Both events are being organised by Dennis Puniard.

The Tourism Conference takes place over two days and the Rail Trail Symposium on 3 February.

At the Tourism Conference there will be:

Four Keynote Addresses

Matt Lamont (Southern Cross University), The overlooked cycle tourism segment: Active spectators.

Chris Bull (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK) A Systematic Review of Evidence for the Local Impacts of Tourism and Leisure Cycling.

Craig Groke (Manager, Economic Development , Regional Development Australia, Barossa SA) The Chicken or the Egg? Which one is responsible for the success of Cycle Tourism in South Australia?

Sally Rodgers (Cycle Tourism Officer,  Murray to Mountains), The Murray to Mountains Rail Trail ; The Benchmark for Australian Cycle Tourism – The story thus far and future plans.

Fourteen papers:

Peter Thompson (Project Manager, Roads ACT), Build it and they will come – Cycling in the Australian Capital Territory.

Marjan Moris (Tourism Policy Support Centre,Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium), Cycling as a tool for regional (tourism) development.

Jun Shao (Beijing Forestry University), Connecting Through Social Media: The Case Of Chinese Cycle Tourists.

Dennis Puniard (University of Canberra), The impact of new technologies on cycle tourism; How cyclists use websites, blogs and social networking tools.

Ray Freeman (School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at Royal Roads University, Canada), Mountain Bike Tourism and Community Development in British Columbia: Critical Success Factors for the Future.

Stephen Schwer (Tourism Development Officer, Southern Flinders Regional Tourism Authority), Falling in Love Again: Helping government to fall in love again with cycle tourism.

Darren Stewart (Makin Trax) and Rod Florence (Territory Venues and Events), Stromlo Forest Park – Cycling Mecca risen from the ashes.

Peter Thompson (Project Manager, Roads ACT), Canberra’s Best Kept Secret – The Off Road Path Network.

Bruce Ashley (Director, The Environment Works), Cycling touring information and guide books: how they can contribute an integrated cycle tourism strategy.

Peter Neilson (Chief Executive Officer, Oncology Childrens’ Foundation), Charities and Cycling Events: how they attract a special type of tourist.

Blake Rowsell (University of Northern British Columbia, Canada), Mountain bike tourism development under the Midnight Sun: Capitalizing on site characteristics to maximize potential in the Yukon Territory, Canada.

Pam Faulks (THINK CANBERRA Director,  Canberra Convention Bureau), The Tour de Timor experience 2009-2011.

Daniel Carruthers (Zhejiang University, China), Sportive Cycling Events in China: Local Governments Promote their Unique Regions.

Louise Rose (Department of Resources Energy and Tourism), Tourism and Strategy – The  View from the Top.

Two panel sessions: Cycle Tourism Experiences; and Cycle Tourism Research Issues and Funding.

The Rail Trail Symposium program includes:

A Keynote Address by Sally Rodgers (Cycle Tourism Officer, Murray to Mountains)

The Murray to Mountains Rail Trail ; The Benchmark for Australian Cycle Tourism – The story thus far and future plans.

Ten Papers:

Steven Kaye (Vice President, Rail Trails Australia), The State of The Nation:  the best of the bunch and where we can get better

Michael Oxer (Chairperson, East Gippsland Rail Trail Committee of Management), Count your chickens as they hatch, OR Is there anyone out there?

Arianne Reis (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Southern Cross University), A conceptual model for rail trail development as a significant tourism product and Combining tourism products to increase tourism demand for rail trail tourism

Darren McClelland (Director, Enjoy Inspire Consulting Pty Ltd), In anticipation of a new adventure: what do cyclists expect?

