Topics for BarCamp Canberra 2013

The BarCamp Canberra 2013 "un-conference" is on this Saturday, 16 March at the Unviersity of Canberra Inspire Centre. John Sheridan 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 Education, Green 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).

eLearning at Barcamp Canberra 2012

Greetings from Barcamp Canberra 2012 "un-conference"at the ANU in Canberra. I gave a talk on eLearning, which worked okay.

We have enough computers and telecommunications for a digital education revolution, but it is not just about connecting schools to the Internet and buying tablet computers for students. Teachers need to learn a new (or old) way to teach and students need to take responsibility for their , own learning. As a society we need t invest in the skills and systems to do this. ...

Gamification of open source software development

Greetings from Barcamp Canberra 2012 "un-conference"at the ANU in Canberra. Where Melanie Rooney from open source software company Suqiz is talking on their internal "roadmap" product. Tis is an internal online service which the management use to get the views of staff and clients on what the company should work on. This has elements of Gamification: using features of a game in non-game software. But what I found more interesting was that there are also aspects of e-democracy, with staff and clients debating the value of various options for new products. This could be useful for government.

Barcamp Canberra 2012

Barcamp Canberra 2012 is on Saturday 17th March 2012. This is a very well organized "un-conference", if that is not a contradiction in terms. It is free and is better than many of the paid conferences I attend. The theme is usually around government and Internet technology, but strays into other areas. No doubt there will be people talking about 3D printing, as that is trendy. At BCC2011 I talked about "Designing for Dialogue" (there was also a wired sign on the door saying "Please help keep this building a Comic Sans free zone"). At BCC2010 I talked on "Making e-Books for e-Learning on i-Pads" and at BCC2009, it was "National Bushfire Warning System". I don't know what I might talk about this year, but it may be to do with the e-learning revolution in higher education. One of the pleasures of the event is that you are under no compulsion to speak, or not. I decide what to talk about on the day.