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.

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.

Scrape & Store Using the Leech Module

Our DLC project website is now live at http://mashedlc.edu.au.