http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000840.html

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/mashup.vss

I liked the UML icons that Scott Wilson produced and shared for the OminGraffle tool, but couldn't use them 'as is' because OminGraffle doesn't exist for the PC. So I asked Scott if he could share the source with me so I might somehow get them into Visio, the tool I most often use to whip up such drawings. He kindly went one better and produced an exported stencil for Visio, out of which I created the same set of mashup shapes for Visio. Just drop it in "My Documents - My Shapes" to be able to use it in Visio. Happy Diagramming! And thanks again Scott! - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000830.html

http://openomystatus.blogspot.com/

The link above is just an example, but doesn't this one seem obvious to anyone else? Blogs to inform your users about a server/services status - hosted SOMEWHERE ELSE if you've got a clue. Yet, I still get these interminable emails about planned server outtages, upgrades, etc., and NO communication after unplanned outtages actually do happen. I guess there's no faith that the RSS feed would get read (and lots more, perhaps misplaced, faith that the spam-like emails will). - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000829.html

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/duguid/

So at least 5 weeks ago, First Monday publishes this article by the co-author of The Social Life of Information, Paul Duguid, that asks questions about the oft-asserted transferability of "laws of quality" from open source software projects to the peer production of 'knowledge' in sites like Wikipedia, and literally almost no one replies (well at least one well read blogger did)?

Maybe everyone just read this already and went on with their business. But this smells like the fart in the crowded room of social software acolytes that nobody wants to acknowledge (jeez, somebody crack the window already!) Duguid can easily be faulted, as he does himself, for the anecdotal examples, but his article doesn't read like one from the establishment "enemy" camp trying to argue for the quality of existing authorities, but instead a call for a thoughtful examination of some assumptions that enthusiasts of the peer production of knowledge (and I count myself as one) continue to make but which, if questioned, might actually improve these processes. Not that the examples he cites, like Wikipedia, aren't always trying to grapple with these issues. Still, the silence is deafening. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000828.html

So last Friday I gave a talk at the WCET conference titled "The Future CMS." A flash version (13Mb) with both audio and slides is available, but if you'd prefer you can just grab the slides on their own (7Mb) (if you view them in 'Notes' mode you can pretty well see the full text of the talk.) Be warned, I have a hard time taking myself seriously as a prognosticator (as likely will you by the end of the presentation.)

A little context; the crowd at this conference is mostly policy and admin folks - very few techies and faculty in the crowd. While there were certainly more people who had heard of the social software/Web 2.0 explosion than in previous years, it's still a crowd that I hope finds value out of this kind of presentation. This year was notable for the marked increase in both Web 2.0/e-learninig 2.0 topics and blog-savvy presenters. I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Jaren Stein and John Krutsch, the two lads responsible for the recently announced Moodle OCW module. In addition, I got to hang out and see present both Terry Anderson and Chris Lott, and finally meet the indomitable patent battlers Al Essa and Barry Dahl. Rather than being one of the self-congratulatory post-conference blog posts Terry mentioned that he hates, I actually mention all of these folks, as well as the number of blog and wiki-savy attendees in the audience, as proof of the every growing awareness and practice; at this conference I I have seen through the last 3 years the topics and practices of Web 2.0/elearning 2.0 slowly moving into what I'd consider the 'early adopters' and even the start of the 'early majority.' - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000823.html

http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/10/

the_tyranny_of_.html

The only reason I don't recommend reading Ulises Ali Mejias's Ideant is that you may never get back to work, so deep and thought provoking do I find his essays (calling them posts would seem a slight). But if you have the heart, head and time to have followed some of Stephen's longer posts essays, then you must read these as well. These represent for me the two intellectual views on networks between which I currently vascillate (though careen would likely be the better word).

When Ulises writes in conclusion that while "self-interest might be a functional principle to organize networks ... it might not be sustainable as the basis for a social ethics, which requires a degree of selfless engagement" he gives word to a fear that has been nagging me since I first heard Stephen disparage "networks of proximity" and have myself tried to give feeble voice to in posts like this one on Canada day and in conversation with other edubloggers. What I appreciate so much about Ulises' piece as I read it was that it was not demonizing networks nor underplaying their power, but instead questioning what we lose in adopting them as a governing metaphor (and more, an actual organizing principle).

