Lafayette hosted Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V during the first week of January, and I have to say, I think it went pretty well. We got a lot of stuff done, including putting the finishing touches on two new tools for Moodle: Assignment ZIP (which allows you to download all of the files associated with an assignment as one ZIP file … something our faculty should love) and Simple File Upload (which is an easy way of quickly adding a single file to a course as a resource, bypassing Moodle’s awkward file upload interface). Both of these will be going into production at Lafayette in Spring 2010.
We also spent a good amount of time working on Moodle/Banner integration with the author of the Banner/Luminis Message Broker plugin, Eric Merrill of Oakland University (which should pave the way for us doing a test run of the plugin during the spring semester, on a test install of Moodle run in tandem with production Moodle) and began testing a number of interface improvements to the Moodle gradebook that will make it easier for students to understand the calculations that went into producing their grades.
We also spent considerable time using Google Wave, Google’s new collaborative email/chat/wiki/forum/whatever tool. We used it for the Hack/Doc backchannel, as well as to coordinate off-site participants who were joining us virtually. The virtual component was the hardest part of the whole event; it was hard to keep folks who were off-site involved with what was happening locally. While we did schedule several conferences in Elluminate to keep them in the loop, it was difficult (if not impossible) to include them in the casual conversation and decision making that is such a big part of Hack/Doc.
For a day-by-day accounting of our work at Hack/Doc Fest, check out these posts on CLAMP-IT.org: