Australian Forums for true EdTech-ers

Ben Buchanan, a former collegue and all-around webby kinda guy, emailed me the other day to ask me what I thought about the currect forums available for collaboration and learning on webby EdTech.

The underlying thought is that for general web geeks we have Web Directions South, but not an equivalent for the education sector. The available events tend to be backend- or academic-focussed, rather than frontend/user experience focussed.
What do you think? Do you think there's a gap in the market, or do people just have the wrong impression about existing events?

And my response:

Not sure if there's a gap as such. I think there are 3 main groups to consider in all this:
- Tech-savvy teachers: The academics/TAFE instructors/K-12 teachers who are using exsisting technology in cool ways.
- Ed Designers (aka Learning Designers, instructional Designers): The professional staff who's role it is to foster and direct technology use within an institution. You tend to have two types within this group; those who are passitionate about technology in education, and those who are passionate about educational practice and dabble in the tech side. This second group are generally the ones at ASCILITE etc, not AusWeb.
- Programmers, web developers etc who happen to be in the edu sector: These are the ones who are passionate about the technology and like to hear about what the first two groups are doing in order to get ideas for building tools that'll do just that, only better (and with drop-shadows).

I suppose there is a 4th group of edtech administrators/managers/leaders who span across all 3 groups.

The tech-savvy teachers are fairly well catered for with ASCILITE, EDUCASE and various local forums. Although I was in an ASCILITE session last year where someone asked the presenter 'what's a blog?', so the focus is really on educational practice, not the technology that supports it.

The Ed Designers do tend to split along those lines I described, with the edu-focussed ones joining the tech-savvy teachers, and the edtech-focussed ones fitting better with the programmers/web developers. While there are a few local forums for this group (QUT's OLT conference fits this, as do the Bb User's conferences, although with the obvious platform focus), there does seem to be a gap here.

I think maybe AusWeb is too broad to accommodate this group, as it encompasses corporate/administrative web as well as edtech web. Maybe an edtech stream, specifically targeting designers and developers involved in educational web technology, would be a good way to fill the gap.

She's ba-ack...

Right. So after re-reading my past posts on this blog, I realised just how much I did actually gain through the reflection and free-form writing opportunity it provided me with, so I'm taking it up again. The whole process of starting, then abandoning, and now wanting to re-start a blog has got me thinking about the whole reason why many people feel the need to express themselves, sometimes anonymously, to an unknown audience via this medium.

There are two things that are driving my return to this activity:
- I enjoy writing very much, and reflective writing even more. I have kept a journal on and off in the past, but I want the community aspect of blogging. I still regularly read the posts of others and have benefited from the occasional insight. i want to give back to that community.
- I want to keep a record of this time in my professional life. I find that as much as I enjoy or am inspired by events as they happen, reflecting on them after the fact often gives me as much if not more pleasure than the original experience did (case in point, The India Diaries). I want to be able to look back on this manic time in my career 10 years from now and learn even more from it in hindsight than I am able to now, while I'm in the thick of it all.

So, what the hell have I been up to? In true LJ style, here's my 4 months highlight and not-so-highlights:
+ Have settled into the swing of things at QUT. Very different culture from Bond, which I expected, but also very different from Griffith, which surprised me more.
+ I'm happy to be working with GM again, and I like that I am more comfortable disagreeing with him now than I was when we worked together in the past. I've learned a great deal from him in the past, but I'm finding that I'm learning more from challenging and therefore understanding his approach to things than I did from just benefiting from his advice.
- Like any large institution, QUT has complicated internal politics. I need to acknowledge them, provide the best example I can to those around me, but never lose sight of the fact that my ultimate responsibility is to the teaching staff of the university and the students they teach, not to the person in the office next door.
+/- I've now taken on the project management of the largest project I've ever led, let alone been involved in. To put it in perspective, we are replacing an existing, heavily utilised LMS with a new one, and tranferring over 3000 unit and related teaching sites to it, many with extremely customised interfaces and system-dependant designs. And we're doing it in the space of 18 months all up. I'll let you know in a few more months whether I strive and grow under the pressure, or crumble. I'm aiming for the former.
-- The Brisbane Council desperately needs more buses. After having too many buses arrive late, then sail past full to the brim, I'm finally giving in and driving to Kelvin Grove now, at least until the latest order of buses is completed.
++ I have a fantastic project team, with some of the most talented programmers and learning designers you could ever wish for, and they seem to think I'm a bit of okay too.
+ I'm able to help a great former colleague out of a tough spot and onto my project team, and add some well-needed skills to the mix in the process.

That's enough for now. There will be more to come I can promise. I'm aiming for a post a week to get me back into this exercise.

And thank you Peta, for inspiring me to start this up again with the best system outage message ever on the Bond Library's L Files. Glad to see the great spirit down there is still going strong.