 I'm from Moodle HQ, and you'll know Moodle from the learning platform. Can you have a quick show of hands if you use Moodle or have done in the past? That's everyone in the room, thank you very much. Moodle is for ubiquitous, over 100 million of users worldwide, but I'm not here to talk to you about the learning platform today. I'm here to talk to you about something new and I want to kind of just riff off something that Amber did yesterday. I tried my best to try and represent my career history in the same way that Amber had done, but she must have some kind of advanced slide skills because I couldn't seem to be able to do it as kind of cleanly as she did. So I resorted to a list and I wanted to just situate what I'm doing in terms of my own practice, which has been a theme of this conference, but also just to echo what Amber said yesterday in terms of coming to learning technology, not from computer science or technical background, but instead especially through trying to understand humans and society. So my background is philosophy and history. I was a history teacher. I also trained staff on using technology. I was a senior leader in schools. And then I went to work for Jisk and Jisk have a heavy presence here at Alt C. And I worked as a researcher analyst around OER, around mobile learning, and around digital literacies, which was a subject of my doctoral thesis. From there, I went to work for the Missile Foundation and you probably know them best through Firefox, the web browser. I worked on open badges. I was on the open badges team from 2012 and I also worked as their web literacy lead. And then since then I've been a consultant. I set up a co-op with some people who I used to work with at Missile and also Brian Mathers, who you've seen some of his images already. You'll see some more in this presentation. I know he's watching this live stream. So hi Brian. And also since the start of this year, four days a week, I'm now leading the project that I want to talk about now, which is MoodleNet. I'm still doing consultancy and cooperating as well. I think it's important to do lots of different things because it keeps you fresh. Okay. So the reason I joined Moodle, the reason that I decided to kind of not do as much consultancy, but to join Moodle was because of Moodle's mission in the world. And Moodle exists to empower educators. As I've already mentioned, there's lots and lots of people who use Moodle worldwide. And they're all using Moodle slightly differently in different contexts. And that's one of the wonderful things about what Moodle provides. Just a quick explanation of how Moodle makes its money, if you didn't know. Moodle, like Catalyst, who's a partner of Moodle, Moodle has a number, lots of Moodle partners worldwide, and we get 10% of the revenue from their Moodle generating products and services. And also we now have some shareholders, not venture capitalists, but people who are interested in the long term into kind of societal change and empowering educators. Just in case you're wondering where Moodle gets its money from. We're not like other organisations in that respect. The other thing, just to flag up before we begin, is that just like alt, Moodle believes in openness. All of the stuff that we do is open source, which means that you can take that and run it for your own purposes without having to be told what to do with it. You can use it for your own purposes, and we don't tell you how to use our products. And the same is false, and we believe in working openly and transparently on everything we do, and that's how you can get involved in this project. So if you've got a device in front of you, feel free to go to this link now. This is the canonical URL for the MoodleNet project, Moodle.com forward slash MoodleNet, and everything that you need will be linked to from there. And I'll make sure that the link to these slides is on there after I've finished talking. So MoodleNet, before I get into what it is, I just want to zoom out and kind of situate it within kind of the wider world, because I think we need to look up from what we're doing in learning technology and think about how it affects our world. If we're trying to empower educators to change our world, well, what are those things that need changing? You'll be familiar, I'm sure, your university or institution is probably already talking about the global goals for sustainable development. Obviously, Moodle wants to contribute towards goal number four around quality education. But I think MoodleNet, especially, as I come to tell you a bit more about, is focused on number 11 as well around sustainable cities and communities. Moodle, the learning platform, has been around for the last 16 years, and isn't going away anytime soon. And the same with MoodleNet, it's going to be around for a long time. So we're not just trying something out and then going to pull it. This is something which we're in for the long haul because we're trying to build a place where communities can thrive. Now, when Martin Dujarmus, who's founder and CEO of Moodle, asked me if I'd like to lead this project, there were so many things that he was talking about with MoodleNet. And I asked Brian to try and capture some of these. You can see some of them here in terms of having like a dashboard with news coming in from trusted sources about having a narrative of professional developments. You're linking to your portfolio, but like Seamold. Private conversations, public conversations, being able to find people in your locality that