Great post today from OCWC board member Phillip Schmidt on the iSummit event he attended — what went well, what might have gone better. As a communications guy getting ready for our own conference in September, this graf, on how best to share the conference with the larger community, was particularly thought-provoking to me:
The natural response to this would be: “place more emphasis on documentation and share audio/video/text online”. However, having facilitated the documentation efforts at the iSummit 2007 I know how hard it is to collect all the images and notes from participants, and how much (tedious) editing is required to bring it together into a useful resource. Yet, I am not sure how many people actually go back to the notes beyond trying to find email addresses of people they met, or links to projects that were mentioned. In 2007, Mark and I knew we were going to write an article about the event, so having very detailed notes was more important than this year.
So I would suggest, that rather than trying to document everything that is going on during the event, we create a rich list of contact details, URLs, and links to everything that comes up during the discussions. Every time someone mentions a project, it needs to be added to a list of resources on the wiki. That’s relatively easy to do, even if we ad short annotations which makes the list so much more useful, and this could easily live on after the event.
Like most people reading this, I’ve seen sharing efforts at these sorts of things done well and done poorly — and found that there’s not necessarily one right way. It depends on who your conference audience is. I’ve been to academic conferences where almost everything put online was done centrally (and what was put online was not much). On the other hand, I’ve presented at a digital democracy events where people liveblogged your presentation as you spoke.
My sense is our community falls between those two extremes, and in the next couple of weeks we’ll be figuring out how best to assist in documenting the event in a way appropriate to our resources and audience. But we’d love your help. What sort of things have you seen that have really worked — and have not added that much overhead? What have you seen that has failed?
And the big question: what sort of approach to documentation would you like to see us employ in Logan?
[and remember this question is as much directed to those who will not be in Logan as those who will, Consortium members and non-members alike -- share your thoughts!]
Tags: ocwc, ocwc_logan08, opencourseware
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One thing, incidentally, that Phillip mentions in his post is the importance of getting subjective views of the conference (via blogging, etc) out to the world. It’s often easier for non-participants to jump into a more subjective reaction to a presentation than to respond to the presentation itself — presentations can intially seem too polished and handle-less, too unexpecting of a response. I’d love to create a culture where some participants take a little time to react to what they have seen on their own personal blogs….
One thing, incidentally, that Phillip mentions in his post is the importance of getting subjective views of the conference (via blogging, etc) out to the world. It’s often easier for non-participants to jump into a more subjective reaction to a presentation than to respond to the presentation itself — presentations can intially seem too polished and handle-less, too unexpecting of a response. I’d love to create a culture where some participants take a little time to react to what they have seen on their own personal blogs….
Mike,
Well, well, well, blogging the new digs, I like it. This is a great question and I have had a couple of experiences to take part in sharing resources at a conference. The OpenEd folks did an excellent job last year in Logan of sharing the presentations, give people a back channel, and presenting a readable, helpful, and link rich program online. Which people couple annotate and add to. The used an application called 51 weeks, and you can see it here.
Also, Northern Voice does a nice job of creating useful portal site of info about the conference well ahead of time, and presenting info, and collecting feeds of people who are attending and aggregating them through the site. pretty effective, then they share a ton of images via flickr, and have the MooseCamp pre-events in a PBWiki.
Here at Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy used a WordPress/MediaWiki hybrid to share out what is happening and aggregate people who were blogging the conference. As well as track twitter, UStream, etc.
http://facultyacademy.org/blog
http://facultyacademy.org/blog07
http://facultyacademy.org/blog08
Not sure if this is helpful, but I’d figure I’d drop em by anyway
Mike,
Well, well, well, blogging the new digs, I like it. This is a great question and I have had a couple of experiences to take part in sharing resources at a conference. The OpenEd folks did an excellent job last year in Logan of sharing the presentations, give people a back channel, and presenting a readable, helpful, and link rich program online. Which people couple annotate and add to. The used an application called 51 weeks, and you can see it here.
Also, Northern Voice does a nice job of creating useful portal site of info about the conference well ahead of time, and presenting info, and collecting feeds of people who are attending and aggregating them through the site. pretty effective, then they share a ton of images via flickr, and have the MooseCamp pre-events in a PBWiki.
Here at Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy used a WordPress/MediaWiki hybrid to share out what is happening and aggregate people who were blogging the conference. As well as track twitter, UStream, etc.
http://facultyacademy.org/blog
http://facultyacademy.org/blog07
http://facultyacademy.org/blog08
Not sure if this is helpful, but I’d figure I’d drop em by anyway
Perhaps creating a planet, that people can add their feeds to as they wish, which is prominently displayed on the COSL website, there will be more incentive for people to blog etc. I always hated when I go to the website of a conference that is running, and there is nothing, until perhaps weeks later when someone posts a summary, etc.
Not sure if it’s possible to do a planet based on a keyword, but if it is possible, that could also happen. “Tag all your posts COSL2008″ or whatever, and the posts will also show up on the planet + in the sidebar of the frontpage, etc.
Recordings are great, both video and audio (choice).
