Ten Reasons Why

This MERLOT conference is the first time I’ve tried weblogging the sessions I attend. Here’s a couple of observations about this practice.
First, it’s friggin’ hard. I’m not accustomed to taking such copious notes during presentations. I was always the kind of student (and conference participant) that took very few notes. Of course I didn’t have a laptop when I was a student, and typing about 110 words a minute helps. Personally, I find that note-taking decreases my attention and retention. Clearly that’s not the case for everyone, but I find myself less focused on understanding and more focused on recording.
Second, don’t take the notes in your browser. I suppose the advantage to this is you can save several times during the presentation so your readers can get a semi-live update. But weblogs aren’t IRC, so I think it’s totally legit to post your session notes at the end of the session. I’ve seen too many people complain about losing their session notes because the browser crashed or whatever. I just use EditPad (a Notepad replacement), so I don’t have to worry about browser crashes, wifi hiccups, etc.
I will probably not record notes for all the sessions I attend today. I’m going to focus on understanding, not recording. There’s plenty of other people blogging the conference. :-)

MERLOT Conference

EdNA — Education Network Australia
began in 95 to facilitate collaboration across territories in Australia
EdNA online portal resulted out of need to facilitate collaboration
http://www.edna.edu.au
This MERLOT session addresses the re-engineering of EdNA. Great focus on the use of RSS to syndicate content from their portal.

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MERLOT Conference

Beyond Learning Objects: Towards the Educational Semantic Web
Terry Anderson, Athabasca University
Notes on this MERLOT session follow…

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MERLOT Conference

Using MERLOT in Faculty Development Initiatives: Dreams and Nightmares Re-visited.
[will add presenter names later]
This session was run as a collaborative brainstorming discussion. A lot of time was spent on the “nightmares” (failures, problems, etc.), about 40 minutes, and only about 20 minutes on the dreams.
Notes follow. . .

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MERLOT Conference

Douglas MacLeod, Netera Alliance
David Porter, NewMIC
Notes on the opening MERLOT session follow . . .

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MERLOT Conference

So I’m sitting in the morning plenary session at MERLOT wondering if there’s a back channel, e.g. an IRC channel or chat room, for the wireless users at this conference?

MERLOT Conference

Oy! Getting here from DC was an ordeal, but I made it.
Suggestions to the airline industry: most passengers would willingly provide you with height and weight information if it meant that you could analyze the data to assure that you don’t seat three men, each over 6′ tall and 200 lbs, in the same row in coach. At least assure that the 6′5″, three hundred pounder can sit somewhere besides the center seat next to my window seat. I think I still have the impression of the plane window on the left side of my face.
The good news is I managed to re-jigger my flights to leave on Saturday instead of Friday, so at least now I’m not missing the last day of the conference. Happy, D’Arcy? ;-)
Tomorrow, the conference. For now, sweet sleep and luscious elbow room!

MERLOT Conference

I’m off a little later today to the MERLOT learning objects conference in Vancouver. Stephen Downs has written code to automatically aggregate MERLOT-related posts from RSS feeds. Will be interesting to see how effective it is.
Unfortunately I’m missing the opening stuff and reception today and most of Friday because of crappy flight schedules and conflicting commitments. Sigh. It’s hardly worth flying across the contintent to miss almost 1/3 of the conference.

MERLOT Conference