Computing Assistance Support & Education Inc – CASE Notes

While attending Connecting Up 09 Darrell and I had a chance to meet Wendy Spencer from of the Dharriwaa Elders Group, Walgett NSW. After a long day we made it back to the hotel room to record a podcast with her (Wendy bravely jumping in front of the mic despite having a cold – and I didn’t end up sick!). Wendy talks about the DEG finding CASE and how the relationship developed between the two groups. We then examine some of the technical aspects of the work CASE has done for the Elders group.

Head over to the CASE podcast page to listen in to Episode 4.

There’s been an abundance of good references mentioned during the event and we want to take note of a few of them here.

Yesterday Susan Devine and Gail Tuft gave a talk on how they have used a wiki to maintain business knowledge. The session was packed and a lot of people were very interested in trying out a wiki themselves. Gail reccommended DocuWIKI for a simple, easy to use wiki platform.

Peter Deitz from Social Actions gave a thought provoking presentation on “Social Actions”. For his site you can see www.socialactions.com, for a list of social networking sites you can see this wikipedia entry.

Headshift, a social networking consultancy based in the UK (but looking to expand into Australia) has done some good work and their offical site can be found here: http://www.headshift.com.

More to follow…

The second day of Connecting Up 09 is now in full swing. We’ve just had a talk from Alan Noble, engineering director of Google Aus/NZ. He gave a brief overview of some of their lesser known apps, cloud computing and answered some good questions. Just how green can cloud computing be? Can we get our information back out of the cloud if we place it there? He also detailed how adwords works and where community organisations can go to apply for grants from Google.

The wireless connectivity issues that plagued the conference seem to have been resolved (at this stage) so Twitter is still filling up with tweets. Elliott Bledsoe who gave the talk on Creative Commons yesterday also has a great blog post that explains how hash tagging in Twitter works and would be a valuable read for anyone new to Twitter.

More to follow after today’s roundtable discussions have finished…

We’re coming up on lunch in the first day of Connecting Up 09 – there have been some highlights so far including a great talk by Mark Pesce where he explored ideas surrounding the gradual change of our social fabric. An incredibly comprehensive online version of his presentation (plus much much more) can be found at his blog here.

Elliott Bledsoe’s talk on creative commons and copyright was very informative and ultimately, very important. Learning more about creative commons can be done (quite easily!) through their newly revamped website at www.creativecommons.org.au. A very important tip is to make sure you generate creative commons licenses specific to your country, even though CC applies worldwide.

The official Twitter feed has been getting a healthy workout despite generally poor wireless broadband at the venue! You can follow the twitter conversation here.

More to follow…