What I'm left with, though, is the same question I feel in the face of my children's over-mediatized future, which is not how to make it go away, as I don't think it ever will, but instead if there are ways in which we can adopt the technologies (and ways of being that we can adopt that aren't on the network) to help us, if not evade, at least amend, this 'tyrrany.' Like I said, careening!!! - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000831.html

http://www.blackperl.com/javascript/greasemonkey/ft/

So after about the 100th time of trying to tag a site in del.icio.us that I'd already tagged before (early onset alzheimer's?!? More likely the effects of my misspent youth), I thought to myself "Someone has got to have already built something that queries del.icio.us in the background and lets you know if you've already tagged a page." And sure enough, someone had, using Greasemonkey.

This script (great name!) displays a small piece of text on the screen with the tags you used (and optionally, how many other folks have tagged it to) on any page you visit that is already in your del.icio.us links and then gently fades away (the fade time can be configured). I use the del.icio.us extension for Firefox already, and this would seem like a natural addition they could build into it, but until then, this script does exactly what I want. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000824.html

BCcampus EdTech PD Report

I'm hoping this is of interest to folks outside the province too - my employers, BCcampus, commissioned a study done by Janice Johnson of UBC to examine professional development needs around educational technology in public post-secondary in British Columbia. Through a combination of surveys, face-to-face meetings and an environmental scan of existing offerings, the report paints a picture of the current practices and potential needs for PD in our province. It also recommends a number of approaches for addressing these needs, including ways to harness existing resources in the province at a larger scale as well as the idea of dedicated 'demo' spaces, places where educators can try out new tech with very low barriers and cost.

We should start to see various activities come out of this soon which I am very excited about. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000822.html

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/DEC0602.pdf

There's nothing really wrong with this report but also nothing very exciting either - basically a short synopsis of Sakai and Moodle and the state of affairs in LMS adoption in the US. If I were one of the 50 or so other open source learning management system projects out there I might be a bit choked by the continued lack of recognition (and it certainly gives pause to claims I've seen made within the open source CMS community that there's no inherent competition between open source projects) but if you need a short synopsis document on the topic to stick in front of a still skeptical CIO, this is one place to start. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000821.html

http://www.notemesh.com/?a=home

Along the same lines as stud.icio.us, which I wrote about last month, NoteMesh is driven by students and creates wikispaces for an entire class to take notes in. I actually much prefer the stu.dicio.us model, in which each student is taking their own notes but the class 'tags' create a collective note space, over this one, where instead students collaborate on one set of notes for the entire class. If I'm understanding correctly, this is partly the distinction Stephen was getting at in his recent whiteboard drawing. Still, encouraging to see the being aimed directly at the student taking control over their own knowledge creation processes rather than having to be always mediated through instituional infrastructure. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000843.html

http://www.xk72.com/charles/

For the server geeks out there, here's a nifty little app that my buddies at The Learning Edge turned me on to. It's a Java-based tool that lets you watch all of your HTTP session traffic in real time. The really nice piece is how it handles XML as it enables you to see the XML flowing between the client and server. It also does bandwidth simulations - while this is probably pretty out of fashion these days, we should remember that broadband adoption in the US is just over 50% and that connectivity in places with many remote communities (like Canada ) can still be challenging. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000842.html

So first Michael Feldstein joins Oracle. Now comes news that Jon Udell is headed to Microsoft. What's next? Jimmy Wales starts working for Encyclopedia Britannica? Stephen Downes becomes chief evangelist for Blackboard? I swear, if that happens, we're headed to our secret bunker in the hills, and good luck to the rest of ya! - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2006/12/13/study-on-what-us-c

http://www.eduventures.com/about/press_room/

12_12_06.cfm?pubnav=about

Via Jim Farmer’s eLibrary feed, an ongoing treasure trove of documents on patents and elearning (amongst other topics), comes news of this report by Eduventures, a Boston-based consulting firm. You have to pay for the full report, but even the short precis has some interesting nuggets from a student perspective. According to this summary, the study of 6,200 enrolling freshman in the US found ‘Professional Preparation,’ ‘Academic Strength’ and ‘Affordability’ (in that order) as the top 3 things incoming students are looking for. And around the notion of ‘Academic Strength,’ apparently

students value “close interaction with faculty” and “experiential learning” more than “honors programs” and the development of smaller “learning communities.”

