From imoot.org

Next year's Moodle Moot is to be hosted by University of London Computer Centre on 13th and 14th April. Here are the details...

“We are very excited at the opportunity to host MoodleMoot UK 2010” says Mick Kahn, Head of Application Services at ULCC. “Moodle is now the VLE of choice for the UK education sector and a triumph for the Open Source approach and this conference will bring together teachers, developers and administrators to learn from each other and advance the UK e-learning agenda."

We will be hard at work, putting together two days packed with thought provoking keynotes and engaging workshops whilst offering you the chance to meet fellow Moodlers.

Sean Keogh from pteppic.net, a member of the Programme Group for MoodleMoot UK 2010, who organised MoodleMoot UK since it started in 2004, says "I'm very pleased to be handing over the reins of MoodleMoot UK to ULCC. With their engagement of all sectors of the Moodle community, I am sure that they will organise an excellent conference and I look forward to working with them". The conference will be held on 13 & 14 April 2010, at Senate House, the University of London’s iconic Art Deco building, which has recently undergone major refurbishment.

It was a great pleasure to attend last Tuesday's Mirandamod to hear Etienne Wenger discussing communities of practice (CoP), with particular relation to education, both in schools and, particularly, in relation to teachers' continuing professional development. I'm sure that the CoP approach to CPD is both more fulfilling for the individual and more effective for the profession than the traditional training model of courses and powerpoints that we see so much of: my own professional development has owed far more to colleagues in the various staff rooms, communities and networks with which I've been associated, not least MirandaNet, SchoolForge and Naace, than the training courses I've occasionally been sent on; I doubt my experience is that unusual.

Mirandamods are a particular style of unconference, bringing something of the reflection of an academic seminar to the participatory, micropresentation format of a teachmeet, and thus I took my turn presenting, taking the above title as my theme.

The larger open source projects, such as moodle (which I used extensively for my examples), drupal, wordpress, firefox and ubuntu have a great deal in common with Wenger and Lave's notion, which Wenger admitted was certainly not a new one, of the Community of Practice:

• There is clearly a shared domain - the project, and I guess at its heart, the code itself.
• Whilst it's certainly possible to use the code without participating in the community, these big projects have very active communities, happy and eager to "engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information."
• Furthermore, there is, at least because all members of the community share the use of the same code, a shared practice: members: "develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice"