Here are my goals for a district eLearning platform to be in place within 2 years: To have a complete ecosystem that allows for learning (moodle), community building/blogging/resume building/personal learning artifacts for students (mahara), and web communications and presentation archiving (dimdim). This is also a great toolset for web 2.0 technologies.
The web 2.0 classroom toolset:
1. Moodle 1.9 (November 2007) www.moodle.org
2. Mahara 1.0 (ePortfolio/community building/ November or December 2007) www.mahara.org
3. DimDim 1.0 (Desktop Sharing/Conference/Presentation / Early 2008) www.dimdim.org
4.Joomla (frontpage and possible “glue” to tie these all together so that you go to one website and then get access to all aspects of the ecosystem. Otherwise you can get access from within each website.
5. PHP Motion 1.0(Video Sharing)
6. WordPress MU (Teacher website/blogging)
7. Liferay (widget based portal/custom homepage)
ALL of these products are fully integrated meaning if you login to one, you can click on a link within the website and you will automatically be logged in to the other website allowing for a seamless integration. Dimdim is an activity within Moodle and Mahara takes advantage of the networking feature of moodle that allows you to go from one site to another and not have to login again.
I believe these tools are going to give our students and teachers unprecedented opportunities for professional development, collaboration, sharing, and learning. The ePortfolio system will help students gather and save work needed when applying for college and give them a tech savvy way to present their educational work.
All dates given above are subject to the release of the programs in the open source community.