The Ed Techie

No country for old ideas, this

So, I've been in New Delhi this week as a keynote speaker at the EdgeX conference. It was great to catch up with George, Dave, Stephen and Grainne, and to meet Jay Cross, Clark Quinn and LesFoltos. Viplav Baxi and the team were the most amazing, hospitable hosts, and it's been a real pleasure to be here. I thought I'd share a few of my own perceptions from the visit, although one has to accept they are based on a very limited scope of India, but for what it's worth.

Start-up fever - It feels like a very exciting place to be at the moment. The opening speaker said he felt blessed to be living here to witness change and a form of social democratisation experiment in such a vast scale. And the oft-repeated mantra was that education was key to this. Social entrepreneurship is seen as the means to achieve this. Just about everyone I spoke to had a start-up company. If you hadn't initiated one start-up before breakfast it was a slow day. And while this is undoubtedly driven by the desire to make money, it was also seen as the way to get things done, and the social good element seemed to be a strong driver also.

Scale, scale, scale - It is the numbers in India that make drive a lot of this. We were variously given figures of 150 million to 500 million people who needed to be educated over the next couple of decades. Those kinds of numbers are probably not going to be satisfied by a single solution. And so all manner of educational businesses and inititiatives become viable, because a small slice of that is still a big number.

Beware the undead - there are a lot of US and UK universities hovering around India, trying to sell their model as a solution. With higher education on its knees in the west, this big market attracts the half-dead universities to suck on its new blood. Ok, I'm overplaying it. I think there are undoubtedly mutually beneficial collaborations that are being established, but as George exhorted, "stay Indian". There are aspects of the Indian context that are unique and simply importing a model wholesale won't work.

Beware the bubble - while it did feel like a very exciting time, the reality of India is never far away and it may be that the task is just too great to be sustained. The last time I felt in the midst of such collective fervour was when I was at a tech conference in the US at the start of the web 2.0 explosion. I remember having breakfast and on a table of 8, being the only person without two start-ups on the go. This kind of enthusiasm is liberating, and can produce great things, but it tends to run out of steam, so I would just caution against a potential bubble here. Having said that, if I was a) younger and b) more business minded, I'd be in India now.

I met some great people, and learnt a lot, so I'll be fascinated to see how it develops. At the moment, I'd sum it up by saying it's a place where a youngish man can tell you he has 800 acres of a new city to develop a university of his own design and you don't dismiss him as delusional.

Digital scholarship recognition - the debate

So, I was the invited keynote debater at this year's EdMedia conference in Lisbon. I had ten minutes to put my case in favour of the following motion:

"This house believes that in the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs, and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship"

My (poor quality, one take audio) slidecast is below.

Digital scholarship debate

View another webinar from Martin Weller

My argument was that there are a number of converging pressures which will make recognition inevitable. These were:

1) Impact

2) Efficiency

3) Efficacy

4) Complementarity

5) Institutional benefit

6) Variety

7) Human factors

Antonio Figueiredo put the opposing motion, and Paulo Simoes captured it in everyone's (well AJ Cann's anyway) new favourite tool, ScoopIt. We ended up kind of agreeing that it would happen, but Antonio suggested it would take longer than ten years. He pulled a nice trick here inviting the audience to close their eyes and picture their university ten years ago, 'was it really so different?' he asked. He must have struck a chord with this as the no vote won the day.

Chatting to people afterwards the sentiment seemed to be that they thought it would happen, and indeed, should happen, but they were generally pessimistic about the ability of universities to change to accommodate it. I've got to say I find this kind of depressing if it turns out to be true. I'd have preferred it to be rejected because people felt it abandoned core scholarly principles or something. But to think that despite us all thinking it's a good idea, an entire decade is still not long enough to bring about a modest change in university recognition processes? If true, one wonders how displaced from society unis will look in ten years' time.

Or is that just sour grapes because I lost?

5 things I think about Learning Analytics

<Ed Techs go in search of data in the wild>

I am at the 1st Learning Analytics conference in Banff, which has been interesting. I came not sure of what it was, or what my take on it was. The conference has been good, very interdisciplinary in nature (for which you can read 'I didn't understand some of it'). I'm still not sure about a lot of it, but here are five things that have occurred to me over the course of the past few days. I don't believe they're strong enough to say I've learnt them, but rather they are things I now have come to a tentative viewpoing on.