you can meet up with. It's about supporting other people through crowdsourcing and with your own money and OER and all of this kind of stuff. So we have to start somewhere with all of this. We're going to try and build all of it eventually, but we have to start somewhere in a place that I decided after lots of research, after talking to people like Amber and researching and doing interviews with people, we decided to start with a resource-centric social network. And I'm going to explain what that means in due course, but it's basically about curating resources and sharing with other people. And as an educator, I feel that's something which is certainly intrinsic to my own practice. So if I had to describe it with words, I'd describe it as a social media platform for educators focused on professional development and open content, it's about sharing and learning to improve the quality of education and it's going to be integral part of the Moodle ecosystem, but even if you're not using Moodle as a learning platform, you can still use MoodleNet. It's going to be focused on all of the things that you come to expect from Moodle in terms of it being a private space if you want it to be, being ethical and transparent, obviously being open, being safe, we're not going to be doing shady business practices, and also the whole point of it is to connect educators worldwide to build stronger relationships around the world because Moodle is used in every country of the world and in every single language. So before I show you a quick video, an overview of where we've got to with kind of a prototype of Moodle, I want to explain some of the stuff that you're going to see in that video and why it exists. So as an educator, when you go looking for something for your course, you've got an intention and sometimes you know exactly what it is that you want to search for, you're being proactive in that regard. The trouble is, sometimes you don't always know what it is that you're looking for. I was at the OE Global Conference earlier this year where some Dutch librarians were doing some experimental work on how you can surface stuff to people who perhaps don't know the terms that they're looking for. I found this recently when I was trying to find a particular technical thing, and it turns out that it was called a faceted search, but it must have taken me a few days to figure out that that was the search term that I was looking for. Now, when I was doing my research and interviewing people, people said, well, one of the reasons I really like following other professionals in my sector on social networks is because it's like waiting for treasure to arrive. Every day I go on there and I find things that I wouldn't necessarily have been looking for but is absolutely relevant to my practice. So we're trying to build something that can be used both proactively because you know what you're looking for but also reactively because people within your network are sharing things that you wouldn't necessarily have looked for. So what would that look like in practice? Well, something like this where you have things which are surfaced from people that you're following, first of all, then from open education resource repositories and then from the open web. How this is going to work in the light of the EU copyright directive yesterday, we still have to figure out. So feel free to ask me questions about that later on. I'm going to show you, without further ado, some work that we did with a co-op called Outlandish in London three months ago. Martin Duke Yamers Fleur from Australia. It was the first day of work for our technical architect and we managed to produce in a week's sprint the following video which gives you a flavour of the kind of thing that we want MoodleNet to look like. There's no code behind this. This is one of those kind of mock-up prototypes, clickable prototypes that have been tested out by people in the Moodle community, like Jess Gramp and some other people who came there to help us test it out to give some feedback. So here we go. Just to say, I'm aware of the number of times I say certain words in this video and I'm thinking about creating a drinking game based on that. I just want to show you a demo of what we've been working on this week, too. And we've been designed to be here in London with Outlandish. Martin Duke Yamers Fleur in as well. So it is what we've been working on. Let's imagine that you're a teacher and you've been messing about with MoodleNet and you joined last week and you're now going about your business of planning some lessons. So here you are at Google and you're searching for teaching the Bolshevik Revolution. You get your search results. Here they are. All of them is MoodleNet. Great. Well, I already know what this is. So I'm going to go there and since last time MoodleNet has updated its privacy policy. So you'll need that in-depth. Click I agree. And then here we are at Bolshevik Revolution. Great. Or you can see this is a collection, a collection of resources. And it says, Finally, a good collection of multimedia resources about the Bolshevik Revolution from a worker's perspective. You can see that there's some contributors here. So it's a collection which is being made by people. Oh, great. I can add it to my MoodleNet so I can add this to my MoodleNet course. And I can also add my own resources collection that looks like. So let's have a look what's in it. GCC History, the Bolshevik Revolution. So this is a website, Active History of Cody UK that's got some