I would certainly echo Martin Sepion’s comments about the opening presentations from Professor Geoffrey Crossick and Professor Sugata Mitra being good – they kicked off the Moot with a buzz that lasted the whole conference. I facilitated the Moodle in Schools workshop which was equally inspiring; children in year 2 upwards were using moodle with a variety of colourful themes (one memorably based around creepy crawly bugs!) which had been purchased by the LEA and offered to the schools. Parents seemed to welcome the involvement by using Moodle at home with the children’s schooling. Interestingly it was also used to help with the transition between years by introducing new teachers and classes via Moodle ahead of time.
Overall I thought it was a great event. The facilities were excellent and the twitter display a great fun thing to do too. Philip Butler, who MC’d, did a great job keeping the energy levels high and injecting lots of humour while maintaining seriousness – a good balance. The sandwich lunch could perhaps have been a bit more exciting, but the cakes with tea/coffee were nice though. The wireless network worked really well and everyone was able to ‘tweet’ effectively – I particularly liked the Twitter display in the main hall. The venue was excellent with the exhibition, food, and conference halls looking nice. It was just the right size for the number of delegates (probably much more would’ve been unmanageable). The Moot banners/marketing stuff looked good too.
For MoodleMootUK 2011? I wondered about having some real workshops, rather than just presentation based sessions, but then thought about possible conflict with ‘training’, commercial operations, etc. Perhaps some effort to collect output for submission to Moodle.org or to the conference– for example top 10 lists of features we’d like to see in the next Moodle version. While this isn’t a formal ‘user group’ organisation, is it never the less a powerful and committed group of people who collectively represent a good cross section of opinion. Perhaps comments/outputs could be collated for submission back to the conference for publishing on the website