I am very sad to learn of the death of Dr Mark Laws just before New Years. He apparently drowned while on holiday with his family. If any of his family read this I hope they will accept my deepest sympathy for the loss of someone who I regarded as a good friend and impressive New Zealander, as well as my regret that I was unable to make it to his funeral. Mark was someone I had a lot of respect for - his energy, passsion for Maori education, and sheer ability to make change happen.

Mark was Director of the eWananga Centre for Creative Teaching and Learning at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi and was leading and influencing the Wananga's use of technology in ways that will be missed for years to come. The Herald article listed some of the other projects he led, and he was also the recipient of a number of scholarships, awards and grants over the last decade, including the Inaugural FiRST Awards, Foundation for Research, Science and Technology in 1999. He was constantly talking about others - the impact that the Wananga was having on the local community, Maori throughout New Zealand, and those students who were obtaining PhDs at the Wananga. He was most proud of their success and was constantly praising their achievements when I visited.

Mark and I met through our shared interest in technology and have been working together on the Ako Aotearoa change project. I will remember him as someone with the rare combination of skills, intelligence, good humour and a down to earth appreciation of the important things in life. Last time we met he was saying that his wife had taken up fishing with him and he clearly loved the sea and fishing for kai moana. I will very much miss him.

The eMM is still actively being applied down here in Australasia with projects following up on the ITP sector assessments and with ACODE applying the eMM in large Australian institutions. I also just spent last week in Perth presenting on some ideas for relating eMM assessment results to institutional frameworks and priorities (I'll post the link to the paper as soon as its online, you can find the abstract on the conference site at the moment). Paul Basich has also drawn my attention to the recent publication of the University of London eMM report, an extensive document that contains some very useful observations as well as a positive endorsement of their use of the model. I thought however, that I'd talk about some of the work that others are doing with model. These are projects and papers that I'm completely uninvolved with. Its great to see others taking the ideas and making them their own.

The second half of 2008 has been a busy time. A combination of work pressures and a lot of behind the scenes work on the eMM has meant I've let this blog lapse badly. At the moment I'm sitting waiting for the last keynote at the SLOAN ALN conference in Florida having given a presentation on the eMM to a US audience, and I'm getting ready to fly out this afternoon to visit the folk at NIME in Japan, sharing the eMM with Japanese colleagues.

Had an interesting email arrive this morning from the Times Higher Education Supplement who are asking delegates of the forthcoming OnlineEduca conference the following question:

"What new technology [do you] imagine will change the lives of academics within the next decade and what the implications of that might be for universities"