Michael Maher (Director, Transplan Pty Ltd), Overcoming Adjoining Landowner Opposition to Rail Trails

Dennis Puniard (University of Canberra), Rail Trails in Southern NSW; Prospects and Possibilities

Petrina Quinn (Riverina Highlands Rail Trails Group), Riverina Highland Rail Trails – A work in progress

Denise Cox (Fraser Coast Regional Council, Queensland), Mary to Bay Rail Trail

Peter Lee (Newcastle Cycleways Movement), The Fernleigh Track

A Panel Discussion on the topic of Rail Trails 2020: A vision for the future of Rail Trails in Australia.

Last Sunday after the radio check we looked at a short video produced by CFA Victoria.

Although the content is related specifically to a fire incident I thought there were some great generic lessons about:

• Thoughtful decision making
• Transferring training into action
• Reflecting on practice

It is a part of a week of activities for research students planned by Joelle Vandermensbrugghe.

Whilst preparing for the workshop I noticed an interesting announcement from Michael Gove in the United Kingdom:

Advances in technology should also make us think about the broader school curriculum in a new way. In an open-source world, why should we accept that a curriculum is a single, static document? A statement of priorities frozen in time; a blunt instrument landing with a thunk on teachers’ desks and updated only centrally and only infrequently? … The essential requirements of the National Curriculum need to be specified in law, but perhaps we could use technology creatively to help us develop that content. And beyond the new, slimmed down National Curriculum, we need to consider how we can take a wiki, collaborative approach to developing new curriculum materials; using technological platforms to their full advantage in creating something far more sophisticated than anything previously available. (My emphasis)

I am profoundly interested in collaborative learning and have been using wikis for some time. My use of wikis was accelerated by some work I did with Leigh Blackall at the University of Canberra in 2011. One aspect of this work was for a unit titled Business, Politics and Sport, the second was connected to a history of the Paralympic Movement in Australia.

I have created a Wikiversity page for the workshop.

I will look at some other wiki opportunities too including PBWorks, Google Sites and Wikispaces. I will alert the group to this comparison of wiki opportunities.

I am hopeful that Laura Hale will work with me in this workshop. I am keen for Laura to share her experience and I would like her to say something about her Mind the Gap writing.

Postscript

I was delighted to discover that Jenni Parker is involved in a wiki workshop this week.

This is her blog post. She writes:

I started the Open Content Licensing for Educators online course on WikiEducator today. It is a free open course that runs for 5 days. I am already familiar with the concepts of open learning and open educational resources as I have been an advocate of open resources for the past few years and a WikiEducator user since 2007. I license most of my work under creative commons licenses and I encourage my students to “give back to the community” by publishing their work under a creative commons license. We obtain much of the information and photos for our own creations from the work others openly publish on the web and I believe we should return the favour in kind by adding our own work to the open web.

Photo Credit

Wiki Wiki

Open Space Principles

Kent writes about a stop motion film made in the Type Books Toronto bookshop.

The Joy of Books was made by Sean Ohlenkamp and Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp.

The film was posted on YouTube on 9 January 2012. By the time I saw it there had been 1,498,241 views.

I was delighted by the creative imaginations that made the film possible. In addition to admiring the passion that led Sean and Lisa to make the film I found myself thinking about how we can transform everyday learning environments.

I liked the soundtrack composed by Tim Westin of Grayson Matthews too.

If you would like more information about this project there is:

• an interview with Sean Ohlenkamp in a Quill & Quire post
• a CTV report
• Organising the Bookcase (Sean and Lisa’s first stop motion film about books) “This weekend we decided to organize the bookcase. It got a little out of hand.”

After watching both videos I went back to a post I wrote last October about Brigita Ozolins and her Reading Room show at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. I thought Brigita, Sean and Lisa would have a great conversation.

Bruce Coe submitted his PhD thesis for examination.

The title of his thesis is ES Marks and His Contribution to Australian Sport. Robin McConnell and I have worked with Bruce over the last two years and we have been  intrigued constantly by the unfolding story of a remarkable volunteer in the formation of Australian sport.

In an age when we lament the disappearance of volunteers and voluntary associations I think Ernest’s story makes for compelling reading.

