Boss: I think you should go to the UK Moot this year.
Me: Um, ok.
And so started my adventure of coming from the small town of Adelaide, South Australia, to London for the 2010 UK Moodle Moot.
As opening day for the Moot approaches and I start to think seriously about my first trip ever to the UK, I have also been lucky enough to be asked to contribute to the Moot blog to share some thoughts and ideas about why I’m heading over.
Firstly, there will be three of us heading over from Adelaide – myself, James Strong and Allan Christie – we’ll be the funny sounding ones, probably with jetlag. Stop us and say hello if you get the chance. Or at least stop me and say hello – as the least well travelled of my companions (and a small town boy at heart) I’ll be the one looking like, well, a small town boy wandering around one of the largest cities in the world…
But why come over in the first place?
Working for the largest Moodle Partner in the Southern Hemisphere is great and has taken me to lots of places around Australia, but it is also quite isolated in regard to meeting some of the ‘big names’ from the North. In particular I’m looking forward to (hopefully) meeting some people from the Open University, which is still considered by many as the ‘holy grail’ of campus-wide University implementations, so if you are at the Moot from the Open Uni then please come and say hello – we’d love to hear your experiences.
Then there is the presentation I’ll be co-delivering with James Strong, which will be all about the people, processes and platforms required to run an Enterprise Moodle environment.
I’m also keen to see how significant the regional differences are in the Moodle communities (if there are any), to meet people I’ve interacted with online, and really just to experience a Moot on the other side of the globe. Then there’s the little matter of seeing how many ideas I can ‘borrow’ for the Australian Moot I’m helping organise in July – I have been watching the Moot UK team work their way through the various challenges of organising an event like this and getting just a little nervous about the amount of effort involved… And of course I, like most, will be keeping an eye out for any presentations on Moodle 2.0 as we draw ever nearer to the beta release.
Whatever the case, I can’t wait to get over there and experience at least a little bit of London, see what I hope will be some innovative and thought-provoking presentations and meet as many people in the global Moodle community as I can.
Roll on the 13th!