resources, interactive exercises for GCC history. And you can see here that some people have commented, saying that there's a big tune that's in which really brings this to life. Great. So there's conversations and comments happening from some of my colleagues. What else is in here? Well, let's have a scroll down. Bolshevik Revolution in 10 minutes. What else is a YouTube video? Again, there's other people who are commenting on this. This is great. This is exactly what I want from my teaching. So loads of resources here on this related collection as well. Other things that I might find useful. This is fantastic. This is something which the Red Group has collected. So a community has curated this particular collection of resources. So let's find out more about the Red Group. This Renegade Group of Stockings has shared interest in all things relating to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Well, that sounds like a lot like me. So I'm going to join this community. I can do that because this isn't one where I have to apply. I can just join and sign up straight away. So here I am. I'm now a member of the Red Group. I can join in the discussions and I can start helping them to create resources. Excellent. OK, well, let's see what's going on. I'm going to go to my profile. Here we are. This is me, Jeremy. And I was added to MoodleNet by Andrea Leblanc. That's really my good friend Andrea. And I've started filling out my profile. I took an idea and I probably have my LinkedIn profile later on. You can see I'm now a member of three communities. I'm a history teacher. So I'm a member of these three groups. And I've started adding tags or interests, things that I'm interested in, so that MoodleNet can suggest things that I might be interested in. That's exactly what I want. So I can make sure I've got good resources and good people that I can lean on and I might be teaching a lot. So now I'm going to go to see what's been happening in the week that I've since I joined MoodleNet. So here's some updates. This is kind of a highly personalised feed of things which are useful to me. So I can see that Andrea is now also joined the red group. She must have seen that I joined it. There's new communities. People have added resources in there. Red gens accepted my request to join that red group. And my MoodleNet profile is 78% complete. So what I'm going to have to do is to make sure I complete that. I'm going to have a look at communities. I can also search. And here are my communities. A really educated and friendly focus place where I can find resources and have discussions of how I might teach and learn. So this prototype was built this week during this design split. I'm really interested, all of us at MoodleNet are interested in finding out what we think of this. It's just a start-up attempt and we're going to iterate towards it. So tell us what you think. Get in touch. At MoodleNet you are well for everything to do with MoodleNet. It's Moodle.com forward slash. So that's the kind of UX UI of what MoodleNet could look like. It's just our first cut. The idea is that there's collections which are curated by communities. That's the idea behind it. That's the hypothesis that we're testing. Now, behind all of that, I want to dig into it because as learning technologists we need to understand the technology which is underpinning all this. Has anyone heard of Mastodon or any kind of decentralized social network? Thank you, a few of you. So Mastodon is a bit like Twitter. You're just signing up to a single instance like on Twitter. There are multiple instances. So, for example, I've been a member of one which is all about co-ops. Those are the ones about art. Other ones about LGBT rights, all that kind of stuff. So you can see people on your instance and what they're talking about, but also the wider network as well which means that you can move between them depending on your interests and depending on the kind of people you want to associate with. We're going to build something which is decentralized from MoodleNet, which is the hard option. It is not an easy thing to do, but we think it's the right thing to do because we want to build things which are empowering. We don't want to centralize everything on Moodle HQ. We want it to be like Moodle the learning platform where you can have power and control and authority and autonomy over what it is that you're doing, your learning technology. So this quotation talks about how decentralization is powerful because there's no single centralized authority instead each party or peer makes local autonomous decisions and then shares that information with other peers and providers. So the advantages of having this instead of having a single centralized system, the advantages of having a decentralized system is that we do get diverse contribution from all around the world who might have different use cases to what we've envisaged. It means that it's more efficient to make local decisions instead of trying to get everything pushed into a centralized product, and it also means that you can keep some things private within your institution without having to share everything with the entire network. So we allow in kind of private spaces. An example of that which I was talking to someone about earlier might be that you have access to resources as your institution which you don't have a license to share with the whole network but you certainly want everybody at your institution to have access to those resources which you'd be able to do within MoodleNet and