Matthew Allen

Attending my first ANZCA conference for many years. Having missed the first day while doing other work, I am very keen today – it’s amazing how conferences operate in such an affective manner to create the climate for thinking, creating and generally inhabiting the spaces of knowledge. My presentation is on “web presence”: not entirely sure I have nailed down what I mean by this term, but have some modestly useful ideas about its use in teaching and learning (as a normative model for educating people about web communication), and how it could renovate our approach to online identity. We will see how it goes…

Spending a lot of time recently playing with technologies which might be described as Web 2.0. Trying to get a handle on what can be used for innovative teaching and learning as part of my ALTC project, Learning in Networks of Knowledge. Am thinking that mostly these technologies don’t do a lot we might not already be able to achieve, but that, in some cases, they are incredibly useful. The difficulty is knowing which ones are in which category, without actually trying them out!

Also, it seems to me, there are always several different instances of the same basic technology; knowing which one to use is hard; knowing, also, which ones are just ‘upstart-ups’ (start ups ready for buyout and not likely to continue because a big player – Google? – will grab them) can be tricky.

Am making progress on a moderately annotated list of these via the Netstudies bookmark collection.