Well, what can I say, a great bunch of people sharing a great bunch of blogs, thanks to all who came along & voted!

Basically, congratulations to everyone who was nominated. As I’ve gone on about ad infinitum the idea of how ‘results’ might work has been troubling me a fair bit and I’m really keen to avoid ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ (because really, these and the many great blogs that weren’t nominated (probably due to lack of credible-blog-clout :o) are all very much winners) and in that thinking we kinda decided to scrap the ‘editorial’ aspect and just let the votes decide. In the end I reckon if you picked up 5 votes or more then you should get a mention here.

Also before we kick off I’d like to thank Alex Halavais for the spark and his support through this and say that, yeh, I’ve never been a great fan of awards but for me this is just about sharing, recognition and community and I’m sure you will find some fantastic blogs below… I have!

Best Individual Blog: Pharyngula

In high esteem:
OLDaily
Weblogg-ed
Mario tout de go
Mathemagenic
jill/txt
Early Modern Notes
Easily Distracted
The Life and Times of a History PhD Student
Seb’s Open Research
Alex Halavais

Best overall group blog: Crooked Timber

In high esteem:
XplanaZine
Into the Blogosphere
Many-to-Many
Kairosnews
EdBlogger Praxis

Best resource sharing blog: OLDaily

In high esteem:
Teaching & Developing Online
ZeroIntelligence
Online Learning Update
Elearnspace
ResourceBlog
No.2 Pencil

Best Research Based Blog: Mathemagenic

In high esteem:
Professional-Lurker
Seblogging
Mamamusings

Best blogged paper(s): Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs

In high esteem:
Into the blogosphere
The Buntine Oration: Learning Networks
E-Learning Flexible Frameworks and Tools: Is it too late? – the Directors Cut
Educational Blogging

Best designed & most beautiful blog: Blaugustine

In high esteem:
Teaching & Developing Online
Stephen Downes
CogDogBlog
e-Literate

Best technology meets pedagogy blog: Teaching & Developing Online

In high esteem:
CogDogBlog
EduBlog Insights
elearnspace
Auricle
Think Thunk
Abject Learning

Best use of weblogs within teaching and learning: Bee-coming a Webhead

In high esteem:
KMD1002 & KMD2003
EduBlog Insights
Alex Halavais
Schoolblogs

Best Newcomer (2004): Chasing the Dragon’s Tale

In high esteem:
2dmanjon
Hipteacher
EduTechUK
Learning Curves
My Blogging Experiment
e-Literate
Random Walk in eLearning

Best Librarian Blog: Library Stuff

In high esteem:
The Shifted Librarian
librarian.net: a library weblog

Now, as a footnote I imagine a lot of people will go off on one about the blogs which weren’t nominated, the voting system, the winners, the processes, awards as a whole etc. etc. etc. Please do! This is the first run of the Eddies and I’m sure we can do it better next time round, your constructive criticism is absolutely welcomed… fire away :O)

Have a colleague who’s interested in using a CMS for a fairly major Uni project, he’s wondering whether Plone, Drupal, Mambo or any other solutions might work best.

Personally I had a look at Mambo a few weeks back and it didn’t rock my (admittably community driven) world, you can probably guess that I’m pretty enamoured by Drupal :o) and I’ve seen some great Plone instillations but never had the chance to play with it (PHP & MySQL only through incsub, sadly).

Any thoughts??? I’m guessing that essentially he’d be looking at an area for hosting different projects, some community elements and ‘unifying’ the whole environment in a user-friendly way.

Well, that was a thoroughly enjoyable conference I reckon! Not only was there a range of interesting and (has to be said) quality presentations on evaluation, pedagogy, research and alike but there was also a ton of refreshing new stuff.

And a paper I co-authored even took out one of the outstanding paper awards… which was a surprise:

The 6 by the power of 3 model for enhancing academic teachers’ capacities for effective online teaching and learning: Benefits, initiatives and future directions

So, if you’re interested in enjoying Australasia’s premier technology meets education next year, see you in Brissie!

Finally, if you fancy coming to a workshop of mine in the near future… watch out for the ‘zombie method’ that I have developed when addressing the subject of blogs ;o)

Interesting presentation on Eduforge, offering project spaces for educators and researchers (here’s the short paper: Design for communities of practice: Eduforge).

I’m trying to figure out what it’s made with…. siteframe? It’s an interesting concept, providing project spaces…. hmmmmm… I like situating these things next to incsub, worth a think!

Interesting if not particularly hi-volume weblog from Jeremy Williams on authentic assessment:

“The Authentic Assessment Web Site: A place to share ideas on the creation of meaningful, engaging, real-world assessment, promoting deep learning”

Jeremy just presented a very clear and compelling argument against traditional examinations, good on ya! Here’s the short paper: Creating authentic assessments: A method for the authoring of open book open web examinations

Hurrah! Thunderbird 1.0 is here, email & aggregation & everything you could possibly want in one beautiful tool. Get it now!

Ahhhh, seen at Kairos it looks like bits of Blackboard only work with IE (for now) … now, am I imagining this or isn’t it the case that Microsoft have a significant stake in BlackBoard?

Just for the sake of comparison, they’re not the only ones with compatibility issues!

… don’t all jump up at once and flood me with suggestions for “The Eddies” icon.

[Um, OK, actually it’s looking rather worryingly that I might have to do this myself… I’m not the best graphic designer y’know!]

Just a quick note to people who have been nominated for the Edublog awards, it certainly seems to be the case that people who alert their readers to their nomination(s) may well get the odd vote or two more than others…. so… I know you may be blushing about being nominated and may not be particularly keen to say ‘hey, I’ve been nominated, go vote for me!’… which I totally understand…

But, that means that everyone who does mention will probably get more votes, so please take this as an invitation / encouragement for you to publish on your weblog that you have been nominated and link to the nomination(s)… just to make things fair :o)

Am now in a couple of interesting sessions on SMS in learning, cool!

Stephen Cheung “Fun and games with mobile phones: SMS messaging in microeconomics experiments“.

Stephen uses SMS for voting & playing in learning games…. not cheap but a lot of fun! There’s also an ‘economists’ version of his paper here (.pdf).

Louise Horstmanshof “Using SMS as a way of providing connection and community for first year students”

From her conclusion:

“…Contemporary university life in Australia is a challenge to the provision of community because of the mobility of students, the realities of the teaching portfolios of academics, and other issues of time and space. Using texting to communicate with tutors and other students is a way of providing connection and community in today’s on-campus/off-campus university environment where both students and tutors are likely to spend fewer hours on campus and are also more likely to lead busy, complex lives in which work, family and social interactions make demands on their time. Students are managing the rest of their lives with the aid of mobile phones and text messaging, being able to manage their university lives in the same fashion seems to make sense.” [link]