Serendipity35

NJEDge.Net joins with the UMDNJ Master Educators' Guild and Informatics Institute for the Annual Faculty Best Practices Showcase: Integrating Technology into Teaching and Learning. The program will take place Friday, March 23, 2007, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of NJ (UMDNJ) Newark Campus.

Faculty from throughout New Jersey will present uses of technology and new instructional methodologies in K-20 (though primarily higher education).

I'm heartened to see that the keynote speaker is Gene I. Maeroff from Teachers College, Columbia University. His last book was Building Blocks: Making Children Successful in the Early Years of School (2006). I really believe that higher ed faculty need to be exposed to what is happening in education and by that I mean Pre-K through 12.

Maybe I'm somewhat under the influence of having seen the movie Freedom Writers this week (and I do recommend it, especially to teachers) which reminded me of what it really means to be in a classroom. Watching Erin Gruwell portrayed on the screen also reminded me of what I lost in moving from K-12 to a university.

I'm doing a session at the showcase. It's titled "Moodle: A Free Learning Management System (Free - like free kittens)" I guess what I'm poking fun at is the idea that free software isn't really free - unless you don't have the accountants put anything on the books for the hundreds of hours people spend on a project. Open source is all about support.

Like other universities, NJIT feels that it is in our best interest to explore some of the available open source course management systems that are alternatives to commercial products such as WebCT. The instructional technology team at NJIT first began to look at Moodle during the fall 2005 semester and looked at pilot programs at other schools. Seventeen NJIT faculty ran test courses during the spring and summer of 2006. A formal pilot program using Moodle was instituted this past fall with 24 courses. Participants included current users of WebCT and faculty who were new to using any type of learning management system and for online courses and face-to-face or hybrid courses.

That's what it says in the session abstract. But what interested me about Moodle right from the start was not that it was an open source LMS/CMS software or even how it could be used in eLearning, or that it might be an alternative to Blackboard.

I was interested in the constructivist philosophy behind it and in the creation of the software. From the Moodle.org site:

[Constructivism] maintains that people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environment.

Everything you read, see, hear, feel, and touch is tested against your prior knowledge and if it is viable within your mental world, may form new knowledge you carry with you. Knowledge is strengthened if you can use it successfully in your wider environment. You are not just a memory bank passively absorbing information, nor can knowledge be "transmitted" to you just by reading something or listening to someone.

This is not to say you can't learn anything from reading a web page or watching a lecture, obviously you can, it's just pointing out that there is more interpretation going on than a transfer of information from one brain to another.

I'm impressed that the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia is a new high school developed in partnership with The Franklin Institute. Its approach is inquiry-based science, technology, mathematics and (you don't see this in too many high schools) entrepreneurship. So they are using a lot of project-based learning, inquiry, research, and collaboration - and this is their Moodle site.

And right around my own area here in north NJ, we have Montclair Kimberley Academy who puts our Moodle pilot to shame. They have every class K through 12 in Moodle courses. They should be talking at the showcase - but I know that college faculty want to hear college faculty present. They just can't seem to make the connections to what is going on in those "lower" education classrooms.

Okay, it's not all college faculty that are like that. Maybe it's more present at a research university like NJIT where everyone admits that research takes the driver's seat.

I hope NJEDge gets some K-12 attendees - maybe even a few presenters. I'll be looking for you. Let's chat at lunch.