then share other resources more publicly. Now, to dig even deeper into some of the technical stuff here, Mayor de Borneo, who is our technical architect based in Athens and Greece, he couldn't be here today but if you're interested in some of this on the development wiki, it does have a very deep dive into some of the programming languages we're using and some of the tech choices. But just to give you a flavor of that, if you imagine a spectrum between a fully decentralized system where every single pier is equal and a closed software as a service product like Twitter, we're somewhere in the middle because what we want to do is to have something which we need to rename. It's an API as a service which basically means we're providing a service to everybody within the network. So you set up your own version of MoodleNet, you're sharing information in your own instance but also across the entire network and we're providing services with that API around search so you can quickly and easily search across the network so that you can have nomadic identity so you can move around the network and still be the same person, have the same followers and also do privacy respecting contact lookup. Mail's already got a prototype of how you could upload your contacts, your address book without actually sharing the names and addresses and telephone numbers, you're sharing the hashes of them and then you can check to see if that person exists on the network. I can go into more detail about that in questions or probably afterwards if you're interested. Just quickly in terms of the technical architecture here just to point out that from a user's point of view they will not see this complexity. They will just see a very simple to use web app as you've seen some of the prototypes already. The web app will be the thing which we release in beta in January to a select group of testers and then we'll be developing a native app to be able to use via app stores and the back end all of these things here and all this diagram is available on the development wiki. Your organisation would take the code, develop it however you want and so long as you meet certain terms and conditions about code of conduct and also the way in which you have a robust code base you'll be able to connect to the API as a service. If some of that went over your head don't worry, it's not fundamental to understanding what MoodleNet is about. I haven't got time today to go through all of the other screencasts that we've done, some of the things we're putting out to the community for feedback. Some of them, which we've put out we've already kind of rejected as an idea so there's one here around creating an alias which we've already thought actually I don't think that's going to work very well because we've had some feedback from the community so if you're interested in this please do have a look at what we're doing and give us feedback, we can only make it as good as the feedback we get from you. One thing you might be particularly interested in if you are using Moodle is the sending collection to Moodle prototype that we've just had a look on the screencast here it shows how you would curate a collection with other people in MoodleNet and then send it into your Moodle course so you can use those resources. I talked at the start of this presentation about how Moodle is funded and one of the things we've been thinking about was how are we going to have a sustainable version of MoodleNet here. Obviously we work a lot through our partners so if you want to set up an instance of MoodleNet initially we'll probably go through partners but there's lots of things we could do some of them range from the sensible like referrals to Moodle Cloud or Moodle partners to the slightly crazy like equity crowdfunding or sponsored content we could do that I was over at the mountain moot in Montana earlier this year and they have Moodle box which is like an internal currency my son's playing Fortnite all the time with V-books we could do something like that we could do crypto currency for goodness sake but more likely are donations, referrals and membership at different levels so just to finish off we've done the research and planning we've done the design sprint and specification we've just kind of doing the prototype and testing at the moment and we're looking to launch a minimum viable product of MoodleNet in January 2019 and if you'd like to be part of the beta testing for that do let me know if you want to contribute do go to Moodle.com forward slash MoodleNet on the link to take to Changemap you won't probably have seen Changemap before because it's currently in beta within New Zealand based organisation if you've ever used an issue tracker before to figure out from a suggestion from the community all the way through to development it's like that but it's much more user friendly for colleagues who are less technical so I've got some FAQs which I can go through but I'm sure that you've got some questions so before I go through those I'm going to point you again to Moodle.com forward slash MoodleNet you can email me at anytime dogo at Moodle.com and I thank you for your attention thank you very much so we're going to stick this on the screen if you have a device in front of you and you'd rather not put up your hand you're very welcome to enter the ID 152788927 if you're watching this on the live stream you can do the same thing and I'm not looking at my Twitter feed at the moment but Nick I don't know if there's any on the old C thing you're very welcome