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Driving Home from Madison

While winding our way home (2800 kms) from the Madison Distance Learning and Teaching Conference and our annual holiday at Sue’s Father’s cabin in Blind River Ontario, we had a few adventures, that I wanted to share in the following post.

We left Madison Wisc. enroute to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and began to notice an increasing number of motorcycles on the freeway. Suddenly it twigged and a check on the map showed we were heading straight for Sturgis SD. For those not aware, Sturgis is the town most centrally located in the continental USA and home of the world’s largest motorcycle rally. A check on the net showed the annual event was starting the day we were to arrive!  This 70th anniversary rally, was hoping to attract over 700,000 motorcycles attendees!  The event features rallys, contests, concerts (Bob Dylan appearing this year) sales, tattoos, tours and everything else related to motorcycles! By the time we were within 100 miles, the motorcycles outnumbered 4 wheeled vehicles and probably 50% of the cars and trucks were towing trailers, many with the now familiar Harley Davidson winged decal plastered on the side.Read More

Slides from Open Access Publishing Seminar

I’m attending the 26th annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning here in Madison. This is my 3rd time at this conference and it is a large, mostly practionaire orientated conference on e-learning. I’m looking forward to Etienne Wenger’s keynote tomorrow and have marked most of the soical media sessions to attend.
This morning’s keynote by Michael Allen, I found to be a bit “ho-hum” – mostly story telling about the past and the way that e-learning needs to be ‘fun’. Nothing to disagree with, just not much new and certainly no research data to back up claims and stories.
Yesterday I chaired a symposium with 3 authors of Distance Education books that have been published as open access resources through Athabasca University press. The symposium covered some of the research and ideas behind open access publishing and then featured an opportunity by each of the 4 authors to talk about the distance education books that they edited. These books are part of the Issues in Distance Education Series that I edit and all can be downloaded as chapters or full text from AUPress.
I was especially pleased to hear George Veletsianos talk about his experiences editing Emerging technologies in Distance Education and his concerns and hopes for publishing in Open Access outlets. He shared with me the story of discussing a list of “acceptable” journals to publish in. The list of journals hadn’t changed in 7 years, thus excluding all of the open access journals that have almost all appeared since that time. Sigh…”
The slides from our presentation are embedded below:
View more presentations from terrya.