Moodlemoot Italy '23
The MoodleMoot Italia 2023, held in Florence from December 14 to 16, 2023, was an amazing conference in a beautiful venue. This annual conference, organized by the Italian Moodle Users Association (AIUM) in collaboration with the University of Florence, served as a gathering for Italian Moodlers from all sectors.
Florence is a city that I had only virtually “visited” in the game Assassins Creed, however the impressive blend of architecture conveyed in the game was just a hint of the architectural beauty that is Florence with the small streets, churches, and historical buildings that made it feel like I was walking through an open-air museum, one that was very much alive!
Palazzo Vecchio
The conference began on Thursday afternoon, and in the evening a wonderful formal start and social event was held in the stunning room “the Salone dei 500” in Palazzo Vecchio. The amazingly beautiful painted room reminded me of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
This town hall building was an interesting contrast – looking like a fort outside, yet inside the beautifully decorated rooms and artworks.
However, the room also had some strong accessibility features including physical representation of one of the designs, and audio description in multiple languages of the different parts of the painted ceiling and walls.
The ceiling decoration is a visual map of Tuscany aimed at Glorifying Duke Cosimo I.
The Programme
The conference schedule was packed with plenary sessions, workshops, and contributions from participants, covering a range of topics including the latest Moodle features and innovative practices in e-learning.
Marie Achour, Global Head of Product at MoodleHQ delivered a keynote covering the Moodle Overview and Product Vision: Empowering Creativity, Collaboration, and Outcomes for Life with our Community. It was great to see translated captions being used more in presentations to support cross-language keynotes and those with hearing difficulties. The rooms also had repeater monitors regularly through the room, to help people see the screen better.
Brickfield at the Moot!
Brickfield had a stand there, and shared an Italian translation of our Accessibility Tips Zine. We delivered a short presentation on “Tearing down the accessibility barriers in online education” highlighting some of the common barriers that get created in online content, how to avoid building them and how to fix them.
Until next year!
It was great to meet so many friends from prior Moodlemoots, including the wonderful team at Mediatouch – they were presenting some amazing work around AI.
Overall, MoodleMoot Italia 2023 stood as a testament to the growing Moodle community in Italy showcasing great projects, the evolution of e-learning technologies especially including AI, with Moodle at the forefront of these developments.
Thanks to the hosts Associazione Italiana Utenti Moodle (AIUM) in collaborazione con l’Università degli Studi di Firenze.
We look forward to supporting the MoodleMoot Italia 2024!
