(photo by maxinstosh of flickr)

I attended the 2-3-98 Open Discussion on Technology in Education conference last week. In many cases, Open Source is becoming just another option when evaluating software for use in education. Of course, there are still objections from some, but more and more software in compared on the solution it can provide, without regard for the license. One day of the conference was devoted to Moodle, and it was clear that Moodle was regarded as a superior solution by those that chose it. There was not any bias in choosing open source or proprietary solutions noted by those that chose Moodle. That is, they chose Moodle for the the features it provides.

I learned quite a bit about Moodle. There are almost 21 million people with Moodle accounts, and over 45,000 installations of Moodle. I had not realized the scope of Moodle adoption. Many of these are outside the United States and Europe.

There is always discussion about  e-portfolio/social networking solutions that integrate with Moodle. Mahara was a favorite this conference, it is a fully-featured e-portfolio that has single sign-on integration with Moodle. Another, simpler option is Moofolio is a Moodle block that allows collection and reflection of  portfolio artifacts.