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.