Eurocall 2011, Nottingham, England 31st August - 3rd September

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(Invited to take part in a joint presentation on an Interschool project using Moodle Network.) 

Proposal Abstract

Interschool Collaborative Activities Using a Customized Moodle Network

Harashima, Kanda, Sato & Yamauchi 

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, recently wrote concerning thriving social-networking services, “Each site is a silo, walled off from the others,” (2010, p.2) and expressed his concerns about the closed nature of online community sites. This concern very much applies to the communities developed inside Learning Management Systems (LMSs). The inhabitants at one LMS site hardly ever communicate or collaborate with those living in other LMS sites, because each LMS world is closed and the service is strictly limited to its registered users. We have thought it regrettable, and hoped for some ways to allow users of different LMSs, both teachers and students, to share ideas, materials, quizzes, resources, and tasks among themselves.

Moodle is a very popular open-source LMS. With version 1.8 Moodle has incorporated a networking function through which different instances of Moodle can be connected with each other and the students at each Moodle site can move to other Moodle sites without signing off. Although this Moodle Networking function, or M-net, provides a very promising way for teachers to share resources and for students to communicate and collaborate with remote partners, little has been studied concerning the practical merit of using M-net for collaborative learning.

The authors set out to conduct an experiment on setting up M-net between servers at different locations in 2009. After establishing and testing the M-net, we began to engage our students in a number of interschool collaborative activities.

The first semester we implemented three activities: Exchange Forum, where students from three different schools gathered on M-net and exchanged opinions on current issues; TOEIC Reading Quizzes, where students remotely accessed and solved TOEIC-style quizzes; and Collaborative Database, where students from remote Moodle sites put their efforts together and created a database of the world’s most influential people.

After the semester, we realized upon reflection that each remote user was not easily identified as to which school/Moodle site he or she represented. This led us to have the M-net customized by a programmer so that each remote user could get color coding, which enabled users to visually distinguish each remote user according to school or site.

With this modification we introduced Interschool Discussion in the second semester using M-net, where students engaged in debate-like structured discussions on some controversial social issues. 124 students from four different universities exchanged heated discussions over M-net, being fully aware who was coming from which Moodle site this time. Toward the end of the activity we conducted a questionnaire. The results revealed some interesting insights into the differences between face-to-face and online discussion types, students’ sentiment toward remote discussion partners, the effectiveness of M-net and its customization, and the significance of being connected to learners whom they would never see in real life. In this presentation we will report our analyses and findings concerning the data we collected.

Works Cited

Berners-Lee, T. (2010). Long live the Web: A call for continued open standards and neutrality. Scientific American. Online. Retrieved on Feb. 3, 2011 from http:// www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

Presentation Slides (PDF)
Click here to download:
Eurocall2011final-2.pdf (5.19 MB)

M Yam

M Yam


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