even are asked to agree to terms and conditions acceptable use guidelines before being given access to the learning management system in any course in particular. So it is all about I guess this is an online communication tools but I think the rules are the same. I guess the conventions that we've established if you wouldn't say something to someone face to face or in person well it's probably not appropriate to say it in a chat room or a forum or a blog or a shout box. The same sort of conventions and protocols ought to reply. So that's commenting. From there I guess this blogging might be a good place to go. Mine for a time we've got perhaps to tie things up in the next five or ten and any questions that we see pop up in the Q&A window please drop in there as we get along. Blogging is I guess sort of short for a web blog if you're into journaling and reflections, public reflections or self reflections it could be a perfect tool for you and your online course participants. I've added the blog menu to the course again it won't be there by default. That's the sort of thing that needs to be added by an administrator or an editing teacher to the course. In any case if the blog menu is not there what you can do via your profile. So the navigation block that's pinned up the top left at the moment we click my profile blogs and what you can do you've got a few sub options here you can view all your entries or add a new entry. I might in fact do that now so I'll add a blog. Again this is a public reflection most likely anyone who's got a login account to the learning management system will likely be able to view and comment on this blog post. So it's sharing a thought with the idea publicly with other people. So it's all about I guess socialization and perhaps getting a critique and there's a lot to be said educationally speaking about metacognition the idea of thinking about thinking and learning processes that's a very powerful form of learning. So I would type a message and perhaps give it a bit of thought. I could attach a file and I might in fact do that as a matter of fact. So I upload a file and then I need to browse for a file that may be appropriate to my blog post. So I upload that it could be a document, a presentation, a piece of media and I decide who I want to publish this blog post to. You see the options here. Anyone on the site or if it's just for your eyes only you draft it to yourself and no one else will be able to read or comment on it. In this case I'm comfortable with what I've got here. Anyone on the site. The administrator can set up official tags like keywords and associate log entries. Makes them easier to organize and to find. This entry might relate to myrtle let's say. You could add other tags as well. Certainly I mean this is for I'm just getting some questions coming through there as we get along. This is perhaps a more reflective tool as I said if you're in the journaling with your students blogging is very effective and students can use it as well. It's not a teacher only tool. Everybody has access to blogs and controls the visibility of their blog. I've just tagged this entry. I'll save it so that's now been posted and we can see the entry there. Actually I made an earlier post as a matter of fact it wasn't my first blog post. So what I'll do is return to the course page. We can now see there's some tags. I've added this tags block and tags again as a set of sort of keywords that associate blog entries and they can also associate the interests of users. The interest can be indicated via the user's profile and we'll get to that in a moment and look to wrap things up quite shortly. We've got now Moodle as a tag that appears on this tags block. We could add Moodle as an interest and I now am presented. Remember this is through the eyes of the teacher. We can see that the teacher is interested in Moodle and in fact he's interested about it as well. So it's populated on this page. If I log out for a moment and entirely I'll come back in as an admin because there's one other thing I can do with that tags page which can be very handy. These tags pages can make your learning, online learning very social in a minimal time. So we go to Moodle tags page through the eyes of an admin. If we turn editing on it doesn't seem to be doing what I thought it would and I was intending to in fact add some blocks to the tags page. I think I prepared one of these earlier so I'll give you an idea how this works. The administrator ought to be able to add additional blocks to any given tags page. You can see for example Flickr images and YouTube videos being fed in from these third party sites services by keyword or the tag for this particular page in this case it's Latin. So that can make this page very social and collaborative in no time at all. If I visit my user profile page and edit my profile as I said tags are keywords that can associate blog entries and users by their interests and to add it on their profile page. So look we put in a list of interests here for the administrator and it might be that they are also interested in Latin and comma separate another tag or interest Moodle. So update the user profile and if we revisit the Latin page you'll now see the administrator user is also on this page and they can communicate immediately with another user who's interested in this particular tag. You can see a lot of blog about it. You've got images and videos being fed in socially from these third party sites. If you change your mind down the track you could remove this tag as one of your interests to remove yourself from this particular tag page. Over time I suppose it's kind of a collective duty that we moderate the appropriateness of the content on these tags pages and at any point in time a tag could be flagged as inappropriate and the administrator would be notified and they could investigate that particular tag. Alright I'm looking to just wrap up online for a time. If there's any questions perhaps now might be a good time to ask them. Just drop them in the chat window there. If there's anything that we haven't quite covered and I guess beyond the formalities of this presentation if you've got a couple minutes we'd appreciate some feedback and on the same token if you want to hang around and ask some questions sort of offline we'd be happy to assist. Look I'll wrap up in any case perhaps with a Chinese proverb you know this can be a food for thought for the day Confucius he was a great Chinese thinker and social philosopher back in 500 BC and he said tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, let me do and I understand and I think that's the essence of getting social with Moodle it's letting the users take control, take ownership of their learning they're not just consumers but they're producers and constructors of knowledge and information and even in a modern day educational research empirically tells us that we learn best by doing. Okay we're going to learn less by being shown and less again by being told. So put that proverb in your back proper. There's some references from today's presentation as Shalina said we'll make this presentation available via the web in a short while and we appreciate your time and your participation today I'll hand you back to Shalina. Thank you Moodle for participating in today's webinar presented by my Learning Space We trust this session has been of benefit to you. If you would like to learn more about Moodle 2.0 and its functionalities or any of our expert services please feel free to contact us. If you have any questions as Chad said please ask them now to everyone we look forward to seeing you again in our future webinars and happy Moodling.