Perhaps creating a planet, that people can add their feeds to as they wish, which is prominently displayed on the COSL website, there will be more incentive for people to blog etc. I always hated when I go to the website of a conference that is running, and there is nothing, until perhaps weeks later when someone posts a summary, etc.
Not sure if it’s possible to do a planet based on a keyword, but if it is possible, that could also happen. “Tag all your posts COSL2008″ or whatever, and the posts will also show up on the planet + in the sidebar of the frontpage, etc.
Recordings are great, both video and audio (choice).
Some great examples and ideas here. I should specify we’re looking mostly at solutions for the OCWC portion of the conference — though of course we’re talking to COSL and others about what they’re doing.
First, Stian — I like the idea that we should get a tag defined, and aggregate somewhere. Our ubertech Clay actually has a pretty sweet Wordpress based agg plugin, and there are some free thrid party options as well. I’ll look into it.
Jim — I love the Northern Voice site — beautiful. And we’ll also be coordinating with the Logan folks to see what they have on tap, good to know your experience with the Open Ed conference was good last year.
On UStream, I was one of your rapt watchers during the faculty academy. And I love how UStream makes it feel like a real *event*. But I gather upstream speed in these conference rooms is extremely limited, I’ll have to check if we can reliably stream up.
On the audio — my understanding is that there will be audio, but the turnaround time on it will be considerably slower than last year — measured in weeks, not days. If people want to find some grassroots ways to get snippets of the conference up before that, that would be great.
Some great examples and ideas here. I should specify we’re looking mostly at solutions for the OCWC portion of the conference — though of course we’re talking to COSL and others about what they’re doing.
First, Stian — I like the idea that we should get a tag defined, and aggregate somewhere. Our ubertech Clay actually has a pretty sweet Wordpress based agg plugin, and there are some free thrid party options as well. I’ll look into it.
Jim — I love the Northern Voice site — beautiful. And we’ll also be coordinating with the Logan folks to see what they have on tap, good to know your experience with the Open Ed conference was good last year.
On UStream, I was one of your rapt watchers during the faculty academy. And I love how UStream makes it feel like a real *event*. But I gather upstream speed in these conference rooms is extremely limited, I’ll have to check if we can reliably stream up.
On the audio — my understanding is that there will be audio, but the turnaround time on it will be considerably slower than last year — measured in weeks, not days. If people want to find some grassroots ways to get snippets of the conference up before that, that would be great.
Mike, I will leave it up to you to decide what format will be the best in sharing text/audio/video. What I can do is try one more time with making videofiles of the conference. I tried this last year at Logan, but it was an impromptu decision, and there were many limitations such as
1. the internet connection fazed out once every 15 minutes
2. i did not have ppt files of presenters(the software I used is similar to Adobe Connect, and I could upload ppt files to view with the video) to optimize the whole thing
3. i did not have the proper microphone to pick up the sound from my laptop
4. the software i was using only worked on Windows
Since I have experienced it once and know what the limitations were, I can prepare for it this time and try one more time. If things go OK, I can covert it to Flash file and upload on YouTube(with consent of the presenters). If it doesn’t work, maybe it will work next time. Will keep trying til it works. haha…
I know that someone always takes notes of each session, but they don’t get shared that well, which is a shame. Can the Conference Committee designate people to take notes and make sure things get posted?
Mike, I will leave it up to you to decide what format will be the best in sharing text/audio/video. What I can do is try one more time with making videofiles of the conference. I tried this last year at Logan, but it was an impromptu decision, and there were many limitations such as
1. the internet connection fazed out once every 15 minutes
2. i did not have ppt files of presenters(the software I used is similar to Adobe Connect, and I could upload ppt files to view with the video) to optimize the whole thing
3. i did not have the proper microphone to pick up the sound from my laptop
4. the software i was using only worked on Windows
Since I have experienced it once and know what the limitations were, I can prepare for it this time and try one more time. If things go OK, I can covert it to Flash file and upload on YouTube(with consent of the presenters). If it doesn’t work, maybe it will work next time. Will keep trying til it works. haha…
I know that someone always takes notes of each session, but they don’t get shared that well, which is a shame. Can the Conference Committee designate people to take notes and make sure things get posted?
@Meena:
I would love you to try again. I’m sorry that the infrastructure wasn’t in place last time to make this smooth for you.
I’m also going to bring my equipment (flipcam, etc) and see what I can do. Like you say we’ll just keep trying.
As far as notetaking, we now have the wiki up now, and we’ll remind presenters that we want to capture those session in some form on the wiki.
Looking forward to meeting you there — you seem like a fellow guerilla media soul!
@Meena:
I would love you to try again. I’m sorry that the infrastructure wasn’t in place last time to make this smooth for you.
I’m also going to bring my equipment (flipcam, etc) and see what I can do. Like you say we’ll just keep trying.
As far as notetaking, we now have the wiki up now, and we’ll remind presenters that we want to capture those session in some form on the wiki.
Looking forward to meeting you there — you seem like a fellow guerilla media soul!
Oh and links to the wiki pages for OCWC are here. You are welcome to add your comments to it, even before the conference.
Oh and links to the wiki pages for OCWC are here. You are welcome to add your comments to it, even before the conference.