We have plenty of video and reporting on the conference coming soon, but this, to me, was the sort of thing the conference was about — getting people from different areas together to find common cause.

In this clip, if you can hear over the ambient noise, you’ll see Brian Lamb giving a presentation on edupunk approaches to course publishing.

Christine Geith, who has been in distance education since 1989, is excited. But when Brian says it deals with everything but the gradebook, Christine (quite rightly) wants to know how that is handled. At which point John Mott, standing next to her listening to Jim, describes a new grant funded project that he is working on at BYU — a separable gradebook application that can work as easily with WordPress as with Sakai or Blackboard.

Christine remarks that it reminds her of way back, when people first began using online threaded discussions, and it was such a simple powerful presentation mode that made so many things possible.

I’m a big proponent of replacing a lot of face to face interaction with distance technologies. But when you see three people who have never heard of each other brought together like this — well, you can’t beat it.