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2006/12/13/all-i-want-for-chr

My Amazon Wish List

Just because I know you’re all wondering what to get this lowly edtech blogger for the holidays. Never let it be said that I didn’t ask

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000847.html

Overheard in the Leslie house today:

Kaya (4 years old): How can Santa work with the Elves on toys if he's at the Mall?

Daddy: Well, I suppose he has a super fast sleigh or something to get him back to the North Pole every night.

Calum (7 years old): That's not it, dummy. Those are Santa's clones(!?!)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000846.html

http://eportfolio.edutools.info/static.jsp?pj=16&page=HOME

I wasn't really a part of this project, but my colleagues at Edutools have put the comparison of 6 eportfolio tools into our comparative analysis tool so you can now do some easy side-by-side comparative analysis of them.

Now's probably as good a time as any to mention a change to the overall review process on the Edutools site, specifically with the better known Course Management System comparison site.

The big issue with running this site has always been how quickly the reviews go out of date and the effort involved with maintaining them (on the old site, we had active reviews for 25+ CMS). That's why we've changed our review model. Instead of only one person doing all the reviews, anyone is free to post a review of a new product or a revision to one of these. We've also built some feedback mechanisms and associated discussion forums with each of the reviews in the hopes that the community will police itself - the reviews are partially constrianed by a set of checkbox features, but there are free text areas as well (these are clearly demarcated on the site) to allow for additional comments outside of the standard feature comparison.

So I am no longer actively writing these reviews, they are being upkept by various people, including the vendors themselves, and we encourage you, if you find the site useful and have issues with a review, to read the Editorial FAQ and follow the dispute process if there are issues in what you are reading. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000845.html

My Amazon Wish List

Just because I know you're all wondering what to get this lowly edtech blogger for the holidays. Never let it be said that I didn't ask ;-)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000844.html

http://www.eduventures.com/about/press_room/

12_12_06.cfm?pubnav=about

Via Jim Farmer's eLibrary feed, an ongoing treasure trove of documents on patents and elearning (amongst other topics), comes news of this report by Eduventures, a Boston-based consulting firm. You have to pay for the full report, but even the short precis has some interesting nuggets from a student perspective. According to this summary, the study of 6,200 enrolling freshman in the US found 'Professional Preparation,' 'Academic Strength' and 'Affordability' (in that order) as the top 3 things incoming students are looking for. And around the notion of 'Academic Strength,' apparently

students value "close interaction with faculty" and "experiential learning" more than "honors programs" and the development of smaller "learning communities."

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000835.html

http://www.dlcms.ethz.ch/

Ahhhh, love those Google searches. Whilst searching (and still seeking) information about the standards compliance of WebCT CE 6 content exports, I stumbled across this find, the dynamic Learning Content Management System. Built as an extension of the open source CMS called Silva, dLCMS bills itself as a "content management system for web based learning materials" built on top of Zope and released under a BSD license. It stores resources in XML format and has created packages which have been successfully imported into OLAT, ILIAS, Moodle and WebCT. It looks to have been produced by ETH Zurich (and possibly on soft money that's now run out) but possibly worth a look. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000836.html

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczjrt/Editor/

Wow, I feel really torn about posting about this at all. When I stumbled across this today I was quite excited; while the promise of content interoperability has been there for quite a while now, the availability of easy to use tools for producing such content outside of the CMS delivery environments has been scarce. So any time I see a tool like this I am anxious to check it out. more...

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2006/12/13/edutools-eportfoli

http://eportfolio.edutools.info/static.jsp?pj=16&page=HOME

I wasn’t really a part of this project, but my colleagues at Edutools have put the comparison of 6 eportfolio tools into our comparative analysis tool so you can now do some easy side-by-side comparative analysis of them.

Now’s probably as good a time as any to mention a change to the overall review process on the Edutools site, specifically with the better known Course Management System comparison site.

