I’m here at the Access 2005 conference in Edmonton and finally have something to share that may be of interest to the distance folks. There’s a sort of preconference to Access called Hackfest, where a large wishlist is considered and a small number of projects are tackled in an all-day brainstorming / programming session. This afternoon we were presented with the results from the first batch; tomorrow afternoon we’ll hear about the rest. One of the submitted projects is called Online Tutorial Tools. Basically the requestor is looking for easy-to-implement open source tutorial options (something along the lines of TILT) that could be used for large groups of libraries (public, in particular). Unfortunately I missed the beginning of the brief report so I’m not sure what to expect next, but the hackfest team that grabbed this one has a wiki page up describing how far they got on this project – it’s available here. Not a ton to get excited about there yet, but it’s got some nice background, and is a page that should be watched in case they continue to work on this project. There’s a link there to something at Simon Fraser University called MOSST – Modular Online Software for Self-Paced Tutorials – definately worth a looksee!