to do that but first does anyone want to stick up their hand and ask any questions we've got a roaming mic over there I'm happy to answer any questions there's no stupid questions just my stupid answers we have one over here I guess one of my potential concerns not concerns but something to think about is how do we ensure that this gains enough momentum even the fact that it's open it should do that but I'm thinking of things like Joram and other sort of learning resource repositories in the past that you know haven't sort of continued to evolve and with the community for various reasons so I think for this a long-term impact it needs to reach that critical point and I'd just like to hear what your thoughts are on that no absolutely I was on the steering board for Joram when I was at Jisk and we have experiment with this in the past if you've ever been to Moodle.net if you go there now you can see that you can share entire courses now you have to formulate as a product manager which is effectively what I am in this role you have to formulate hypotheses based on the research that you do and also your own experience and that one of the hypotheses that I have is that educators sometimes want to download an entire course and look through what other people have done but mainly are looking for a resource for a specific part of the course and so what this will do is will allow educators to create collections of resources for a specific module or a specific day or event or whatever it is and some of them might actually be collections of courses or collections of plugins or collections of resources or whatever it is but the idea there is a community having a conversation to try and find the best resources for a particular thing so this isn't trying to just create a massive place I don't think we've got a problem around not having enough resources in the world I think we've got a problem around discovery which is why we spend time thinking of our proactive and reactive ways of discovering stuff I feel like social networks are great but are not geared up for educated discovery of resources in the way that this is now we'll rest answer all of your prayers in the first release no because we'll get some things wrong but that's why we need your feedback as a community to say well this is great but I really changed that and I would never use that but it's a good point thank you yes thank you could this function as a community of practice? absolutely so I didn't want to just drop people into a random community because what happens is you know when you signed up for a social network in 2007 like I did with Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is you were totally up for trying all different types of social networks now you're like well I've got my crew on different social networks I'll try them out but really unless I get immediate traction I'm not that interested so I don't want to just drop people into a moodle social network and around a particular thing which is the curation of resources that can totally pivot into more meta conversations around what do we mean by the best resources what do we mean by different views of this particular subject or whatever it is so the idea is that it will blossom into a much more general community practice network et cetera will this be a bolt on for existing installations of moodle in an institution and therefore have separate infrastructure support needs so this is completely separate to the moodle learning platform and it will have tighter integration with moodle but even if you're using something different you can still use moodle net that's the idea and then finally i.e. as a distributed learning platform we use the generated content as opposed to just sharing already existing resources so I don't I was a I was a continuum and it's been separated out yes absolutely so to start off with the quickest way to get resources in there is to reference stuff which already exists so you saw on the thing that was youtube it was pulling stuff in from OER repositories all that kind of stuff but one of the things which is talked about on the screencast is well okay I've got something like a moodle quiz and I want to share that so what we're going to do is to have like a moodle repository which can then be referenced so in the same way that we'll archive everything that currently exists on moodle.net to be available as stuff which can be cured into the new moodle net existing content in your moodle course will then you'll be able to share that as a public URL in a collection that's the idea we very much want there to be lots of moodle content there obviously any final questions before I hand over to the next speaker can you yes, where are you, sorry yeah I had a question you mentioned sorry you mentioned you had developed various degrees and that we could access the work that he's doing is that a separate link everything you need is on moodle.com if you click on tech choices then you'll see lots of information about decentralisation federation we're also using not obscure but less well known this is not going to be built in PHP so some of the back end stuff we need high scalability and reliability so we're building it in a language called elixir and Mayor de Borneo is a technical architect he has defended at length his decision as to why he's done that and we're actually currently in the process of hiring an elixir back end developer from our office in Barcelona he'll be coming on board in the next two weeks so I'll be building that out thank you