Perth City from Kings Park
I’ve just returned from EDUCAUSE in Australasia 2009 held this year in Perth. Like most conferences it had its ups and downs in terms of papers and presenters. The keynotes were a mixed bag with some sessions being obviously sponsored by vendors. While these may have been a necessary evil for the conference organisers in terms of securing sponsorship, I don’t think they added value to the conference.
Day two was probably the highlight for me in terms of papers by delegates. The pick of the keynotes for me was Carie Page from EDUCAUSE who explored using practical examples how web 2.0 has transformed education. Leo Plugge from SURF was a close second, mainly for the engaging way he outlined how the Dutch were using the internet to innovate in education via SURF (the Dutch version of AARNET). It always amazes me how people from Western Europe can launch into English, their second or third language, with barely a hesitation while many of us here in Australia have difficulty mastering our one and only language English.
Of the presentations I attend four were of particular value and resonance to me. Two were on migrating from existing LMS to Moodle, one was an evaluation of the current state of play of library systems and the last was from the National Library of Australia on their use of ICT to support scholarship.
The two papers on the Moodle migration experience were from Derek White (University of Waikato) and Helen Carter (University of Canberra). The reason I found these interesting is that I’m currently managing our curriculum design unit and we’re in the early stages of migrating LMS from Blackboard to Moodle. Waikato were migrating from a home grown LMS and UC were migrating from WebCT. Although there were some differences in their approaches – Waikato had academics manually transferring files while UC automated as much as possible – due to local context there were some similar messages, eg the importance of providing point of need support to academics. Interestingly enough both institutions partnered with private providers to assist with the migration.
Rodney Foley from the University of Tasmania gave a very goodpresentation on the state of play of library systems. Some key points were that the nubmer of vendors is reducing due to consolidation in the industry, most vendors are focussing their efforts on front ends rather than back ends, open source library systems are still a way off although they are being slowly adopted in the US by some big players, and that discovery layers are the way to go.
Finally, Alison Dellit from the National Library of Australia gave an overview of what the NLA is doing to supoprt scholarship. She particularly focussed on their development of a discovery service which should have beta release soon.
After the conference we headed off to Albany and Augusta in the beautiful SouthWest for a few days … more on that next time.
Posted by Graham Black 
