Hey, apparently you can now get ITB on your T. Good stuff!

Larger image and more.

• Blogsavvy > Improving blogging tools
  How would you like to see blogging tools improved? What developments do you reckon are most likely in the next couple of years… read my opinions and tell us yours over at blogsavvy!
• Tuttle SVC – The Open Educational Symposium
  Tom has been going to lots of things that make me insanely jealous. There’s a link at the bottom of this post to a paper that’s well worth reading too: "SchoolTool: Defining Our Niche in the Open Source Architecture of Schools"

Got an email from Matthew Kearney at UTS asking about what to do and where to go with those enormous and valuable projects we all went nuts over many years ago, namely the ‘resource / links sits’.

In particular Matthew points to some resources he put together a while back (edtech, science) for kids and prospective K12 teachers and shares frustrations which many of us, I’m sure, will share:

“As you can see, it soon got out of hand with a) maintenance b) user-friendliness (became simply another ‘long list of 1000’s of resources) and c) broken links..”

Which brings me to write (with Matthews permission) this post.

For me these are really valuable sites… there’s a lot of selection, expertise and opportunity for people to browse off from these and as much as I like my ‘up to the minute’ tagged, blogged or social links… this is where I’d point people / turn to in looking for significant links.

But, of course, it isn’t sustainable (unless you’ve got many hours to put this together) and is really, the reflection of only one persons perspective.

Matthew’s after something which is:

a) more student-driven & collaborative i.e.. by our prospective student teachers
b) easy to search and find useful resources and
c) (somehow?) free from ‘link-rot’ …

I’d probably add ‘currently relevant’ to the pile (another of the problems that these sites have encountered is a tendency to point to years old materials… particularly out-of-date considering the pace of change at the moment).

One of the possible solutions he’s thinking about is Scuttle, obviously there’s wiki potential here (but that doesn’t help currently relevant or link-rot issues) and something tells me that there needs to be a rating / review system here (a bit like an Amazon.com of links).

Another question is whether this could / should be a broader project than UTS… or whether you would want it to be?

Any ideas, I think this is something that most ed designers will come across at one point and it’d be good to have system in mind… even if it’s yet to be developed!

• Seb's Open Research – Real life
  Jeez… I can’t tell you how similarly I feel to Seb… most of the time. Good luck with your explorations & can I second all of those ‘things I’d like to be doing’ :o)

Good stuff, I finally have a new laptop and it looks like this:

Which added to my new phone:

Means that I can now be a vogger (hmmm… wonder if this will work!)

[can anyone tell me how to get embedded quicktime into my RSS feed… or if you;re getting this by RSS, can you tell me it’s working]

Was just about to write this post about Yapaca and spotted something on the dashboard… I moved to WordPress on October 5th 2004 so not a bad effort I think ;o)

Anyway, on with the show…

Form Ian Grove-Stephenson comes news that their new teacher authoring tool is live and ready to go:

“The authoring module of Yacapaca is now in ‘Beta’. If you fancy playing around with a really leading-edge elearning system over the Summer, let me know. To the best of my knowledge, Yacapaca is the only system that lets you create, set, mark and monitor your own tests and assessments, all online, completely without charge. To request inclusion in the Beta programme, simply email me ian_gs [at]chalkface.com. Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, here are the authoring instructions (PDF) to download.”

You need to get setup with a username and if you’re in the K12 game I reckon this might be worth trying out!

• skippy dot net » WordPress Database Backup
  Skippy is about my favourite WP plugin developer… this is a dbase backup plugin for WP, it’s very very cool.
• Wirearchy :: Knowledge Work, Networks, Blogging and Organizational Structure
  Via Harold this is well worth a look. Bloody interesting blog stoo… subscribed!

Isma has posted a working version of his paper, e-Learning for Development: a model and if you’ve got some time I recommend you scoot over and take a look!

“Beginning with a very brief case study of a free e-learning for development project, the Campus for Peace of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, this paper will try and show how, thanks to the nature of nonprofit organizations, e-learning can solve most of the problems related to corporate training, education for development and e-advocacy for stakeholders. And this paper will try and show also how, just because of the nature of nonprofit organizations too, this can be done for free.” [my emphasis]

We’re all going down the same road… how long till stuff starts tipping?

On that note, if you fancy a chuckle you should head over here and read a press release by Deakin on the podcasting project I’ve been setting up for the last 9 months or so. Now, what else was happening 9 months or so ago… hmmmmm… no links, you’ll have to figure it out for yourselves, but how the wheel turns eh :D

“Now Deakin students studying via distance can download John Carmichael’s incarnation of the ‘fireside’ chat from a weblog on the Deakin website and catch up, using their iPod if they wish, with what has been going on in the world of competition law. (Competition law principles now ensure the price of mp3 players (generic ipods) has fallen below $100.)”

If you’re interested in the use of blogs for developing communities then you might be interested in what I just posted over at Blogsavvy: Cityblogs – WPMU & developing blogging communities based on physical / spatial relationships.

Basically it involves, in the first instance, trying to set up Melbourne Blogs, Sydney Blogs, Brisbane Blogs, London Blogs and New York Blogs using WPMU.

Have a look and tell me if I’m dreaming :o)

Via Stephen, Dave Pollard comes up with “a set of principles … on how to develop Social Networking Applications that really do work”.

It’s well worth a read but I’m unconvinced. There’s not one mention of anything approximating centred communication there… that I can see at least.

It’s one of those things that keeps on and keeps on striking me about social networking and which very few people seem to get… you can’t have a community without first addressing the question of identity and individual presence.