The big issue with running this site has always been how quickly the reviews go out of date and the effort involved with maintaining them (on the old site, we had active reviews for 25+ CMS). That’s why we’ve changed our review model. Instead of only one person doing all the reviews, anyone is free to post a review of a new product or a revision to one of these. We’ve also built some feedback mechanisms and associated discussion forums with each of the reviews in the hopes that the community will police itself - the reviews are partially constrianed by a set of checkbox features, but there are free text areas as well (these are clearly demarcated on the site) to allow for additional comments outside of the standard feature comparison.

So I am no longer actively writing these reviews, they are being upkept by various people, including the vendors themselves, and we encourage you, if you find the site useful and have issues with a review, to read the Editorial FAQ and follow the dispute process if there are issues in what you are reading. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2006/12/13/have-yourself-a-ge

Overheard in the Leslie house today:

Kaya (4 years old): How can Santa work with the Elves on toys if he’s at the Mall?

Daddy: Well, I suppose he has a super fast sleigh or something to get him back to the North Pole every night.

Calum (7 years old): That’s not it, dummy. Those are Santa’s clones(!?!)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000849.html

http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/

Tip of the blog-tam to Michael Penney for letting me know of the recent announcement that UCLA plans to adopt Moodle as its institution-wide learning and collaboration environment, while also pledging to "continue as a Sakai Foundation member and ... to work with others in the Sakai, Moodle, and IMS communities ... on data, tool, and language interoperability solutions." Let us hope this latter comes true too - with the behemoth increasingly playing annoying content lock-in games, (more to come on this, don't you worry!) it bodes well for us all to have an increasingly healthy set of open source alternatives that can model non-predatory, open, interoperable solutions.

This is one new year's prediction I feel pretty safe making - that we'll see more and more institutions getting behind these and other open source CMS solutions in 2007 as they will be able to take advantage of the critical mass of adoption that built up in 2006 and avoid the "enterprise un-ready" FUD that major adopters like the Open University and Athabasca (amongst many more) have helped assuage. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000837.html

"All men are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality."

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2006/12/19/ucla-to-adopt-mood

http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/

Tip of the blog-tam to Michael Penney for letting me know of the recent announcement that UCLA plans to adopt Moodle as its institution-wide learning and collaboration environment, while also pledging to “continue as a Sakai Foundation member and … to work with others in the Sakai, Moodle, and IMS communities … on data, tool, and language interoperability solutions.” Let us hope this latter comes true too - with the behemoth increasingly playing annoying content lock-in games, (more to come on this, don’t you worry!) it bodes well for us all to have an increasingly healthy set of open source alternatives that can model non-predatory, open, interoperable solutions.

This is one new year’s prediction I feel pretty safe making - that we’ll see more and more institutions getting behind these and other open source CMS solutions in 2007 as they will be able to take advantage of the critical mass of adoption that built up in 2006 and avoid the “enterprise un-ready” FUD that major adopters like the Open University and Athabasca (amongst many more) have helped assuage. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000850.html

You already know what I want for Christmas. So in the spirit of the season, here are my (non-denominational holiday) gifts for ....

WebCT and Blackboard - I'd say a lump of coal, except they'd probably just claim to have patented 'mining' and sue me. So instead, how about "Courage," the courage to adopt a strategy that keeps customers not by locking down their content in difficult to export ways but instead by creating a product people can easily leave but want to stay with; the courage to grow as a company not through intimidation and pathetic legal challenges but again, by continuing to develop a product that people simply want to buy (oh, and did I mention I believe in Santa Claus too!)

ELGG - continued success, and for some funder to acknowledge the blood, sweat and tears of these guys to build one of the best social learning platforms around today. As open source.

D'Arcy - some plane tickets to Hawaii so I can finally stop seeing all the links to Hawaiian hotels in his del.icio.us feed ;-)

Alan - what do you get the guy with a great new job and seemingly unlimited talent? How about some well earned time at his cabin soaking in that unused hottub!

Stephen - A Patent. On Everything. Just Kidding.

Brian - his own radio show. I know, I know, who un-Web 2.0 of me. But I'd listen to it. You probably would too if you'd seen his record collection.

