Clayton Wright has released his the 22nd edition of the conference list. It primarily covers January to June 2010, but also confirmed events after this time period. New additions have been made to December 2009.

Clayton writes:

You are receiving this list earlier than usual. Consequently, there are a number of conferences whose 2010 dates, locations, and urls are not available. Last fall, I was helping faculty in The Gambia and Sierra Leone design distance courses. Thus, due to limited Internet bandwidth in Africa and high access cost (see http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/608/1180 if you want to learn more about using technology in some countries), it took awhile to produce the list. So, the list was distributed in late December – too late for you to arrange to attend conferences scheduled for January. This year, I am assessing the distance education capacities of two institutions in southern Africa and decided to send out the list before I travel overseas. As a result, information was/is not available for a few conferences in May and June 2010. However, there are still more than 650 confirmed events listed in the attached – something for everyone!

View the list – Educational Technology & Ed Conferences Jan to June 2010 crw

Jason Hiner’s Tech Republic Tech Sanity Check blog Netbooks are dead. Long live the notebook addresses the evolution of Netbooks from tiny underpowered 7″ screened mini laptops with impossible keyboards to their current iterations as 10-11″ screen laptops with full sized keyboards and enough power to be useful. Hiner does clarify that with the introduction of CULV (consumer ultra-low voltage) chips we should be seeing even more functional mini laptops with full sized keyboard.

Having purchased many Netbooks (including a 7″, 9″ & 10″ ASUS Eee and an ACER 9″ & 10″) over the past few years I am looking forward to what I see is the laptops evolution. My current Netbook is the HP Mini 1000 and its 95% full size keyboard fits my full sized hands.

Read the full article…

The Chronicle of Higher Learning Chronicle Review addresses the question of Who Should and Who Should Not be Going to College. While there is no definitive answer to this question the debate addresses many pragmatic, social and moral issues related to this question.

David Nagel of Campus Technology refers to a market research report from Ambient Research that points to the their Chief Research Officers claim:

by 2014, at which time, Adkins forecast, only 5.14 million students will take all of their courses in a physical classroom, while 3.55 million will take all of their classes online, and 18.65 million will take some of their classes online.

While I am not surprised by these claims I and led to ask: What are we doing to prepare for this?

“I now believe that having public access to most scholarly communications is inevitable,” said David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. “Faculty are coming to understand, finally, that this has to happen if they’re going to have the most scholarly opportunities to get things done.”

Lets hope that this is more than just a statement in a panel discussion at the membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries.

If we really want to see a radical change in education then Open Access and Open Education Resources are just to initiative that must be embraced.