What would Marja have heard here?

I just read the weblog by Marja Verstelle. She is present at the ELI 2007 annual meeting, as far as I understood. I wonder what she picked up at this presentation:

EDUCAUSE | ELI 2007 Annual Meeting | Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner

Ofcourse, if others want to fill in here, that's fine with me.

Repositories are so 2006! Or 2005...

D'Arcy Norman, from the University of Calgary (Canada), has a great weblog for everyone interested in elearning and such. There's is always something interesting on his weblog.

One of his last posts is about CAREO, a repository that was offline for 9 months. His post is pretty disappointing: "(..) I think it's a pretty impressive statement about Institutional Repositories that something that was once trumpeted as The Next Big Thing can be out of action for 9 months without many people even noticing. Relevance of top-down, centrally ordained institutional Repositories?"

D'Arcy goes on to say that he still puts his links in del.icio.us and his pictures on Flickr. He doesn't need a repository. Also read the comments on this posts, for some more valuable discussion about repositories and the likes.

More social software in education!

So, this must be the year 2007 then! This will be a great year. There are lot of predictions for this year pouring in through my Bloglines. One recurring prediction is that social software will finally get mainstream for and in education. I sure hope so!
A teacher in Seattle, Mark Ahlness, starts of his new year with a great illustration of the aforementioned prediction:
"My 8 and 9 year old third graders (..) are alright with web 2.0. Many of them take it for granted. A third of my classroom has blogged from home over Christmas Vacation. (..) These kids are comfortable in the medium. My job is simply to give it to them. My resolution for 2007 is to give them more. They will not waste the opportunity."

One laptop per child (OLPC) video

Ben Werdmuller (of Elgg fame) pointed me to a great video. It shows off the user interface of the the OLPC - One Laptop Per Child - project. It really looks great, and has some similarities with the Elgg user interface. Ben writes on The Internet is People: "This social networking UI for the One Laptop Per Child ($100 laptop) project is amazing". See for yourself what you think.

The video referenced by Ben has been made by "90 percent of everything", which is a blog about usability.