Big shout-outs to Novak Rogic, the Manager of Web Strategy at the University of British Columbia and his colleagues.

At Educause this week, I had the chance to learn more about some of the great open-source plug-ins his team has contributed to WordPress and MediaWiki.

Novak’s team has mashed-up http://blogs.ubc.ca/ and http://wiki.ubc.ca, so that a small department (I think he said 2-3 people), can instantly deploy new learning spaces and tools for the entire university.

I especially like their Wiki Embed (ways to instantly pull wiki pages into CMS pages) and Pulse Press (a twitter-like live-classroom collaboration tool) modules which are shared in the open-source community.  

I’m just saying.  The 2011 Educause Exhibitor Hall (like most conference exhibitor arenas) was divided into three major sections: Vendor booths, Poster Presentations, and Startup Alley. 

Startup Alley  (entrepreneurs) was nice and small.  That seemed about right.  Apparently, though, the grand majority of new ideas are mobile apps that pretty much do the same thing.

The Poster area (educators) represented various projects from schools, where teams (made up of professors, administrators, and school staff) talked about what mattered to them, and the ways they had created studies, processes, and solutions for their various problems.

The Vendor area (companies) was mostly … you know … edu-Disneyworld.   Vendors with magicians (the one at the orange booth was pretty good, too).  Vendors with give-aways (I love it when sales reps have JLo head-sets).  And of course, plastic robots, whirly-gigs, doo-dads and hand-out words like open, free, next-generation, and fill-in-the-blank (Patrick Masson is writing well about this).

The purist in me says the educators should always be at the center of the room.  There is no literal or figurative space in education where entrepreneurs, vendors, magicians, and media shouldn’t be looking in and in.

@teachpaperless, @davetroy, @andrewcoy @moodlerooms.  I really had fun last night at the first @edtechbaltimore Forum.  Had a chance to join a panel with Shelly Blake-Plock, and Dave Troy moderated by Andrew Coy.  Really enjoyed the company of everyone who attended.  Great questions from attendees… Let’s keep the conversation going!

More about the forum: http://www.edtechbaltimore.org/2011/baltimore-edtech-forum-september/ and http://citypaper.com/news/pressing-buttons-1.1205519