Once the examination process has been completed I hope to work with Bruce to write more about Ernest.

Bruce’s Abstract is:

This thesis presents a chronological study of the life of Ernest Samuel Marks, a proudly Jewish man who was universally known as a champion of amateur sport in Australia, a highly efficient administrator in many sports and a long-serving alderman, and sometime Lord Mayor, in the City of Sydney, who, over half a century since his death, has been largely forgotten.
Ernest Marks was a man who found the time and energy to devote to his love of sport, to public service, to patriotic work and to charities, to history, to communications, to business and to his faith. He was a man who for sixty years was an exemplar for volunteerism through his multifarious unpaid activities within and without the world of sport.
His realms of influence included:

• Amateur sporting clubs and associations in Sydney, New South Wales and Australia
• Australian Olympic and Empire Games Movements, including the chairing of the
  organising committee of the 1938 Empire Games in Sydney, the first pageant of
  international sport to be hosted in this nation
• International sport, through his links with a number of bodies including the International
  Olympic Committee
• Municipal Council of Sydney where, for a quarter of a century, he was a highly respected
  alderman with a particular interest in the provision of playing facilities for children,
  especially the underprivileged
• Patriotic activities during both World Wars
• Manifold charities
• Philanthropy
• His Jewish community.

As an administrator, Ernest Marks contributed to the modernisation of sport in Australia from predominantly locally-based games to that where activities and competitions were well organised and this nation had become a significant player on the international sporting stage.

This thesis celebrates his story and, in the words of John Ritchie, a former General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘rescue [s] and restore[s] a comparatively unknown person to his … rightful place’. I believe that by sharing the story of the life and times of Ernest Samuel Marks which hitherto had been forgotten, under-estimated, misrepresented, confused or ignored, this thesis has added to the body of knowledge of those who have contributed to Australian sport. In the process, I believe that I have also been able to underscore his profound sense of civic responsibility.

ES Marks' Portrait (Joseph Wolinski)

Each Saturday morning our family invades the Dojo Bakery in the town.

The Dojo Bakery is located in one of Braidwood’s oldest buildings. It has housed a brewery, a garage and stables, and has been a workers’ cottage. We sit outside, enjoy the produce and delight in the coffee made by Anders.

We like the personal care in making bread and coffee at Dojo’s. It is a wonderful convivial space and prompts me to think even more about the articulation of service and contexts to support learning.

Bronwyn Richards and Helen Lynch add to the delight with their food stall. “Nearly every week Wynlen House sells vegies and preserves from a small stall in the laneway leading to the Dojo Artisan Bakery off Wallace Street, Braidwood, NSW. We sell whatever is ready from the garden focusing on a little of everything rather than a lot of something.”

Bronwyn and Helen use organic and permaculture principles with lots of loving care in their large kitchen garden. Their aim is “to produce as much of the food we consume as possible and to supply food locally”.  They keep chooks, ducks and turkeys for both egg laying and meat production and raise sheep and pigs from time to time.

We love their produce and their commitment to slow food.

Dojo’s and Wynlen House are great examples of what passion can make happen. Their proximity is symbiosis in action.

Last Saturday I was fascinated to see that Helen had created a QR Code for Wynlen House. At the time I was taking my picture of the QR Code there were two other people doing the same.

This is the Wynlen House QR Code:

The code gives those who want it a direct link to the Wynlen House website on their iPhone or Android. Bronwyn and Helen are planning to have QR code T shirts too.

If you are travelling through Braidwood your directions are “just look down the laneway next to the Pizzeria, and you will find the familiar Dojo Bread sign decorating the baker’s van” … and the Wynlen House produce table.

Photo Credit

Bronwyn and Helen

From the ABC:

I liked the idea of a car parking itself … not from new technology features but from driver error.

A car reported stolen last month in the Adelaide Hills is believed to have rolled into the garage of a nearby home, parking itself perfectly.

