Graham Glass, etc.

EDU 2.0 breezes by 250,000 members

EDU 2.0 recently breezed by 250,000 members, adding 10,000 new members in the last week. Here's a graph that shows the new growth rate for the past two months. At this rate it should pass 500,000 users sometime in 2011, with the upside of a lot more.

Exciting times!

PLE thoughts: #PLENK2010

I recently signed up to participate in Stephen Downe's PLENK 2010 (Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge) online course. The main reason for this is because I'm working on EDU20.NET, the EDU 2.0 personalized social learning network, and wanted to see what others are thinking about such environments. So far, most of the activity is taking place in forum discussions on Moodle. My own thoughts about this area are:

1. There is a huge benefit of having a community of enthusiastic learners that can share and interact with each other. Not only do you have interesting conversations, but the communicate can also accumulate resources, reviews, Q&A responses. I don't think of this is being a PERSONAL learning environment, more a personalized SOCIAL learning environment.

2. If you want lots of students, especially high school kids, to engage in some kind of personalized social learning, then it needs to be more structured than just a bunch of forums. For example, having self-assessment quizzes, badges you can earn, karma points for helping others, individual and group quests, resource library, ability to arrange your own personal favorite resources in a Flip-board like fashion, etc. There are a variety of game mechanics that these environments can use to be more engaging.

3. Social learning environments should exist independently of any particular institution or class.

4. Ideally, social learning environments can be used from within LMSs. For example, a Math class might connect its students to a Math learning circle for additional learning.

I'll post more thoughts as the course progresses.

Code stats update: EDU 2.0 vs. Moodle

About 8 months ago I did a comparison of EDU 2.0 lines of code vs. Moodle. Since then, we've added a huge amount of functionality, including:

- Facebook-like feeds for classes, groups, and per-user.
- Full customization of portals
- Major ease-of-use improvements
- Improvements to the class catalog and e-commerce features
- Improvements to the library functionality for reuse
- Simplified search

Here are the updated figures for our code base:

- 37,000 -> 47,000 lines of code (+27%)
- 742 -> 858 classes (+15%)
- 4977 -> 6192 methods (+24%)
- 6 -> 7 methods per class (+16%)
- 5 -> 5 lines per method (+0%)

So overall, the code base went up by about 25%, which is pretty good considering how much functionality we added. In addition, the platform got *faster* and the code is simpler to understand.

In contrast, Moodle 1.x is over 1,500,000 lines of PHP.