CAVAL is an Australian consortium owned by universities. It provides “shared services to the information and library sectors throughout Australasia” .

They offer an excellent and varied training program around Australia. I’m going to rave about two upcoming seminars and give a plug for a third one.

At the start of March, there is still time to get tickets to see Michael Stephens, of Tame the Web fame, talk about the Hyperlinked Library in Adelaide (Monday 2 March), Perth (Wednesday 5 March) and Brisbane (Thursday 13 March) . From Michelle McLean’s account of the Melbourne seminar, it looks like THE training seminar to go to this year.

At the start of April, Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist from Talis, is talking in Perth (1st April ) and Melbourne (3rd April) . His topic is Web 2.0 – Where Next ? He’s looking beyond Web 2.0 toward the Semantic Web. I’ve been following Talis’ Panlibus blog for a while now, and I’m finally beginning to understand their concern with freeing up our library data, providing mechanisms for sharing it and manipulating it into more retrievable bundles.

At the start of May, I’m giving a CAVAL seminar called Exploring Second Life . (this is the plug bit). I’ll be in Sydney on Friday May 9th and Melbourne on Monday May 12th. I’ll take people through creating an avatar, how to navigate Second Life, how to use its tools, how to stay safe and discussing some of the institutional concerns with providing training or managing property in Second Life. I hope we get time to do a bit of building and scripting too. ..that’s the really fun stuff. With just 10 in the course, I’m planning to tailor it specifically to whatever the participants want, so if you have registered, please feel free to contact me and tell me what you’d like covered.