All the Edubloggers who felt it necessary to acknowledge an "award" from a link troll - some more self-esteem. Come on folks - "top 100 Edublogs"? What you've got there is exactly equivalent to someone's blogroll. You're all great. We love you very much. Remember, in the inimitable words of Dave Winer - it doesn't matter if only 2 people read you, as long as they're the RIGHT 2 people.

Michael (and all the other tireless folks working to expose the evils of software patents for education) - Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software. Actually, no. Just a well deserved break. (And to Michael, great success next year in the new job).

the Moodle, Sakai, Atutor, .LRN projects and all the other open source CMS folks - continued success in the new year. Even if you are not an open source CMS adopter, be glad for what these folks are doing for you. Because you benefit from their work and efforts too, in more ways than you likely realize.



And finally...

To the readers of EdTechPost - thanks. And a promise - to re-launch this site early in the new year with comments back on. So you can talk back to nonsense like this post. That's gone unrectified for far too long.

Hope you all get a break over the next few days, I look forward to learning and creating with you all in the New Year! Cheers, Scott.

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000838.html

Now while in parts of Canada this image would seem commonplace, not so much in Victoria, B.C. where I live. If we get snow 1 day a year we're usually lucky.

Well Sunday the weather conspired to bring us well over a foot of snow, which fairly paralyzed the city. Lucky for me I work at home; not so lucky when the power goes out, and with it the internet connection.

So it was with a bit of trepedation that I got up at 4:30am this morning to catch a flight to Cranbrook to visit some colleagues at the College of the Rockies. If the streets around my neighborhood were any indication, the drive to the airport was going to be treacherous.

But low and behold, the road cleared when I got to the highway, and I made it to the airport and then on to Vancouver to catch my connecting flight. Only to be thwarted by Air Canada, the bane of all Canadian travellers. Apparently no one told Air Canada that the temperature on the West Coast does occassionally drop below 0 Celsius, and so I am stuck on the end of an expensive Telus wifi connection (but at least a wifi connection, hallelujah!) with the Airport Lounge Blues (I now know the title for DJ Nessman strikes again! next recording!) - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000839.html

http://www.statcounter.com/

As Stephen pointed out, a little while ago this blog began launching annoying pop-up windows on visitors' browsers. Unbeknowst to me, the free stats program that I had used had a little clause in its user agreement that stated at any time it could choose to use the tracking image and code embedded in your page to launch advertising. Whoa. Not nice. As soon as I realized what was going on, I ditched the tracking code and I believe the problem resolved.

So the downside of that (on top of tarnishing my reputation with annoying pop-up ads) is loosing a few years of stats, but the upside was finding a better solution. I like the web-based model, a simple program that I can check once in a while online and not have to worry about web log analysis. So off I went in search.

I knew a lot of people I read used Sitemeter so I quickly installed it. It worked fine, but the major drawback for me was that the free version did not aggregate the referrer stats, which is for me a primary reason for looking at these numbers in the first place.

I had been running Google Analytics for some time too in the background, mostly to get a feel for how it worked and if it was useful on other sites I deal with, so it didn't require me to do anything other than see if the reports it produced were to my liking. I can see how Google Analytics could be really useful if you are using Adwords and are trying to analyze and improve how you drive traffic to your site, but I found the reports overkill for what I was wanting. So off to other options.

Which led me finally to StatCounter which is what I've settled on. Why? Well, the tracking code is invisible. It does a good job of giving me one click access to aggregated referrer data and gives the option of showing these by URL or Title. And it gives you some "Path" data. Nice. But the icing on the cake was its Recent Visitor map. Sure, this looks at first like the kind of thing you get with GVisit, but click on any of the map pointers and you realize that it is actually mashing up the IP geolocation data with the referrer info, session length and search term data. Sweet!