1) Analytics for learners is distinct from analytics of learners. Erik Duval gave a good talk which listed some approaches to empowering learners by providing data and visualisations to them. I think this is potentially very powerful, both in formal and informal settings. Showing learners where they are in respect to others, or giving them recommendations in terms of resources or people, or providing an overview of their activity that helps identify aspects they need to work on, etc. All of these seem like useful things to do. What I am less sure about is the analysis of learners in institutional systems because it will allow them to make efficiency savings.

2) There is a range of intentionality and effort. Tony was talking about the types of things you can build by simply taking one piece of data and then plugging this into various tools. The example that stuck for me was the way by simply picking up on a hashtag he could create a representation of a community, construct a blog roll, mine delicious links for of the people in that community to find resources, etc. So from one simple action we can at least infer a good representation of a community. And to join it all the individual needs to do is tweet with that hashtag. This is distinct from the development of very specific tools, such as a virtual machine that sits on a student's machine and they do their course work within it, or a tool like Cohere. Here the proposition is that we will give you a tool which is useful, and from it we will be able to gain richer data. But the effort required is much greater. I'm not suggesting one approach is better than another, merely pointing out that they are quite distinct. I think our instinct is to usually go for the latter for rich data but the former gets at a wider network.

3) Analytics may reveal some uncomfortable truths. A couple of presentations suggested that when you look at the data then you see that students either don't spend very long in your carefully created content and hop off to Google to find their own, or that doing some activities had no impact on exam performance. This prompted David Wiley to ask 'why do we do them then?', and I suspect analytics may reveal many such uncomfortable moments for course designers, in a way that end of course surveys don't currently. You know that resource you spent lots of money on and thought was great? Students spend 15 seconds on it. That big activity we devised? Has no impact on performance. The real question then becomes, what do you do with this knowledge? It may be that you still wish to persist with some elements because we believe in them pedagogically, or because they develop certain skills. But it may also mean that we find the way we think students study our courses and the way they actually do are quite separate.

4) A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing. Related to the previous point, I also worry that interpreting this data into appropriate action will be a difficult task. And at some point the data may fall into the hands of a senior manager or accountant who will look at it and make a simplistic conclusion. One can imagine decisions such as halving the course staff only drops five percent points in average, or reducing course content by one third results in only 10 more students dropping out, so let's implement the cuts. But there is a bigger picture beyond the pure data, and so viewing it in a holistic and contextual manner is essential.

5) We shouldn't put off ethics issues. There are obviously some rather Orwellian overtones to learning analytics. I don't think this need be the case, but there is a strong commercial interest in this and there is also an element of 'let's record everything because we can'. But I think there are also powerful benefits for the learners too, and whenever we are online we are casting off data anyway. For the academics and researchers we should at least draw up a set of principles from the start that we adhere to. If others want to use data for nefarious means, that's up to them, but here are the things we believe in. For example this could include the premise that analytics is performed with the benefit of learners as a priority, that we are always transparent, that the learner owns their data, etc (Erik pointed to the 4 principles of the now defunct Attention Trust which are a good starting point).

So that's the thoughts I have for now. I also learnt that Banff is a) beautiful and b) flipping cold.

Learning Analytics 2011 is the place to be

(This man wants your data)

I'm pleased to say I've managed to get some funding to attend the first conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2011), organised by George Siemens and the good folk at Athabasca. It's in Banff, Canada, Feb 27th to March 1st. Look at some of the people on the steering committee:

• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• David Wiley, Brigham Young University, US
• Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
• Tony Hirst, Open University, UK
• Grainne Conole, Open University, UK
• Dragan Gasevic, CSIS, Athabasca University, Canada
• Simon Buckingham Shum, Knowledge Media Institute, UK
• Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of British Columbia, Canada

I think this first conference will be quite small, but like the Sex Pistols gig at the 100 Club, in years to come more people will have claimed to have been here than it can physically accommodate. I think the interesting thing about Learning Analytics is it's one of those areas we think will be important, but we're not quite sure what it is yet, so there's room to explore. I'm not presenting at the conference, because I don't think I know enough about it, so hoping to learn more. The call for papers is closed, but if like me, you just want to find out what's going on, registration for attendance is still open.

While I'm broadcasting stuff, there are still fellowships available at the OU under the OLNET scheme for research relating to OERs, closing date is 14th Feb, if you feel this is your bag.

PS - it's bermuda shorts weather in Banff in March, right?

 

Let's play OER Roulette!

(The academic version of sending your child up a chimney)

This is the last in my trilogy of Open Ed 2010 posts.

For my presentation at Open Ed 2010 I wanted to do something a bit different. I had the last slot on a long second day (ie ‘the graveyard shift’) and I was speaking after David Wiley (who gave an excellent presentation as always), so the odds were stacked against me. In addition my daughter accompanied me so I wanted to include her in some way.

I remember seeing Elvis Costello in concert once and he had a large wheel at the front with a number of songs listed on it, which they would spin to select the next number to play. I wanted to recreate this, but transporting a big wheel was unrealistic, so I got my daughter to get members of the audience to select cards. My talk had the hypothesis that by considering OERs as big and little, it provided a lens on a number of issues around OERs, including:

• Sustainability
• Working methods
• Production time
• Context
• Academic status
• The role of content
• The nature of projects
• Sites vs Portals
• Aggregation vs Adaptation
• Implict messages

This gave the presentation a non-linear structure and because I had more subjects than could be covered in the allotted time, a degree of uncertainty. It also means I can give the same presentation again and it will at least be slightly different.

The presentation is below, which I haven't had time to turn into a slidecast and is now linear, so it loses some of the interactivity. I quite liked using this approach and given my previous post on not doing presentations, it at least allowed me to play with the format to a degree, but I would have preferred it to be more participatory.

OER Roulette

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

Am I done with conferencing?

This is no reflection on Open Ed, I’ve been moving away from conferences for a while. I enjoyed giving my presentation at Open Ed, and I managed to make it interactive to an extent. But I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m done with the traditional conference format. I had a couple of discussions with Brian and Scott around this and talked about how difficult it was to break away from the traditional format. The reason comes down to money essentially, although it’s tied up with a host of other issues.

There is a circular logic in organising a conference that is difficult to escape, let’s call it the Conference Conservatism Circle, which goes something like this: In order to make a conference viable you need people to attend and pay fees. To attend most people need to get funds from their university or a research project. To justify this they need to give a presentation. A presentation needs to be peer-reviewed so they can include it on their CV. People only attend conferences that offer this. You are organising a conference and need to make it viable…

 

Cycle

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

This is another example of where academic practice is continuing despite the alternatives now available. Before we had a digital, open, network then getting people together so they could present to each other was a reasonably pragmatic solution to knowledge sharing. We have largely continued with this practice despite it no longer being the best use of the time.

I’m not arguing for all online conferences here, I think getting together with people is valuable. Indeed it’s precisely because I think it’s valuable that I think we should stop wasting it giving presentations.

The barcamp and unconference models have experimented with this, but this more fluid, practical or discussion based approach has not been widely taken up in academic circles, largely because of the economics I outlined above (and a rather innate sense of conservatism amongst academics). Here are some questions I’ve been asking of myself:

• If peer-review is still important then how about a more open model, where your proposal for a suggestion is voted on by all delegates prior to the conference?
• Why don’t we use the net for the information dissemination function (eg make our presentations live beforehand, as video or slidecasts) and then use the face to face segment for discussion?
• Can we have more practical sessions that aim to develop something? This could be a site, a learning resource, some code, a set of guidelines, etc. But actually have functioning outputs from conferences, instead of just suntans and hangovers.
• Some people are worth seeing as presenters, so is there a proportion of the conference (but a minority) that is given over to these?
• Would more open presentation formats work, eg having to speak on a random subject for two minutes?
• If conferences are really about forming networks can we facilitate people forming groups (based on prior discussions and interests) around developing research projects?

All of these seem to me good uses of the conference time and having people co-located, yet all would struggle to get acceptance and funding as proper academic activity. We do have, for instance, research proposal sessions, or writing workshops, but these are both rare and distinct from the normal conference activity. I know some conferences have been experimental in their use of the format, but the majority of conferences across disciplines are still quite traditional and are locked into the Conference Conservatism Cycle.

So my modest proposal is one of direct action. As with my stance on only reviewing for open access journals, if we all insisted on moving away from the traditional presentation format, would conference organisers, and more importantly, funders shift practice also?

I know I’ll probably renege on this, but I’ll try it out: If you want me to come to your conference, then I will only do so if I can try something akin to the formats above, and not a standard presentation.

