Inaugural Posting

Coming to you from AMTEC 2002 in Regina SK. Keynote speaker today was Stephen Downes. Not only did he have some great ideas, he was an amusing and engaging speaker (perfect when the night before was spent consuming Guinness, then staying up too late). Some emerging themes from the sessions and keynote today are:

• decentralized resources
  
• make it yourself, instead of buy/subscribe
  
• the web is a two way medium - we can all be viewers and creators of the content (Isn't that what blogging is all about?!?)
  
• the web means information can be everywhere simultaneously, so why do we need to go to a specific building in our community to learn?
  
• our models of learning and information distribution are based on information scarcity. If information is abundant, what new models will emerge? (and if information is now abundant, what will become scarce?)
  

Odonovan and I are presenting and giving our workshop tomorrow on using Linux-based thin clients as a means to provide universal access to media resources. (see www.ltsp.org for further information. After we post our presentation on-line, I'll add a link to it from here.