Mahara has developed in leaps and bounds as a viable ePortfolio alternative since I last took a look about a year ago. I particularly like the ability to create Views, that bundle artefacts together with common access control.

Feel sceptical about the ‘learning’ value of Second Life, then check out these examples of houses/buildings modeled for sustainable design.

It must be a good day - I have after all encountered two EDU 2.0 apps. Cohere, from Open Uni UK, takes concept/idea mapping to a new collaborative level. Add ideas, make connections and then discover related ideas and people.

Research paper on Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation.

The problem based learning creation and deployment/playback tool from UQ just got renamed to SBLInteractive - Scenario Based Learning. Theres even an article in the Australian on PBLInteractive.

Common Craft do for Photo Sharing what they did for Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, RSS and Wiki’s - that is explain the concepts in a way anybody can understand.

Common Craft have a wonderful slogan - “Our product is explanation”

An all time classic from Common Craft circa 2004 - “What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?“

QUT is hosting an ePortfoilio Symposium. I’d be interested to hear about the tools showcase. Hopefully some of my friends at QUT will share their observations

Janison, an Australian company that builds Learning Management Systems will be teaming up with the University of Woollongong on an ARC grant to “create strategies and tools to help university teachers design effective online learning experiences“. Based on the previous output of the University of Woolongong (eg multimedia and learning design work), I look forward to the outcomes and tools. Its great to see new Australian developments in this space and competition is always a good thing. Educational Institutions need to take an active role in the design and development of learning tools instead of the rather passive installation and release of systems that look like they are from 1996.

…. and the Edu Blog Winners are …..

Sadly I don’t subscribe to feeds from any of the winners, but that may change soon.

Educational concepts captured on video, uploaded and shared!!! Check out TeacherTube.

Some vids are quite creative eg Paper Trained Teachers in a Video Game World even challenges the concept of sitting still and watching it.

Adobe have announced that they wont be developing a new version of Authorware. I guess this means the end, unless Authorware is made open source. The only real way for Authorware to survive would have been for it to output to the Flash file format. I guess I feel sad having started my career building educational multimedia software.