Submitted for your consideration – two new weblogs

For two years, back in the old TechBC days, I worked next to Dan McGuire with only a thin cubicle membrane between us. It was my job to find learning objects (as long as I ignored the accepted definition of LOs, I did OK), it was his job to get copyright clearance so we could use them. The first thing I noticed about Dan was his silly sense of humour. The second thing I learned was that he was an omnivorous consumer of news and developments regarding IP and elearning. Perhaps my dominant recollection from that period is him leaning over top the cube divider and telling me about the latest copyright oddity, obscenity or paradox that had caught his fancy.

Well, by the miracle of online self-publishing, you too can be on the receiving end of Dan’s peculiar yet absolutely necessary mania by reading Rights, Fights and other online occurences (note to Dan — you might want to spellcheck that title, and make the caps consistent). This blog will be a useful resource for anyone concerned with IP in education (which should be all of us), and is a rare source of Canadian perspective on the subject. Written in Dan’s unmistakable voice, it is accessible and irreverent.

When I first started getting interested in promoting social software at UBC, Jim Sibley was an early collaborator. He installed my first wiki sandbox (even before D’Arcy did), and co-delivered our first adaptation of Alan’s Blogshop. Jim is relentless, talented, without pretence and a damn fine fellow. Recently, he has focused his considerable energy towards the application of team-based learning. Be sure to check out the open-source iPeer, which supports instructor workflow when using peer evaluations — it may indeed be “the greatest software ever built.”

Thinking of my weblog reading list as a distributed network of experts who each possess special expertise in a relevant domain, Dan and Jim are exactly the kinds of people I want to be blogging. I’m subscribed, reading and clicking.