In our annual report to the Carrick Institute we referred to, "Mordac, The Preventer of Information Services" a character from Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon series. Mordac's approach to the management of IT services has struck a chord with both IT professionals and users around the world (and the DLC team). The cartoon below is one example of what has become known as the Dilbertisation of IT .

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Jen Millea from education.au recently picked up Yoni Ryan's paper, Do you Youtube? Wanna come to MySpace? Yoni is on our Carrick Project team and presented this keynote at the FYHE Conference, QUT Brisbane, 4-6 July. In this paper Yoni says:

The explosion of subscriptions to social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook leads us as educators to some fundamental questions abou the purpose and nature of university education, issues which have been ignored in the last decade as Western governments, along with vice-chancellors, have trumpeted the economic, utilitarian and vocational benefits of a university education. Such sites may be designated 'social' in nature, and in one sense they are. But they also direct attention to the individual, as the centre of a virtual 'exclusive' group. What does it mean to an education system notionally geared to the 'class' as a group, to inclusivity as a goal of education, and to the notion of tolerance of difference as a result of exposure to the class? Should we be encouraging the display of self that social networks allow as a healthy way of forging identity in a world characterised by increasingly undifferentiated and global 'selves'?

Our social software survey is now available. We are asking academics and students from the University of Canberra, QUT and RMIT to help us find out more about the ways they are using social software and web2.0 technologies. The link to the survey is: http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=697518

The Australian Blogging Conference will be hosted by the Legal and Regulatory Program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and the Queensland University of Technology on Friday 28 September in Brisbane, Australia.

Professor Yoni Ryan recently attended the FYHE 2007 conference as a keynote speaker. Yoni’s paper and slideshow, ‘Do You YouTube? Wanna come to MySpace?’ is now available at the document section of the site.

I recently attended Edmedia in beautiful Vancouver this year. We had a poster presentation on our Carrick project work, a paper on some work I did a few years ago on the use of integrated learning systems in Australian schools, and a really interesting symposium (Getting beyond centralized technologies) with a very international group of colleagues including George Siemens (University of Manitoba, Canada), Scott Wilson (CETIS, UK), Sebastian Fiedler (Centre for Social Innovation, Vienna), Brian Lamb (University of British Columbia, Canada) & Kai Pata (University of Tallinn, Estonia). My contribution to the session was: "Beyond the LMS: What's the BIG idea?". Brian has posted about the symposium here, Kai posted notes here and George also commented with a few reflections on the conference in general here.

The majority of Digital Learning Communities team will be meeting in Canberra over the 6^th and 7^th of August. The pilot projects, social software survey, DLC cookbook and mashedlc.edu.au will all be discussed and reviewed.

Semester two sees the beginning of the The Digital Learning Communities Pilot Projects. These projects aim to identify, develop and evaluate a range of emerging social technologies by engaging learners with blogs, wikis and other web based services.

Some of the pilot projects will take advantage of our Mashedlc Community Site while others will run independent web spaces.

The Social Software Survey is nearing completion, and will soon be sent out to students across the country. The survey has gone through a long development process and should now bring us valuable information regarding the way that students use communication technologies and social software.

Online services were trialled and the survey was prepared for online delivery through QuestionPro. The survey's scope broadened then narrowed with QuestionPro's ability to structure a dense and effecient survey.

With the aim to collect data over a number of years with a potentially increasing sample size it was imporatant to fully develop the survey's layout and delivery. As a side note, Rob came across significant interest in the survey during his trip to ED-MEDIA 2007 .

Beyond statistics and usage data, we hope to better understand students feelings towards their personal communicative devices. Do such devices aid their study, work, personal interests and enhance abilities to learn and keep in touch? Or do users feel overwhelmed or intruded upon?

The Social Software Survey should also help us better understand levels of online production and participation. We hope to gain insight into the number of users still only browsing, those who are participating and those who are actively producing online content.