ICCMSN2008 Conference Report

With Peta Hopkins I attended the inaugural International Conference on Computer-Mediated Social Networks 2008 hosted by the Information Sciences (Information Systems) Department part of the Commerce Faculty at the University of Otago, Dunedin , New Zealand, over 11-13 June 2008. The conference was slow to use social networking tools but a Twitter account was set [...]

Campus Wireless Access

I wonder if those at MPOW responsible for wireless access will be reading this post from which the quote below is taken?
The market research company, ABI Research, predicts that 99 percent of North American colleges will have the current standard of wireless access, 802.11n, by 2013, up from 2.3 percent now.

Disruptive Change and Everything

All professions are undergoing massive change due to the disruptive digital revolution. The librarians are not only studying the revolution in detail they are doing something positive about it and are not afraid of pulling their punches in telling us so. See Kathryn Greenhill’s post about the National and State Libraries Australasia discussion paper with [...]

CodeCampOz 2008 Report

I attended an expanded CodeCampOz at CSU Wagga Wagga campus during 25-27 April 2008. There were extra sessions on the Friday afternoon this year with plenty of new .NET technologies to catch up with. What is so valuable about CodeCampOz is that the speakers are practising software development professionals from around Australia. We had a [...]

AusWeb 2008 Report

In 2008 AusWeb reverted to a smaller, more intimate, conference at Ballina, the place where the original AusWeb 1995 was born. Around 80 delegates gathered to discuss the theme ‘Reflecting on the Past: Anticipating the Future’.
The keynotes were varied and interesting as usual. Shirley Alexander, who spoke about e-learning at AusWeb 1995, is now [...]

Books24×7 - An Essential Tool for Teaching IT Subjects

I have been using the Books24×7 ITPro collection for almost 4 years now and continue to rely heavily on the content for my teaching and research. Particularly of late the electronic book collection contains significant numbers of recently published texts full of the very latest technology. In Australia I have found the response times have [...]

The Long Nose of Innovation

What a beautiful phrase for the title of this post - I wish I had invented it. It is the title of an interesting Business Week article by Bill Buxton well known for his contributions to human-computer interaction. According to Bill:
Innovation is not about alchemy. In fact, innovation is not about invention. An idea may [...]

Computer Science as a Postgraduate Discipline

In an article entitled ‘Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?’ Dewar and Schonberg lament:
It is our view that Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in [...]

Facebook for Scholars - Not Quite

Thanks to Peta Hopkins via Gulcin Cribb for the link to Pronetos that aims to be the social network for scholars. I signed up and added myself to the Web Science discipline which not surprisingly is the largest group on Pronetos so far.
According to the site an academic can:
Create your home page
Find scholars [...]

Reflections on Mix on Campus at QUT

I attended the first Mix on Campus event at QUT on Tuesday. For Microsoft this was the first event of its kind aimed at students and staff to introduce innovations taking place in web design and implementation. An old acquaintance of mine, Simon Kaplan, now Dean of the Faculty of IT at QUT provided the [...]