Marrying conferences and online learning 

Do you have to go to conferences to be in on things? Shelley Powers is wondering about that in a comment on BB Gun, one of the blogs in her new suite.

I keep thinking -- and hoping -- it doesn't have to be that way, because I'm shy, and don't have the money to go to conferences, and there's no budget for it at work. Like Shelley said, it wasn't supposed to matter where you live or who you are.

I also keep thinking there ought to be a way to bring together all the considerable advances in elearning tools and knowledge, and apply them to conferences to bring distance participants into the fold. IT Conversations took a big first step in providing the audio of conference sessions, but it's pretty one-way. I'm going to work on what I have in mind, using some audio files from BlogHer06 or BloggerCon, and building some activities around them in Moodle, a LAMP LMS. I'd welcome input on it. I'll show you what I'm doing along the way.

Maybe demonstrating the idea will be more successful than trying to explain it. I've been wailing away at it at work for years (mostly in the context of extending classroom training online for people who have attended physical courses) and occasionally on my blog, but never seem able to get the point over. Or it could be I'm communicating just fine, and people don't respond to it because it's a dumb notion, but I don't think so because it won't leave me alone.

Game over? 

Here's one thing that puzzles me. Take this statement on the wiki for Wikimania.

Discussions will be held online around specific abstracts/presentations/workshops and proposed BOFs, leading up to and during the conference.

Why not afterward, too? Not just for remote conference-goers, but for people who were there, and thought of something on the way home they wished they'd said or asked or had more time to get into.

I can think of one reason why not. We're all so distractible and there's so much information and so many new ideas to absorb that we tend to keep moving along to the next thing. I've always been somewhat that way anyway, even before internet days, but once in a while I like to linger on a concept, explore it around the edges and from different angles in a leisurely way. Don't you -- and don't you think the web has contributed to our losing some of that?

Free old books 

Google Book Search now has downloadable PDFs for books out of copyright, TechCrunch reports.

I've been using Gutenberg texts for years, but I must say it is nice to have the PDFs all ready to skim and grab.

I found a 1919 book on accident prevention commissioned by my current employer, and written about the St. Louis Public Schools, a former employer.

I never thought about it, but I guess I've worked for a lot of places that have been around for ages. The oldest one must be Franklin College of Indiana, founded in 1832. That's old school (for the midwestern US).

TeleRead take on Googling the public domain 

David says they shouldn't be putting their brand on the older works. That's true, too. Might have to reconsider this.