Earlier this year, Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd announced the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution – a $1.2 billion 5-year program which aims to achieve 1:2 (computer to student) ratio in all Australian secondary schools. Grants up to $1m are now available by application to schools for computer hardware, online curriculum tools and resources, and support mechanisms for effective ICT deployment.
On the back of our Digital Education Revolution, the super-sized Moodle Moot AU 08 will be held on October 2-3, 2008 at All Hallows’ School, Brisbane. Confirmed Keynote Speakers are Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Martin Dougiamas plus internationally regarded Educator, Professor Erica McWilliam from Queensland University of Technology.
Moodle is a course management system – a free, Open Source software package designed to help educators create effective online learning communities. It can be downloaded and used on any computer, yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 500,000 students. Moodle has a large and diverse user community more than 1 million registered users on moodle.org speaking over 80 languages in 200 countries.
This year’s event “…is a major step forward for our Open Source Community” said Event Manager, Chad Outten.
We’ve received an overwhelmingly positive expression of interest from the Moodle Community and the calibre of session presenters for the Moot is pretty amazing.
Naturally, we’re grateful for the support of our Moodle Partners: Pukunui, NetSpot, HRDNZ and Catalyst IT and involvement by local universities: QUT, USQ, Griffith, UNSW, Sydney, Macquarie and Canberra”.
Full-day pre-Conference workshops will be held on October 1 and there will be 4 streams throughout the Conference proper on October 2-3: Educator, Developer, System Administrators and Business.
Event highlights include a sneak peek at Moodle version 2.0 with Lead Developer, Martin Dougiamas, a rare opportunity to get hands on with the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ project through the OLPC Workshop run by Project Architect, Martin Langhoff and sessions run by USQ staff that showcase the site-wide implementation of Moodle for 27,000 university students. When asked who the Conference is intended for, Chad Outten responded:
…anyone who is serious about e-Learning. This definitely includes school and TAFE teachers, university lecturers, ICT decision-makers, e-Learning Managers, technology trainers, software developers, system administrators and business people. You don’t necessarily have to be a Moodle user. You may simply be exploring the possibilities for your organisation.
My Learning Space is a proud supporter of Moodle Moot AU 08.