So lots of the function of these free web trackers can be relegated to a service like Technorati, and I know that is how some bloggers get some of this data. What's interesting to me, though, is how little I've seen written on the use of web stats to build your social network. I see lots of people introducing blogging to newbies, but I also see lots of puzzlement on those newcomers faces about why blogging is essentially a social process, and how they can become embedded in existing networks. To me, web trackers (and services like Technorati) represent one side of the equation - how to find out who is reading you and how people are finding you. The other side seems obvious, and yet many fail to grasp - point to others, as they are looking at their referrer logs too! While some might look on this as evidence of the essential vanity of bloggers, I'd argue that it is instead a critical aspect to becoming a good (read "connected" or "social") blogger and an emerging online 'social' skill.

So please, someone, tell me if I ever start popping up annoying ads on your browser again. I promise, this is something I would never do intentionally! Ick! Luckily, it seems like it's as anathema to StatCounter's creator as it is to me. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000840.html

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/mashup.vss

I liked the UML icons that Scott Wilson produced and shared for the OminGraffle tool, but couldn't use them 'as is' because OminGraffle doesn't exist for the PC. So I asked Scott if he could share the source with me so I might somehow get them into Visio, the tool I most often use to whip up such drawings. He kindly went one better and produced an exported stencil for Visio, out of which I created the same set of mashup shapes for Visio. Just drop it in "My Documents - My Shapes" to be able to use it in Visio. Happy Diagramming! And thanks again Scott! - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000831.html

http://www.blackperl.com/javascript/greasemonkey/ft/

So after about the 100th time of trying to tag a site in del.icio.us that I'd already tagged before (early onset alzheimer's?!? More likely the effects of my misspent youth), I thought to myself "Someone has got to have already built something that queries del.icio.us in the background and lets you know if you've already tagged a page." And sure enough, someone had, using Greasemonkey.

This script (great name!) displays a small piece of text on the screen with the tags you used (and optionally, how many other folks have tagged it to) on any page you visit that is already in your del.icio.us links and then gently fades away (the fade time can be configured). I use the del.icio.us extension for Firefox already, and this would seem like a natural addition they could build into it, but until then, this script does exactly what I want. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2006/12/22/my-holiday-gifts-t

You already know what I want for Christmas. So in the spirit of the season, here are my (non-denominational holiday) gifts for ….

WebCT and Blackboard - I’d say a lump of coal, except they’d probably just claim to have patented ‘mining’ and sue me. So instead, how about “Courage,” the courage to adopt a strategy that keeps customers not by locking down their content in difficult to export ways but instead by creating a product people can easily leave but want to stay with; the courage to grow as a company not through intimidation and pathetic legal challenges but again, by continuing to develop a product that people simply want to buy (oh, and did I mention I believe in Santa Claus too!)

ELGG - continued success, and for some funder to acknowledge the blood, sweat and tears of these guys to build one of the best social learning platforms around today. As open source.

D’Arcy - some plane tickets to Hawaii so I can finally stop seeing all the links to Hawaiian hotels in his del.icio.us feed

Alan - what do you get the guy with a great new job and seemingly unlimited talent? How about some well earned time at his cabin soaking in that unused hottub!

Stephen - A Patent. On Everything. Just Kidding.

Brian - his own radio show. I know, I know, who un-Web 2.0 of me. But I’d listen to it. You probably would too if you’d seen his record collection.

All the Edubloggers who felt it necessary to acknowledge an “award” from a link troll - some more self-esteem. Come on folks - “top 100 Edublogs”? What you’ve got there is exactly equivalent to someone’s blogroll. You’re all great. We love you very much. Remember, in the inimitable words of Dave Winer - it doesn’t matter if only 2 people read you, as long as they’re the RIGHT 2 people.

Michael (and all the other tireless folks working to expose the evils of software patents for education) - Math You Can’t Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software. Actually, no. Just a well deserved break. (And to Michael, great success next year in the new job).

the Moodle, Sakai, Atutor, .LRN projects and all the other open source CMS folks - continued success in the new year. Even if you are not an open source CMS adopter, be glad for what these folks are doing for you. Because you benefit from their work and efforts too, in more ways than you likely realize.

And finally…

To the readers of EdTechPost - thanks. And a promise - to re-launch this site early in the new year with comments back on. So you can talk back to nonsense like this post. That’s gone unrectified for far too long.

Hope you all get a break over the next few days, I look forward to learning and creating with you all in the New Year! Cheers, Scott.