Month: July 2009

A final reflection on my experience with Moodle.

Since the site was centered around the topic of woodworking it makes sense to stick with that for the final reflection.  Before you can actually start building a project you obviously need a plan, you have to know what it is you’re going to make before you start making it.  To quote Yogi Berra, ‘if you don’t know where you’re going, how are you gonna know when you get there?’  I chose to build the site around woodworking.  I did this for a few reasons, it’s one of my subject areas, it’s something I know a fair bit about, and it’s something I would be doing even if I wasn’t making a living doing it.  So I had my plan.  Next I needed the wood, the raw material that I was going to use to build the project.  Unlike most of the time, in this case the raw material was given to me, it came in the form of a Moodle site and some requirements of what had to appear on the site.  Then it was building time.

In any woodworking project there are stages,  not stages in terms of, ‘do this first, then this…’ but emotional stages.  There’s the initial interest and enthusiasm you get with working on something new, something you’ve never done before.  This is the time when you ask yourself how you’re going to go about building the piece, what tools will you need, and in what order should you proceed.  In the case of the Moodle this time consisted of exploring the Moodle site, trying to find the tools available and learn how to use them in order to build the requirements of the site.

Once you start actually building a wood project you inevitably encounter moments of frustration, a blade that isn’t sharp and has burned the wood, a part of a plan that seems the wrong size to fit where it belongs.  With the Moodle these frustrations came mostly from trying to do something that wasn’t intuitive or well explained, for example spending too much time trying to figure out how to have a discussion forum that would be restricted to a small group.   This is where the real challenges, and for me one of most interesting parts of building the project are, either a wooden one or a digital one, trying to figure out how to do something, how to solve the puzzle.

Another stage I always seem to go through with a woodworking project comes when I’ve been working on it for a while and I start to get a little tired of it, I’ve solved most of the major problems and now I just want to see it finished.  With the Moodle, since we weren’t working on it steadily this took a bit longer to happen, but I did get to the point where I started to think that I had solved a lot of the biggest ‘how-to’s’ and now I was just filling it in to check off the requirements.

The next emotion I feel when I’m working on a wood project comes when it’s all over, the parts are together, the finish is dry and I’m ready to either put it somewhere in the house or give it away.  I’m rarely completely satisfied, if there is a little mistake, even one that no one else notices, I’m always drawn to it.  Even if there are no mistakes I inevitably start thinking about what else I could have done, how I could have changed it to make it better.  For the Moodle site the feeling was much the same.  I met the requirements, (I think) but maybe I should have had more bells and whistles, more stuff. But whether it’s made of wood or made of 1’s and 0’s, you eventually get to the point, often based on time, when you have to say, ‘it’s done’.  And that’s where we’ve arrived.

Lastly there is the emotional feeling that comes afterwards.  The mistakes and frustrations you experienced along the way have slipped to the background and you realize that you actually enjoyed doing that, it was fun to figure out the ‘how-to’s’ and to know that you accomplished something different.  With a hobby this is why you continue to be interested, with Moodle the future is less certain, but looking at it now, it was kind of fun.

Fortunately I have some experience using a Wiki, all from the MET program, so I had pretty much gone through the learning cycle beforehand. As I’m learning the hard way trying to figure out how to add a voice over to the web 2 tools, removing the learning step was a big help when it came time to post my ‘sightings’. As to the question of how the group collaboration and discussion differed from the Vista space, I think the two are distinct enough to deal with separately. The collaboration page, with the sightings, I liked. I liked being able to see everyone’s posting at once on the page. This made it easy to go back to someone’s posting and re-read what they had said without having to hunt around for it. I also liked the look of the page, it was very clean looking, everything laid out and divided up neatly with headings etc. (no, I’m not generally a clean freak). One other thing I liked, and I’m not sure if this is an option with Vista, I liked being able to go back a couple of days later and add to my posting. Even if you can do this in Vista I always have the feeling when I post something that it’s suddenly written in stone. One aspect of the Wiki that didn’t seem very useful for our purposes was the thing that sets Wikis apart from regular web pages, the ability to make changes to anything on the page. I wasn’t about to go to someone else’s posting and start changing things. As for the discussion space, I wasn’t quite as taken with that. I found that there were too many things going on there, it jumped around too much. I also didn’t like that the discussion was on a different page than the thing that was being discussed, I found it a pain to have to keep going back to the sightings page to look at the posting that was being commented on. However, I think the positive aspects outweigh the negatives, I like using Wiki’s and I can definitely see their usefulness in education.