Hmmmm, these could also be the last notes depending on how much I drink at the conference dinner tonight ;o) But I thought I’d be optimistic.

First up I’d encourage anyone interested in education technology to visit the proceedings which are now online and well worth a look!

Me, things that have been of particular interest were:

Duane Varan’s keynote into interactive television and in particular the idea of choice. Prof. Varan in particular pointed to the impact on advertising and viewing patterns of expanding numbers of channels and TiVo-esque technologies. While the idea of more TV and advertising becoming even more powerful through choice fills me with dread, it’s interesting to know where we’re going.

If you remember my ‘Choosing a Wiki‘ posting back at the old Radio site you can now check out a paper resulting from the same project, Naomi Auger et al’s Teaching and Learning Online With Wikis. Naomi’s a PhD student / tutor and I think her exploration and work with this has been exceptional. Well worth a look for people coming from a less WikiExpert background.

I’d also like to highlight, at the moment Christine Armatas, Dale Holt & Mary Rice’s “From online enhanced to wholly online: Reflections on e-learning developments in teaching psychology” and Martin Valke’s “ICT in higher education: An uncomfortable zone for institutes and their policies” (this is well worth looking at if you’re interested in learning organisations – great speaker too :o)

And, check out the dissatisfaction with DISCUSSION BOARDS!!! and other interesting results in Susan Shannon’s “Questioning the teacher’s comfort zone with online learning: A 4 year case study of students’ perceptions of online learning” (which I’m sitting in now!)

Finally, big up ASCILITE, how cool is this having all the papers up in .pdf and .html as the conference is taking place. Respect! Now all we need is a feed for AJET……………………………………….. (believe me, I’ve tried to persuade ;o)

Keep on meeting people here in Perth and bursting into weblog/wiki spiels & enthusiasm, and they nod knowingly and say “Yes, I went to an Alan Levine session”. Good work CDB :o)

Means I actually need to know what I’m talking about now, eeek!

I think I’m getting towards the possibility of enjoying presenting to hordes of peers (much more respectable than me peers :o) but am perhaps not quite there yet! Hence I am very happy to have got my presentation for “Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments” out of the way!

A couple of people mentioned that they would like the presentation so here it is in all its PPoint glory (2MB).

Had a look over at the Edublog Awards voting earlier and there are tons of votes there and a few comments, voting is only open for 4 more days so get cracking, some very close contests!

The 0.8 of SchoolTool is out, go use it!

G’day from Double “U” A.

Am in Perth today and the University is sooo beautiful! No net connection at the hotel :o( but am on wireless in the sponsors tent which is nice. Workshop this afternoon (gulp) and presentation tomorrow (double gulp)… I was toying with the idea of keeping notes on a separate blog but on reflection I’d rather give myself a bit more discipline and post here, keeping everything in one place.

The excellent John Hibbs has picked up on the fact that you can comment on polls in the Eddies by telling us who he’s voting for and why. I like this, it’s a great way of humanising this choose & click process & I’d encourage anyone who wants to comment to register and do so, tell us who you’re voting for & why!

One more thing, can anyone think up a funky graphic for the winners / nominees, I like calling this the ‘Eddies’, so I guess it’d be an ‘Eddy’ (which reminds me of a friend back at Uni :o)

Phew, well thanks to everyone who nominated and spread the Edublog Awards word , being not exactly au fait with survey technology I’ve set up the voting through the incsub drupal site, the incsub association.

You can vote by going to the polls page, here.

Or by going to the categories individually:

* Best Individual Blog
* Best overall group blog
* Best resource sharing blog
* Best Research Based Blog
* Best blogged paper(s)
* Best designed & most beautiful blog
* Best technology meets pedagogy blog
* Best use of weblogs within teaching and learning
* Best Newcomer (2004)
* Best Librarian Blog

Unfortunately html or urls > html didn’t seem to work with the polls… sorry!

Voting closes a week today (10th December 00.00 GMT), go for your lives :D

Have to say that I stumbles across this while looking for Jill’s weblog research links and they’re very interesting indeed.

Looks like Jupiter Research basically get all their analysts to keep weblogs, and don’t they look good!

[well, OK, the blogs themselves look absolutely terribly aesthetically functionally and could do with design overhauls left right and centre but the people are blogging away like you wouldn’t believe regardless :o]

Hmmmm, not very happy with the presentation & especially unhappy that I:

a. Couldn’t figure out (technically) how to do it on PMWiki & not PowerPoint
b. Having done it on PowerPoint couldn’t get a flash file of it together despite using Robodemo (I might have another go with my trial download of Captivate tomorrow)

But it is in .pdf form (you kinda lose the gist once you take out the little flash movie about the ‘communication room’ in the middle) as are the links for my weblogs & RSS workshop on Sunday, I’ve tried to keep them short, sweet & exploratory focused. So, if it’s of interest to anyone here’s my ASCILITE 2004 Presentation & Workshop Wiki.

Well, thanks to the generous wonderfulness of the WordPress community I now have my pick of ways of dealing with WP comment spam, and so do you :O)

The WordPress Combat Comment Spam is something that I think we now need for wikis and is FULL to the brim of fantastic solutions. So so so good!

I’m thinking about the comment killer:

“This is strictly weapons grade plutonium of the comment spam world. If a comment is flagged for moderation, it will be deleted if this plugin is active. So if you use it make sure that you have your settings properly adjusted. Oh, and if you have the “User must fill out name and email” box ticked, incoming trackbacks will be deleted too!”

I think Alan will like this one:

“When a comment is posted to your site that gets moderated (because it’s caught by the spam words list, or has too many links, or for whatever reason), the author is taken to page where they can pay you to post their “advertisement.””

However, all things considered I think I’ll try the preview plugin (easy) and have a think about this alternative authimage device (and how pretty is the blog it’s on!)

Scott posts a link to a very interesting article looking at how your costs work out with open source vs. propriatory tools… I’m with him when I say it’s a shame they haven’t cited where this comes from… but it’s persuasive nonetheless!

And wouldn’t it be nice to stack up some propriatory LMSs (heck, they are Learning Management Systems, they do try to manage learning, that’s their problem!) vs. open source equivalents here: