Australian Blogging Conference: 28 September 2007
The big news of the day is that The Australian Blogging Conference, a fabulous-looking free one-day event exploring everything about blogging in Australia (including education and Creative Commons!) now has a date: Friday, 28 September 2007 in sunny Brisbane! All of the details are here. I’d write more, but I’m now running around to see if I can get myself from Perth to Brisbane for the day of the conference!
Update: I’ve successfully organised flights and my benevolent university has agreed to part with me for the day (yes, the day, so I’ll be on red-eye flight at midnight Thursday flight!) so Aussie BloggerCon here I come! 🙂
links for 2007-08-29
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A case against Blackboard: It’s slow; has a clunky instructor interface; isn’t easily extendable; leads to a homogeneous student online experience; doesn’t talk to the world outside the university well; and costs too much.
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“Video-sharing website YouTube has met with harsh criticism in Germany for hosting clips that incite racial hatred, according to a news report due to be broadcast on German public TV late on Monday.”
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Wonderful fictional website for the Yamagato coroporation, featuring a mini-documentary on the “Sword Saint”, narrated by John Rhys-Davies, promoting the TV series Heroes. [Via]
US Tweens and Teens Talk Education while participating in Online Social Networks
JD Lasica points to an interesting new report from the US National School Boards Association entitled Creating & Connecting /Research and Guidelines on Online Social — and Educational — Networking. The report focusing on ‘tweens’ and teens, and has some really important notes about the role of social networking in forming learning communities and even casual connections between online presence and learning.
As this graph shows, more than half US tweens and teens have discussed education in online social networking:
Likewise, many tweens and teens are not just discussing and downloading, but also creating, uploading and participating in creative projects:
Again we are reminded that education in the twenty-first century has to think about the digital literacies of students and how to allow those literacies to develop in our curricula.
links for 2007-08-28
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Lectopia, the enterprise-level presentation capture and delivery system developed at the University of Western Australia (formerly know as iLecture) has been purchased by Anystream Apreso. Sad to see it go, but good luck to the Lectopia team!
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The next Adobe Flash player will support H.264! Bring on the high-quality YouTubery! 😉
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Light-weight but interesting profile of the three guys behind The Pirate Bay, the web’s #1 stop for illegal bittorrent files! [Via]
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“… IBM’s 9,000 workers in Italy, is planning a most novel form of industrial action – a strike on Second Life – and it wants as many avatars as possible manning the picket lines.”
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“Education Minister Mark McGowan will introduce new guidelines to ban the use of mobile phones in Western Australian classrooms.”
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“A bid to create a new world record and have the biggest number of people dressed up as daleks in one location has taken place in Manchester.”
links for 2007-08-27
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Blogger blogs now support free-hosting of videoblogs: “Today we are releasing video uploading to Blogger! This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading.”
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“A New Jersey teenager has unlocked the iPhone, opening the way to Apple’s iconic mobile telephone being used by non-US networks. The Associated Press news agency confirmed George Hotz, 17, had unlocked the iPhone …”
links for 2007-08-25
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“A 21-year-old man from the western Sydney suburb of Prairiewood faces up to five years’ imprisonment after he was charged with uploading a pirated copy of The Simpsons Movie on the internet.”
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The Australian Government’s “NetAlert” website and free internet content-filters for all Australian families is finally released. This addresses symptoms, not causes. Even the filters themselves don’t actually work!
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A “corrupted blood” disease infecting World of Warcraft avatars is being used as a model of real-world behaviour in the case of a viral pandemic!
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“A new study conducted by Nottingham Trent University …found one in 10 players who regularly played online games had started a physical relationship with a fellow gamer, and most had made good friends while playing. “
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“Internet addiction’ doesn’t exist. It can’t, because it’s a logical impossibility … ‘Internet addiction’ researchers conceive of the internet as if it were a set of activities when, in fact, it’s a medium for communication.”
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A combination of successful radio-based podcasts and newer TV-based ‘vodcasts’ have Australia’s national broadcaster serving over 5 million downloads per month.
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