I called in on the TUANZ Bus Tour one day conference while it was in Christchurch today, and caught up with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach who is the keynote speaker on this leg of the journey. Although I only caught the tail end of the final session, it ws evident to me that the 100 or so attendees had spent the day exploring the ‘new world’ of Web2.0 and social software – many for the first time. There was quite a positive atmosphere – with evidence of many moving into the phase of looking for purposeful ways to incorporate these tools into their teaching and learning programmes.

It was useful then, to discover in my RSS feed tonight, a post from George Seimens announcing to the world that he and his colleagues at the Learning Technologies Centre, at the University of Manitoba, have put together a wiki of New Technologies for Teaching and Learning. George says…

If you’re interested in blogs, wikis, aggregators, audio, video, flickr, web conferencing, and social book marking, these wiki pages are a good starting point. They’ve been put together with the intent of providing a quick overview of the technology…and basic uses in teaching/training/learning environments.

I’ve had a browse through the pages of the wiki and find it lives up to this description pretty well. The explanations are concise and to the point, and there are numerous links throughout that take you to sites with more information or examples to view.

The notes are originally from a series of workshops that were run by the LTC, and each page is laid out with an overview of the session ‘objectives’ and a list of the page content etc. It’s a great idea to see the pages presented as a wiki, as I can imagine others adding all sorts of relevant information that will see these pages develop into a really comprehensive guide.

There are a number of teachers and ICT facilitators here in New Zealand who were at the Learning@School conference earlier this year, or at the TUANZ seminar today who I can imagine would find these notes of enormous value as they take the things they’ve learned about these new technologies back to their own schools and colleagues. Thanks George!