On November 21 there was the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, Conference, Education held at Macquarie University. As normal i rocked up late, not to late but missed the morning introductions. Enjoyed the morning talk on LAMS and its use for facilitating open education. There was also a discussion from DET about how they are trying to use open software to facilitate teacher collaboration. There was opposition present from TAFE teachers who believe management are not getting it down to the teachers. i.e not effectively filtering this technology down..
Donna gave a discussion on Open Education and the need to teach programming in order to engage children and allow them to create with there technology rather then just be consumers of technology.
Discussion on ILabs and how MIT has implemented ilabs in there teaching, which is now being in UQ. interesting use to use ilabs to show people radiation experiments, i.e all online accessed via computers not physical so the experiments can be ran without concern of harmful elements. This has large application for physics students who can use ilabs to run the types of experiments that at the moment they can only read about.
Please see http://openlabs.mit.edu/ you can create and account and play around as well as downloading the source and trying your own.
I gave a presentation on the ALTC Exchange and how it was using Drupal and running on Linux technologies. The main focus of the talk was around our integration of creative commons for the content used on the site. There was a lawyer from the NSW education department who found it very interesting as they do not encourage the use of CC.
I was shocked to learn how much content and software that falls under GPL, freeware, shareware, CC is blocked and filtered as the legal department can not classify the use of the content produced. Hoping this will change as more education is had in the area of creative commons and how it can assist education.
As a researcher I like it when people use my information as long as they refer to me and giver proper attribution. Creative commons can also be used to assist educational departments as class room plans can be shared and added to by many people rather then one teacher. This would also help new teachers coming along with there lesson plans. Just one way that creative commons can help with the share of information.
All over it was a great workshop, a definite feeling that there was a lot gained by everyone who attended.