There’s something in the air right now – something electrifying. It’s conference time. The season when I witness the ceaseless banter of folks like Scott Leslie, Jim Groom, Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and a host of inimitable North American characters flooding the Twitter airwaves like a tidal wave.
It’s amazingly entertaining to watch, and yet something about it often makes me pensive. It’s the feeling that I’m missing out on the excitement, the creative energy, the showmanship, the passion and the fun – missing out on the incredible aire of enthusiastic …

From time to time I’ll push my comfort zones and decide to do something completely new just to challenge myself. Either out of some silly sense of exploring diversity in my interests and activities, or because I have some perverse, subconscious desire for self-torture.
Well now I’ve gone and done it. Against my better judgement I’ve agreed to play on the inter-departmental IT soccer tournament starting new week.
Next week?! This is bad, really.
In all seriousness I don’t say that out of some false sense of modesty, and in reality I’m actually …

Major disjointed brain dump here, bear with me.
New South Blogs
New South Blogs is in many regards a beacon of openness and personal ownership of distributed spaces at UNSW and I’m EXTREMELY keen to put my weight and continued support behind it.  Not simply to help mentally reconcile and negate some of my current involvement with far more centralised and closed proprietary monlithic systems, but more importantly as an ideal and model for the way learning really should be in practice: learner-centred, learner-directed, adaptable, customisable, personalisable, and open.
“Open” in the sense of …

Time Scarcity

I have a growing sense of disquiet that I need to contemplate a bit regarding how to stay up to speed on emerging trends and innovative ideas amidst all the activity I’m now embroiled in.
Things are going really well so far, there’s no doubt about that. It’s just the sheer magnitude of the work I’m doing creates a very busy schedule, and I’m finding that the time I used to allocate to open contemplation about broader theoretical concepts and innovative ideas is now being devoted to resolving immediate practical …

Be warned: this post is a long, winding personal reflection into some of my experiences with technology over the last 25 years. I hadn’t set out to make it this long, but the more I wrote, the more I remembered – so I just kept going and going.
I had a major flashback this afternoon while reading a Richard Scarry book with my daughter.  Scarry is of course the author of many children’s books, most notably involving the friendly people of Busytown, including Lowly Worm, Pig Will, Pig Won’t and …