From AUSPIN members:

The State Governments of New South Wales and South Australia have developed open access interactive web-based resources. Health Statistics NSW provides open access to data about the health of the NSW population. Data include “the health status and demography of the NSW community, current health challenges and inequalities, trends in health, and comparisons between age groups and geographic locations”. Public Heath SA offers an interactive mapping tool that enables data visualisation.

From the EHealth Blog:

The slides, videos and photos of the recent HINZ (Health Informatics New Zealand) conference are now online for open public access.

From the Computing Education Blog a link to Kazuhisa Shibata, Takeo Watanabe, Yuka Sasaki, and Mitsuo Kawato’s paper Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation. I was interested to read in their abstract:

With an online-feedback method that uses decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals, we induced activity patterns only in early visual cortex corresponding to an orientation without stimulus presentation or participants’ awareness of what was to be learned. The induced activation caused VPL specific to the orientation. These results suggest that early visual areas are so plastic that mere inductions of activity patterns are sufficient to cause VPL. This technique can induce plasticity in a highly selective manner, potentially leading to powerful training and rehabilitative protocols.

I look forward to reading the full paper given the plasticity possibilities signalled in the abstract. As I result of following up on the lead from the Computing Education Blog post I found a helpful meta review of visual perceptual learning (2010).

From various LinkedIn groups:

Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool

The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives in which Habit #7 is: they stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past.

Many CEOs on their way to becoming spectacularly unsuccessful accelerate their company’s decline by reverting to what they regard as tried-and-true methods. In their desire to make the most of what they regard as their core strengths, they cling to a static business model.They insist on providing a product to a market that no longer exists, or they fail to consider innovations in areas other than those that made the company successful in the past. Instead of considering a range of options that fit new circumstances, they use their own careers as the only point of reference and do the things that made them successful in the past.

The Living We – An Ecology for Transformative Action. I was delighted to discover Helene Finidori’s work and the innovative use she has made of debategraph. I had not seen debategraph before which is disappointing given my interest in deliberation. Debategraph is: Debategraph is: a debate visualization tool “to help groups think through complex topics by building and sharing dynamic, collaboratively-editable and ratable maps of subjects from multiple perspectives”; and a creative commons project “to increase the transparency and rigor of political debate around the world”.

My final cirrus link this week comes from my wife Sue’s scanning of her Guardian RSS feed. She found a great article by Ruaridh Nicoll, The Art of Fielding: baseball, growing up and the great American novel. Ruaridh writes about Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and the story behind that story (Keith Gessen’s How a Book is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding). Last week I wrote about The Science of Baseball (1910 version). I am hoping I will have a great science and art story to combine separated by a century.

Photo Credit

Car park

Some examples I have found in the last few days:

Stephen Downes linked to Nick DeNardis’s post Why now is a great time to do an OAuth audit. Nick points out that “The beginning of the year is a great opportunity to start fresh and look at everything with a new set of eyes. Something that is easily overlooked is who (or what) has access to your social media accounts. It’s easy to change your password and revoke access from co-workers but it isn’t as easy to identify which websites and services have access to your accounts.”

Alistair Gray shared a link with the International Sports Management LinkedIn Group to a Dan Schawbel discussion of optimising use of LinkedIn. Dan identifies two fundamental principles of networking in his conversation with Jan Vermeiren, the founder of Networking Coach: the networking attitude (give and receive); and the Know, Like, Trust factor.

A Diigo Teacher-Librarian Group link from a Scoop.it page to an Apollo Research Institute Report (April 2011) on Future Work Skills. The Report identified ten skills “vital for success in the workforce”:

• Sense-making: an ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
• Social intelligence: an ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
• Novel and adaptive thinking: a proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
• Cross-cultural competency: an ability to operate in different cultural settings
• Computational thinking: an ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
• New media literacy: an ability to assess critically and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
• Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
• Design mindset: an ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
• Cognitive load management: an ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
• Virtual collaboration: an ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

Robin Good observes that:

By looking at the set of emerging skills that this research identifies as vital for future workers, I can’t avoid but recognize the very skillset needed by any professional curator or newsmaster.

