The Northern Voice Speaker Submission Deadline Looms

December 6th, 2007, No Comments »

Just a quick note to remind all potential speakers that the deadline for submitting is Monday, December 10. Be sure to submit before it’s too late. Fellow organizer Brian Lamb has some very sound suggestions for speaker submissions:

One, it is highly likely we will group people into what we hope will be complementary themes, so don’t feel like your idea has to carry 50 minutes. Two, be concise, but don’t be sloppy — there are a couple people on our committee (I might be one of them) who dislike proposals that read like they were dashed off while the coffee maker was warming up. And third, keep in mind that everyone at this event will be bloggy and be interested in social media, so this is the perfect opportunity to pitch that little crazy nugget of an idea that you never dared propose elsewhere. Original ideas stand out. Finally, keep in mind that though we get plenty of hard-core geeks, one of the things we treasure about Northern Voice is that it is a friendly place for a sizable contingent of newcomers to learn — in fact, we hope to schedule a full track of “101″ and “FAQ” sessions on the basic and fundamental concepts of blogging and the attendant forms (feel free to offer to facillitate one of those).

I’m not sure if I get a vote this year, being in Malta and all, but I’m another of those people with no patience for sloppy abstracts. We’ve received a few “I’m so-and-so, and I’ll think of something to speak about later” submissions, implying that the submitter to so important and/or known to us that he (it’s always been men) doesn’t need to bother with the process. Those guys never get to speak.

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Mashups, Education Style

July 10th, 2007, 1 Comment »

Brian LambFellow Northern Voice organizer Brian Lamb has written an instructive and very readable (that is, comprehensible to laypersons) article about mashups and how they apply in educational contexts.

Educational technologists may wonder if “remix” or “content mashup” are just hipper-sounding versions of the learning objects vision that has absorbed so much energy from so many talented people—with mostly disappointing results. As Susan Metros stated in a 2005 EDUCAUSE Review article: “Learning objects have not fulfilled their promise of transforming education.” Little has changed since then to contradict that assertion.

Describing Brian merely as a ‘fellow Northern Voice organizer’ really doesn’t cut the mustard once you read his byline: “Manager of Emerging Technologies and Digital Content for The University of British Columbia’s Office of Learning Technology and is a Research Fellow with Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning.” You don’t want to attend court functions with Brian–they’re serving dessert by the time the servant’s done announcing his title.

I joke because, in actuality, Brian’s a very humble, self-effacing guy.

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