I'm not going to write up a summary or wrap-up of the conference. Others have done that better, and faster, than I. But I do just want to throw some thoughts out there on my Open Ed experience.

First, it was an amazing conference. There aren't many events that bring together such a vastly diverse group of people - from widely different technical, cultural, geographical and economic backgrounds. Many of the conferences I have been to have felt largely homogeneous. A strong feeling of "sameness" that, while comforting on one level, is diametrically opposed to the real value of these conferences. What a conference can add, above a similarly structured online event, is the serendipitous exposure to people, ideas, philosophies, strategies, and techniques that one wouldn't ordinarily be associated with. A cosmopolitan conference adds so much more value than one that is simply bringing together like-minded individuals. The irony is, this small conference in rural Utah felt more cosmopolitan than some large conferences I've attended in major urban centres.

Our Out of Print session went off pretty well (I think) this morning. Jim worked his usual Bavamagic, weaving early American history, WordPress, wikis, and student conversations into a pretty cool demo. Then, I showed some of the OpenContentDIY resource site, and rambled unexplicably for about 25 minutes. From what I remember, I either sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown, or somehow managed to touch on empowerment of students, open content and reuse as a moral imperative, communities (both in content and open source).

David suggested in his opening comments yesterday that "content is infrastructure." He was (I think) meaning to imply that content is an enabling platform, and that if a robust library of open content is available, that individuals and groups will be able to build new things from that library. Things that can't be predicted by the librarians and publishers. Things that are evolutionary and revolutionary. I completely agree that having freely available and reusable content is an extremely important factor in promoting education and community programs, especially in regions without the resources to build all content from scratch.

The Edtech krëw just wrapped up an epic day of travel to make the pilgrimage to Logan, Utah for the Open Education 2007 conference. So far, Utah's been interesting. The people are all very nice, and the scenery is great. Unfortunately, most of the scenery we had the chance to actually spend time enjoying was the inside of SLC, and the almost-dark-moonlit-mountains on the drive north to Logan. The Good Reverend was decidedly quiet, and Scott was gracious enough to drag our freeloading carcasses along in his gigantor rented van. I tried to talk him into renting a Hummer, but nooooo, he got all "dude, that's just wrong" on me. Whatever, dude. What's the environment ever done for me? Let's ride in STYLE! Yeah. Whatever. He didn't go for it either.

Seems to have worked, so far. The "Similar Posts" plugin borked, so I had to disable that. Everything else Just Seems To Workâ„¢.

So, what's the difference between Categories and Tags now? I used to use Categories as tags. Are they both interfaces to the same table in the database? One way to find out...

Update: oh. they're separate things. well, that's silly. so, now all of my old /tag/tagname links that used to point to category pages now point to empty "tag" pages because none of my posts have actual tags. That'll be fun to clean up...

I'm preparing a series of screencasts as part of the session at the Open Education 2007 Conference (with my co-conspirator, Rev. Jim Groom). We're doing a two-fold presentation.

1. Creation of an open education resource on early American history.
2. Documentation of the processes used to build said resource, using freely available applications and services.

We gave ourselves a very simple constraint. Use only tools that don't require access to a server, and don't require any money. The idea being that we would be able to come up with a process that didn't require a great deal of technical skillz, and wouldn't require a budget to implement.

My entire extended family reminds me to watch Oprah every time the "autism special" episode is replayed, which seems to be about once every 2 weeks or so.

I don't watch Oprah, but I did tune into this episode yesterday, thanks to the wonders of time-shifting digital TV.

What a load of shyte. Complete and utter mindless hogwash. Some hottie gets up to talk with O, claiming that "when little Billy got his vaccination, I could SEE it suck the soul out of his eyes! HIS SOUL!" (or something similar).

I attended my second Calgary FlickrMeet last night. A bunch of Calgary Flickr members met downtown to hang out, shoot some photos and talk about stuff. Picture a bunch of photo geeks walking around taking a bunch of photos of everything, from every angle :-)

It was fun to see many of my Flickr contacts in person - much like Northern Voice is great because it's a vivification of my blogroll, FlickrMeets are fun because they are Flickr in the flesh. The event itself was organized online through Flickr. It's a little ironic, but the main reason to go to the FlickrMeet isn't to take photographs, but to breathe life into the online Flickr community. While a fair amount of interaction occurs online, it is face-to-face events like this that make the community "real".

Darren wrote up a post to discuss the idea that ad blocking software (like the Adblock Firefox extension I'm running right now) are potentially going to kill the current business model of the Web. That advertising would collapse if we all used Adblock and the like, and that free content (which is at least partially compensated for by viewing ads) would degenerate into the noisy crapfest of Geocities.

The point is a good one - we can't have our cake and eat it too. If we want to get content for free, we should expect to pay something, in terms of viewing ads or something similar.

Notes for week 2 of David Wiley's Intro to Open Education course at Utah State University, on Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources - Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation.

I think I'm definitely falling down on the academic rigour of my responses - I should be providing a much deeper response, rather than just barfing out some thoughts and questions. I'll try to pick it up for week 3.

The following are my notes made while reading the first 3 articles for the Open Education course facilitated by David Wiley. The reading list (and links to the original articles) is available at the course wiki page. (I'll clean up the categories/tags asap, but the course wiki and David's blog are down at the moment, so I don't have the exact course tags handy right now...)

I've been struggling with this all day. Haven't found much help on the Telus website, and their tech agents haven't had much in the way of helpful suggestions.

I use Telus DSL at home, recently switching to the TelusTV service (which apparently also affects the internet service, as the internet guys keep forwarding me to the TV department for support. wtf?)

My old Linksys 802.11a router has been acting up, so I splurged on a new Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n base station. I have it hooked up to the ethernet switch installed by the TelusTV guy the other day.