Ascilite here we come

I’m heading off to the Ascilite 2009 conference in Auckland in a few days. The Ascilite (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) conference is held every year and this will be only the second time that the conference has been held in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The themes for Ascilite Same places, different spaces December 6-9, 2009 are: Blended Space, Virtual Space, Social Space, Mobile Space, Work Space.

Keynotes are:

Scott Diener, who has led the development of the University of Auckland's simulation island in Second Life; Grainne Conole, a Professor of e-Learning at the Open University, UK; James Clay ILT & Learning Resources Manager at Gloucestershire College.

The full programme and all the papers went online last week. I really like the idea of putting papers up ahead of time so delegates can get a better idea of what is on offer. Most library conferences seem to do this after the event.

There is the Ascilite09 Conference Hub , a fabulous way to facilitate communication and interaction, before during and after the conference. There's lot of great stuff here for delegates including a Twitter stream which is starting to take off.

An Ascilite SlideShare account has also been set up, but nothing has been uploaded, yet.

You can follow Ascilite on Twitter. And if you are tweeting about the conference the hash tag is #ascilte09

This will be my first Ascilite conference, so should be a blast. I’ll be presenting a paper:
Julia Gross and Eva Dobozy: Adding value to first year student learning with embedded library pod/vodcasts PDF

The other thing about Ascilite is they publish the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology