We're all naturally curious beings, but our day to day lives often get stuck in predictable routines that can dull our minds. And what's a great way to wake up our curiosity? The unexpected. Something that makes us pause and wonder, something that requires us to reconsider what we know about the...
My experience with teaching online courses (and participating in various online communities) has led me to believe that there are three basic groups of people when it comes to finding answers to their questions:Social learners: people who prefer finding answers by asking other people.Resource le...
Here's the thing: I don't believe one or two days long workshops really work when you're trying to change the way people do something or convince them to use a new tool. These workshops are like a first date. It can go really well, you get all excited... but then, the next day, you have this urg...
Yesterday Google announced Google Squared, a new release from Google Labs. From the official announcement: "Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet.". I've played with it for a while tod...
Today I'd like to share with you my recent paper about using virtual worlds in education, with a special focus on how we can use virtual worlds with Moodle. I wanted this paper to be a basic introduction to why virtual worlds are good for education, and also provide a basic overview of some of t...
It's been almost two years since I created a brief video presentation of Moodle, and now I finally took the time to update it with a new version. Initially, I just wanted to update the usage statistics, but I ended up doing a redesign, and I also added some information, so it's slightly longer t...
If you haven't heard it yet, today is Ada Lovelace Day, "an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology". I must confess I haven't heard much about Ada before today, but I have of course heard much more about Charles Babbage, the inventor of the computer she ...
Moodle is a great open source and freely available online learning management system, but what really makes it special is the large community of teachers and administrators that are using it in many different and innovative ways. And that is why Moodle conferences called MoodleMoots (gatherings ...
Keeping students motivated and interested can often be challenging; even more so when you're dealing with distance learning. There are of course several pedagogical approaches that we can use to keep students motivated, but lately I've been thinking about how we could make the tools that we alre...
I recently celebrated my birthday, and one of the most memorable greetings came from quite an unexpected source: the business social networking site Xing. I received an e-mail informing me that they are giving me 10 days of Premium Membership. That in itself is a nice touch, but what really brou...
When I talk about social media I often mention the fact that my grandpa has a blog. Well, actually two blogs: one for his local mycological society and the other for his local pensioner organisation. It all started when his mycological society wanted a website where they could post news and anno...
Yes, it certainly has been a while since I last posted on this blog. I can easily think of several reasons for this: finding micro blogging easier for sharing quick ideas and cool content, having the feeling that what I have to say has already been written more eloquently somewhere else, not fin...