This week’s presenter in the #change11 MOOC, Howard Rheingold has discussed five essential literacies:

I’ve concluded that one important step that people can take is to become more adept at five essential literacies for a world of mobile, social, and always-on media: attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network know-how. The effects of these literacies can both empower the individuals who master them and improve the quality of the digital culture commons.

Stephen Downes shared a great link to Alec Couros’s end of year Social Media and Open Education blog post about student work. Alec notes that:

I wanted to use the last post of the year to share a few examples of the great work that is being done by my graduate and undergraduate students. I am so very fortunate to have creative & hard-working students who are committed to improving their knowledge of teaching and learning in light of our new digital landscape. I hope that some of these examples will inspire you to take up new challenges in your own context.

These examples included student projects using: stop-motion technique; Glogster; Freemind; Xtranormal; Screenr; Jing; Voicethread; TikaTok; Prezi; and Knovio.

SlideShare compiled 12 presentations that look at change in 2012. I was particularly interested in Skytide’s 7 Online Video Trends to Watch in 2012 and the discussion of Adaptive Bitrate Streaming. Skytide suggest “As adoption of adaptive bitrate protocols grows, providers of legacy streaming methods will find themselves under increased pressure to prove their added value. Witness the recent decision by Adobe to cease further development of its mobile FlashPlayer.”

I noted from an iSportConnect alert that the Philadelphia Wings Lacrosse team is using Twitter handles on its shirts (and following on a lead from two football teams (Valencia and Jaguares de Chiapas). Whilst looking at the Twitter possibilities I saw the Twitter blog post about New Year’s Eve activity. The post includes a video visualisation of tweets.

Phil Davis has written a post for The Scholarly Kitchen, Tweets and Our Obsession with Alt Metrics, that offers another perspective on tweeting. He discusses Gunther Eysenbach’s paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. The comments on this post make for fascinating reading and raise some salutary issues for me about connecting, sharing and curating.

I thought I would end this post with a link to Tagxedo. It is a word cloud generator and I have used it here to summarise the content of this post.

Photo Credits

Connecting

Share Your Ideas

Librarian Action Figure

The Olympic Medal Tracker “projects the winners in each medal event for the 2012 London Olympics, based on an algorithm that monitors athletes’ performances leading up to the Games”.

The Tracker projects “finishes for the top eight athletes in each event, plus country-by-country projections based on the accumulated results of individual events”.

The Tracker is updated monthly. The January 2012 projections were published on 3 January.

The projections for total medals at the Games are:

Some of the items that did reach me:

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success (via LinkedIn and OLDaily). A post by Anu Partanen that includes a link to Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of  Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? (Last year I wrote about what sport can learn from Finnish education.)

An Economist article about The Disposable Academic and the place of PhD research. The article concludes:

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

An alert via PhilPapers about a forthcoming paper in Science and Engineering Ethics written by Ksenija Baždarić, Lidija Bilić-Zulle, Gordana Brumini and Mladen Petrovečki, Prevalence of Plagiarism in Recent Submissions to the Croatian Medical Journal. They analysed all manuscripts submitted in 2009–2010 with plagiarism detection software: eTBLAST , CrossCheck, and WCopyfind . They report that of 754 submitted manuscripts, 105 (14%) were identified by the software as suspicious of plagiarism. A manual verification confirmed that 85 (11%) manuscripts were plagiarized: 63 (8%) were true plagiarism and 22 (3%) were self-plagiarism. They conclude that “the prevalence of plagiarized manuscripts submitted to the CMJ , a journal dedicated to promoting research integrity, was 11% in the 2-year period 2009–2010″.

My Scoop.it feed provided a number of newspaper items from around the globe.

My Paper.li feed has had some excellent items too.

Photo Credit

Here Sleep Deer