On the 25th and 25th March, Adrian Schlegel and Penny Leach attended the German Moodlemoot in Berlin.
Penny's Experience
This was my 7th or 8th Moodlemoot, so for me the most important part was seeing other Moodlers again and catching up with what they're doing. I didn't go to many of the talks, since it stretches my German somewhat, but I very much enjoyed Ralf Hilgenstock's keynote address, including some interesting photos of Moodlers and a preview of Moodle 2.0.
Officially, during the conference, I co-led a talk and workshop with about Mahara which went very well – at the end of our workshop we had attendees doing a demonstration of the presentations they created about what they had learned during the course of the Moodlemoot, which was great to see, from people who had never used Mahara before.
I also did a handover of MNet to David Mudrak. I was working on MNet during my secondment to Moodle HQ in January and February, but I can't really maintain it as actively as I need when back in my normal life, and David volunteered while we were at the Moodle developer conference last December in the Czech Republic.
Finally, of course we upheld the fine Moodlemoot tradition of Mojito drinking. This has been a tradition as long as I remember, and apparently I am partially to blame for inroducing Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder, to Mojitos many years ago.
Thanks very much Liip for giving me the time to go to this conference, and of course the organisers for a stellar job.
Adi's Experience
The MoodleMoot in Berlin was my first MoodleMoot so it was quite a different experience for me.
I really liked Ralf Hilgenstock's (eledia.de) Keynote on Moodle 2.0. It provided a nice overview over the upcoming features of Moodle 2.0.
The interesting thing about MoodleMoots is that most of the participants are teachers/people from educational institutions.
Although you will meet the occasional core developer it's mostly an end user conference. This means you meet a lot of people that are confronted with Moodle in their day-to-day life. What struck me most was the amount of enthusiasm these people are showing for Moodle. I had a lot of conversations with other attendees and I was suprised to see how much effort they put into advocating Moodle. Apparently in Germany it's quite hard to introduce new tools into the class rooms due to a lot of bureaucracy. Still those people fight for Moodle until it gets accepted by superiors and pupils.
A lot of the talks at the MoodleMoot were from teachers sharing their experiences in adapting Moodle to their specific needs. Even though most of them do not really have any programming experience they manage to adapt Moodle to their needs.
It was also interesting to meet some of the core developers (David Mudrak and Petr Škoda) and being introduced to the MoodleMoot Mojito tradition.
From a developer point of view I can highly recommend taking part in a MoodleMoot because you get to see how people use Moodle in real life to get the most out of it.