Much has been said over the years about the rise of virtual teams, including the benefits and drawbacks of remote workers and those staunchly for and against it. Not nearly as much has been said (or that I’ve seen anyway) on the topic of blended teams, where some staff are located in the same physical place and others are located elsewhere and working virtually.
The management compass
Its been a while since I blogged, which is predominantly due to two factors. One – its been a busy twelve months, and to be honest a fairly rocky one. Two – my focus has shifted from what I’ve traditionally blogged about as my role has shifted into heading up the Consulting team for NetSpot & Blackboard in Australia, New Zealand and beyond.
Blackboard Education Open Source Services – a personal view
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” – JFK
Over the last four years I’ve been very lucky. Lucky enough to be part of a company which grew from 12 people when I started in 2008 to become one of the largest financial contributors to the Moodle project in the world in 2012. Lucky enough to become part of a global community of educators in an open source community that has grown to over sixty million users. Lucky enough to meet and work with so many awesome people as we’ve deployed Moodle in many Universities, TAFEs and other organisations around the country. And lucky enough to use Moodle through all of this, watch it grow as a product, watch the Moodle HQ team evolve in size and maturity, as has our own maturity in all aspects of using and supporting Moodle.
But, as always, the only constant in life is change, and now NetSpot, Moodlerooms, Blackboard and the Moodle project as a whole are about to enter a new era. You can read the official announcement here and here, but in this post I want to talk more about how I see this change from my own, more personal, perspective.
Riding the Wave with Moodle
Amidst much geeky fanfare Google recently unveiled its latest, greatest innovation – Google Wave. Without going into gory detail, and admitting freely that I’ve only gotten about two thirds of the way through the one-hour-twenty presentation video (but being otherwise filled in over dinner last night about the whole thing thanks to uber-geek Spud), Google Wave morphs instant messaging, email, document collaboration and a bunch of other tools into one more or less seamless platform, that just happens to be open source as well and lend itself brilliantly to integration with other applications thanks to a rich API. In theory anyway.
So what impact could this have on Moodle?