There’s a new eLearning design challenge up… interesting one too… scoot over there to offer your solution and see if you can better mine :o) Consider yourself challenged!

“This Challenge was suggested by Susan Dilan, who lives in Puerto Rico. Recently her government has funded a campaign to encourage the populace to be nice to each other and return to the courteous, supportive, tolerant and respectful values of old.”

[eLearning Design Challenge]

I’ll be in pretty esteemed company on Tuesday 26th of July as the Pedagogy & Practice Group has a special session, Advantages and disadvantages of faculty-based and centralised teaching development activities.

First and foremost will be Dik Harris and Yoni Ryan, should be a very good discussion.

***If you’re an academic in Melbourne with an interest in online teaching and learning, APD or more please feel free to sign up to the blog or the listserv… or come along!***

Am presenting tomorrow on podcasting in higher education, specifically how you produce better quality online teaching and learning audio material, save enormous amounts of money and be pedagogically… all at the same time :o)

Here’s the abstract, posted way back in the day and here’s the online flash presentation. Hopefully it won’t kill anyone’s aggregator…

(oh, and for some reason the transition between slides takes forever… sorry!)

(embedding a flash movie (that doesn’t start immediately) is also a bit beyond me today – so please click on the image below to begin…)

I never really liked my take on the Way-Too-Clean design (although I really like the current IBeBloggin’ design) and am far too fond of playing around with look and feel to stay still for long so have gone and done it again.

New design is based around the Man~ja theme and am sure I will manage to destroy the basic aesthetics soon enough with playing around :o)

As always, feedback / browser problems are very much appreciated!!!

Am currently at the 2005 Radio Conference at RMIT and enjoying it rather a lot I must say.

Fascinating day yesterday thinking about micro-media, smallness, narrow-casting, communities, democracy and social conscience, sustainability, commercialisation and more. The more time I spend here and the more I think about what I’m about when it comes to social software… the more I’m starting to understand what I’m about (I think).

There is a battleground in every medium, organisation, industry and community between economic and cultural rationalism and, I don’t know quite how to put it, social philosophy(?) The free-market $decides approaches have moved on from trade to society and the very way we live our lives. In a rampant post-socialist rejigging we’re getting screwed by a religion of money and I don’t like it.

Local radio, community radio, public service radio and more just don’t fit the mould. Neither do our universities, public television broadcasters, cultural services, libraries or arts. It’s as if a stupefying ideology of materialism is becoming accepted as common sense and be damned all you who stand in front of it (unless it happens to add value to real estate in which case it’s more than welcome…)

As much as the marketplace is a conversation though, so is our political and cultural milieu and this is where social software and blogs in particular make an entrance. To hear the number of people I have heard over the last days fretting over spectrum and to listen to the evolution of spectrum and broadcast licensing over the last 100 years is to understand what a powerful thing it is that we’re playing with here.

Everyone shouldn’t necessarily have a blog (in the sense that we don’t all need (or want!) to be broadcasters) but many people and groups could benefit enormously from them. With the barriers to expression removed (to a degree) broadcast, narrowcast or blogcast is the most effective, if not the only, way we can fight the acceptance of ROI as being our key cultural driver.

I’ve got a proto-project in mind that could completely fall over or could be of some value, to give you a hint, it involves WPMU and physically situated contexts. For more of a clue roll to the bottom of this blog. Will write more about this soon.

I fully second Tom’s assertion… with the addition of ‘some’ ;)

Checkout the guy writing behind a pseudonym(!):

“The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one’s unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world?”

Ahem, perhaps you might pay a little more attention to your own writing first… eh?

It looks like the cancer is only developed in the tumour and hasn’t spread!!!

Chemo starts the week after next and then probably an op in September.

Thankyou so much for all your kind, thoughtful and amazing comments and emails.

Have said it before and I’ll say it again, this is a pretty special place and I’m proud and overjoyed to be part of it.

One quote about his colleagues from my dad to finish: “did you know that at least two subscribe to your blog!”

Bout time he got himself an RSS aggregator… wouldn’t you say ;)

My Dad is a pretty amazing person.

He was the first kid from his school to ever go to University and completed a PhD in organic chemistry by the ridiculous age of 23-24. He lectured in Malta and then came back to England where he got a DipEd and eventually a Master of Education doing what he has always loved, training teachers doing primary science (after all, he says, he finally realised he didn’t understand what the heck all the equations and squiggles he was drawing on the board meant in the first place).

He even pretty much turned down the the possibility of becoming a professor because for him, ‘good teachers should be bloody well teaching, not shuffling papers’.

After my parents split, when I was 10, he looked after me and my two younger sisters 50% of the time, right down the line, as well as working like a dog and still kept it together (and did it bloody well). When my family broke up in 2002 he cancelled his entire summer holiday and was out here, with his wonderful partner, within a week… via New Zealand (that’s the longest trip you can make, in the world, BTW… he did it in economy).

And today we found out that he has cancer of the oesophagus. He’s only 62.

We don’t know how bad it is yet, just that he definitely has it and I don’t really know why I’m writing this, except that I guess I want some way to express how I’m feeling and this has become a kind of place for that. In a way. And I think there’s power in this, I’ve felt it before.

Someone, can’t remember who, mentioned a bit back something along the lines of ‘of course you wouldn’t blog about something personal online’. Well I think that’s fucked. I think that if we’re to represent and communicate fully with each other and the world then it’s got to me in a less than two dimensional sense.

I’m not ‘religious’ and nor do I hold any particular set of beliefs but I do think that manifestation, positive thought and prayer can have an impact. Basically, whatever your religion, beliefs or ideology, if you could spare a few moments of thought and goodwill for my dad then I thank you.

James

Thomas has been doing some serious backend work of late (do graphic designers do backend stuff ;) and has put in some interesting stuff, especially this nice simple WP contact form plugin. Good stuff!

If you’ve been a reader for a while you’ve probably heard me banging on about how podcasting can save an enormous amount of money and drastically improve the quality of online audio for teaching and learning online…. well, here’s the most recent version which concludes my blogsavvy week of podcasts.

Should be called your professional podcast consultant perhaps :o) Am probably going to be something of that next week at The Radio Conference 2005!