Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Topics for BarCamp Canberra 2013

The BarCamp Canberra 2013 "un-conference" is on this Saturday, 16 March at the Unviersity of Canberra Inspire Centre.  asked via Twitter for ideas on waht to speak about. It may seem odd for a senior government official to be wondering aloud \what to speak on at a conference in only a few days time, but this is an un-conference. Those who turn up with a traditional Powerpoint intensive set speech will be in for a shock. The un-conference format is similar to an academic symposium, in that all participants are potential speakers.

My current interests are online engagement courses (aka: Teaching How to Teach On-line, ), Sustainable Development, On-line Professional EducationGreen Computing and New Forms of e-Learning for Developing Nations. The last of these I will be talking about at an international computer education conference in Colombo. The leader of the federal opposition, Tony Abbott, recently proposed a new "Colombo Plan" . The Colombo Plan secretariat office is in Colombo, so I might pop in and visit them.

ps: At the first I attended (BarCamp Canberra 2009)  I did not understand what was going on. There were people with strange codes on their name tags instead of names (these turned out to be Twitter addresses) and there were people writing on post-it notes and stucking them on a board (this is how you offer a talk on the day). It was difficult to work out who were the speakers and who were the audience (a person who looks in their late teens, in torn jeans and fluorescent hair may turn out to be a software engineer from the world's leaning web company).

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