My Moodle course began yesterday. I’ve been using the software for a few years now, but it’s always been very seat-of-my-pants. My goal in taking this class was to get a better sense of the pedagogy behind it, but already I’ve picked up on a couple of modules I didn’t know about. They will be immediately useful in my own work.
I wish someone would write a slick, Web 2.0-style learning management system. Moodle’s nice and all, but that interface is horrid. I cleaned up what I could in my implementation, but there’s still much room for improvement. I also don’t like the fact that it’s in PHP, but I can get over that. The weirdest thing, though, is the development community. Moodle is the first open source project I’ve ever kept an eye on in which there was open flirting between members. This is probably an artifact of it being a touchy-feely constructivist application. All kidding aside, the downside of this educator-first approach to software development is, from my perspective, the occassional-yet-still-annoying dismissal-without-real-cause of interesting ideas–say, implementing OpenID instead of an archaic LDAP-based login system.
Oh well–at least it’s not Blackboard.
There is, actually, a great LMS that has a Web 2.0 look and feel - and it combines social networking! You should check out http://www.scholar360.com.
Looks interesting, but unfortunately the annual license fees put it out of my price range.