A fantastically informative and friendly meeting, as always. Highlights were:

Stourbridge college and their new media server.
Brendan and Tony demonstrated a media server that they had developed in-house. It’s a bit of a homebrew solution (which is why I like it so much) based around The FLV Player. Any video that would once have been burnt to a DVD and shown on a clunky television can now be encoded into FLV and shown on any computer that has a connection to the college network. This offers the fantastic prospect of lecturers actually wanting to use projectors+PCs in the classroom. No more booking out a TV and finding that DVD that your colleague lost last week…

For a lecturer usage is ultra simple – all they have to do is click on a specially provided link and their video starts playing! It’s a bit hard to appreciate until you see how smoothly it runs. The FLV Player features a nifty button that takes advantage of the latest version of Flash’s ability to run full-screen. Older versions can be set to run in a kinda sorta full-screen mode, that just fills the browser window.

I’m currently trying to put together our own version of this system using FFmpeg, FFmpeg-php and the ever trusty LAMP stack.

Stourbridge College (again) demonstrating their new intranet
They’ve gone for the blindingly simple solution of just running another Moodle installation as their intranet. It’s accessible only to staff members and allows staff to edit their courses (rebadged as “intranet areas”) just as any other Moodle allows.

Very simple, very easy to set up and seems to work like a dream.

Worcester College of Technology
Peter Kilcoyne talked about the latest developments at WCT. Gong has been used quite successfully as a voice communication tool. This was demonstrated by the fact that £20,000 was saved by not building a new language lab at the college, and instead just installing headphone-equipped PCs that could access Moodle and Gong.

MP3s have been successfully used as blatant bribes incentives for students and staffs in upping the usage of Moodle. Mp3s were very much the theme of his presentation. He showed us a really trippy MP3 from an obviously mad maths teacher who set a talk about vectors to a mellow jazz track.

Mp3s were also used in an attempt to encourage secret learning, whereby a student can sit in the cafeteria with her headphones on, but nobody knows she is listening to the latest class notes from her lecturer.

Oh, and Peter freely admitted stealing our idea for /userpix-based Moodle posters and expanding them into an exciting range of Moodle postcards. Some reciprocal stealing from him is in order…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 7:39 pm and is filed under E-learning, Moodle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.