My virtual attendance to #mtmoot 2014

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June is usually a busy month for teachers. Final exams, grades, school reports, meetings with parents are the usual stressing tasks for all of us. So as soon I begin my summer holidays, I start to pay attention to many other forgotten activities  and hobbies. One of those activities is to read about what’s going on in the Moodle Community.

In addition to read some interesting threads in the Moodle forums, and have a look to some selected blogs, I usually go to my Moodle list in Twitter to follow a large group of moodlers around the world. And it’s usually around the first two weeks of July when some Australian or American moots are taking place. The last two years I followed in July the Australian moots and this year, as I finished a bit later my professional duties, I focused my attention on the Montana Moodle Moot 2014. The hashtag #mtmoot gathered hundreds of tweets in a vibrant timeline from participants at that event held at Helena (Montana).

The flow of  tweets was constant and as you’ll see below, most of them were very interesting too. This time I decided to write a summer post about this particular way of virtual attendance to a learning event which occurs at more than 4,700 miles away from where I live.

Through the hashtag (#mtmoot) I could read messages (tweets) posted since some days before the beginning of the event to now (24h after the end of the event). As early as on January (maybe earlier), some organizers started to tweet about #mtmoot. Some weeks before the event the mtmoot crew confirmed a physical attendance of «over 150 folks from 23 states and 3 countries«. Of course I was not in their lists, but now they can add me up as a virtual attendant and Spain as a new more country. 😉

I can say that I have a good idea about what they were talking about. My knowledge came not only from the text messages (tweets) but also from a lot of multimedia files they attached to their tweets. Most of keynotes were reported by participants with nice and funny pictures, videos, useful links to valuable websites and slideshare presentations. Some tweets were replies to others so as soon as you organised them in a thread gave me a valuable landscape of their discussions. Microblogging with 140 characters is difficult but once one  gets used to write them, some messages become even more concise and descriptive than it’d be ever expected.

Of course I didn’t smell the fresh air of the Rockies mountains, nor taste their beer, nor felt the friendship of the great people who attended physically to the event. That’s what I’m missing but, at least, I feel that, somehow I’ve been there with them too 🙂 Who knows. Maybe one year I can take my wife and my children and drop by there as a real attendant.

Mountain Moodle Moot 2014 event followed through #mtmoot Twitter hashtag

Mountain Moodle Moot 2014 event followed through #mtmoot Twitter hashtag

Below it’s my Tweets Notebook. Some selected tweets I’ve chosen as a summary for this vibrant #mtmoot 2014. There were many others good enough to be selected but my editor limited the pages of my book 😉

A.- As I said before, +1 ‘virtual’ participant and +1 country (Spain):

B.- Most moots are usually fun but this is…Ice Blocking at Mountain Moot


 

 

c.- Julian Ridden (moodleman and now @EduRidden) was the guest start at #mtmoot. His keynote was full of anecdotes and brilliant ideas some of which are below:

 

«I would love to change the world, but no one will give me the source code» @EduRidden

 

 

 

Some more Pictures…

 

 

d.- Michelle Moore,who I met personally at Moodlemoot Spain 12 in Madrid, talked about the REAL model for course development. Michele is able to extract instructional gold from every resource, activity or configuration tool in Moodle. As she said, she’s with Moodle (v1.1) since August 2003

 

 

 

And finally my tweet:

3 comentarios

    • Hi Kent!

      Thanks for commenting my post 🙂

      Twitter is an excellent backchannel for those as me who were far from the event. But sometimes there are ways for a better dissemination as for example:

    • create a different hashtag for non-attendants just to make people aware of who is following the event online
    • having access in advance to the presentation (for example in slideshare) could attract remote participants if the topic is relevant
    • Of course streaming video would be great but in the other hand I think it’s a bit unfair for those who pay a fee for attending
    • Remote participants could also be speakers to run a webinar throughout hangout or other non-expensive software as Martin Dougiamas usually does from Australia when he can’t attend to the event
    • I think that some keynotes could join more remote ‘virtual’ people than attendants at the venue if the topic is interesting. Some brave moodlemoot’s organizers could try it 🙂
    • Montana moot 2014 was in Summer so many teachers in Northern hemisphere are on holidays. The time difference beetween Montana and CET (Central European Time) is +7 hours so if we’re not on the beach we can follow the conference 😉

      • Well these are a couple of simple (maybe crazy) ideas.

      I’m happy to write it for you Kent. Best regards from Vigo to all the Moodle people in Montana!

      Toni

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