Leonette looking for advice & help on Learning 2.0

Posted on | August 8, 2008 | 4 Comments

Leonette Chew, of the Civil Service College, Singapore, attended my ‘Learning 2.0′ workshop at ICTLT earlier in the week, and has come back to me in a comment asking some great questions to help her get things moving with her colleagues. I’m transiting through Heathrow at the moment, so I’ll offer my own advice later, but perhaps others would like to share their own thinking in response to her question?

She wrote:

“Attended your pre conference workshop and the discussion really got me thinking about how I can start to use some of the webtools you’ve highlighted back at work at the courses I run. Many thanks for the links at your delicious page – will come in handy now that I’m preparing a list of options of webtools that I’m recommending my colleagues to explore in our courses.

Wonder if you have any suggestions as to what kind of platforms I could consider? My requirements so far:
- Shld have discussion forum/blog function
- Security – should allow for only invited participants to contribute (not open to public), preferably require password for access. Administrator shld have control over privacy settings
- Shld have function that allows uploading of files (MS Office files, photos etc)

By the way, what do you think of Moodle?”

So, over to the blogosphere…

Technorati Tags: ictlt, learning 2.0, civil service college, singapore

Category: Web 2.0, community, education

Comments

4 Responses to “Leonette looking for advice & help on Learning 2.0”

Joe Wilson
August 8th, 2008 @ 10:31 am

Moodle does the job of a vle well and we have added Mahara eportfolio to it for our sqa academy they work well together. The OU has done lots of work in this area in UK around the Moodle platform.

These platforms are stable and easy to get hold of but you need technical support to set these up and maintain them locally.

You also need to think about technology that learners will be able to access and they can cope with.

If you were just going to go for it and your candidates had normal access to the web ( not strained through some silly local filters) and they had some level of confidence in using web – I would just use google docs along with google groups give you all the functionality you really need. – you could mix and mash other web 2 apps as required in consultation with your learners .

You could of course also buy the enterprise version of any number of corporate learning management systems that would hook back into all your legacy HR , payroll and corporate systems and track Continuing Professional Development across your workforce. The sales teams for these systems will be reading this thread and will be contacting you in droves
Sue Waters
August 8th, 2008 @ 11:18 am

My question back would be what is she really wanting to achieve? If she is after the collaborative, social networking aspect then I would probably think about a Ning community.
Neil Winton
August 8th, 2008 @ 11:31 am

I agree with Joe about Moodle being a good answer. If your hosting company have Fantastico then setting up a Moodle site is very straightforward indeed.

Another option might be a wiki like Wikispaces. This would give you control over who can access the site as well as allowing for discussions and file sharing.

There are (literally) countless options worth looking at. As well as the Google docs route suggested by Joe, (though you should maybe read THIS first), you could look at Adobe’s Buzzword, Wikifortio, Bubbl.us, and so forth (I’ve not added all the links lest I fall foul of John’s spam filter.

Be wary of setting up a Bulletin Board using phpBB or SMF as I am reliably informed that they have some well documented security flaws.

Feel free to ask any more questions you may have… you’ll always find someone willing to answer.
Ruby
August 8th, 2008 @ 11:51 am

Steve Downes just published a link to a discussion about moving to Moodle – might be helpful?
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=45531