 

The strange case of the unconnected conference

(An unexpected appearance by the Two Ronnies went some way to alleviate frustration about the lack of wifi at OpenEd 2010 - Richard Hall and Joss Winn in full flow).

I was at the Open Ed 2010 conference last week. First off, I want to say that it was great to finally meet Brian Lamb and I really enjoyed presentations from Richard Hall, David Wiley, Erik Duval, Joss Winn and others. So this post is not a comment on the quality of the conference or the discussions I had there.

The conference was held in the science museum CosmoCaixa. This is a great museum and my daughter loved it. It is, sadly, not a great conference venue. Although they had wifi in every room which you could connect to, the bandwidth coming into the museum was so low that in reality no-one could get online (I had visions of a 14K modem in an office somewhere which then got fed into all these lecture halls with great AV facilities and their own routers).

This made me reflect on how connectivity, and the amplified conference has become the norm for me. Being unable to connect had a serious impact on the nature of the conference I think, in the following ways:

1. Loss of archive -  It couldn’t be streamed, or tweeted, or live-blogged, so the more holistic, distributed record of a conference that has become the norm was lost.
2. No backchannel – within the conference itself not being able to chat with other participants and share thoughts meant some of the immediate conversation around a presentation was lost.
3. Stunted presentations – many presenters wanted to at least demonstrate a site. I foolishly wanted to play some YouTube vids (although thankfully an Ethernet connection had been found for presenters by the time I came to present which gave some limited access). Being unable to do so made it seem like we had been sucked into a conference in 1995.
4. No wider participation – at least with those present you could have conversations over coffee, but I am also accustomed to have dialogue with those in my network who aren’t present. There were many time I would have tweeted during a talk and I know I would have had a response from someone in my network who wasn’t present.
5. No amplification – if one of the measures of success for a conference is its impact in its field then to lose connectivity for its duration results in it effectively being isolated. Not to be able to amplify the content and discussion at a conference to a global network severely restricts its significance.

Before someone jumps in and says ‘perhaps you should try talking to the person next to you’, yes I did plenty of that. I’m capable of doing both. And I think there is increasing value in hosting ‘disconnect’ events, where you deliberately don’t have access, such as writing retreats. But these types of events are geared up for this and it’s what you sign up for. What the experience here brought home to me is that amplification is not an interesting extra or a techie nice-to-have – it’s essential.

 

OU conference - evaluation

Following on from the previous two posts looking at the OU conference, this final one in the trilogy looks at some evaluation. I am particularly indebted to Karen Cropper, Rebecca Ferguson and Juliette Culver for doing much of the analysis for this post.

Evaluation took four main forms:

1. A questionnaire of attendees in surveymonkey
2. Statistics from cloudworks
3. Analysis of twitter users adopting the #OUConf10 hashtag
4. Analysis of the elluminate sessions

Questionnaire

There were 102 responses to the questionnaire. Below are some charts representing salient issues:

 

Most attendees were central staff, but there was a significant audience that had no connection to the OU, and a mix across other categories.

 

Attendance was split evenly across most sessions.

 

Most people would not have attended had it been face to face.

 

People usually combined it with an element of work.

 

The content, technology and organisation were all rated good to excellent, with discussion a bit below these.

 

In general participants thought that the conference allowed a community to form, and thought that the open nature of the conference worked well. Opinion was divided as to whether interaction was less than with a face to face conference.

 

There was strong agreement that they would attend another online conference.

We asked attendees to give us three words to describe the conference and the resultant word cloud is below:

 

Some issues raised by participants included:

• Separating out time to attend an online conference
• Perception an online conference is ‘techie’
• Possibly having shorter events but spread out over more time
• Allowing more open sessions and not just presentation

Some representative quotes from respondees are:

• "liked the accessibility factor - it saved a lot of money having to travel to Milton Keynes”
• "The moderators were excellent; very engaging, kept things going well, did a sterling job. The discussions in the text box during sessions was very good indeed. Generally the speakers and the topics covered were of great interest and engaging.”
• “This was an exceptional way to involve people outside the University and particuarly useful for CPD for those who can't afford to travel or whose institutions won't pay for them to go to conferences. A real credit to the OU's open learning ethos.”
• “thanks for the opportunity to take part. Not being part of the OU myself I welcomed the 'open invitation' and got loads out of it. Am already spreading the word!"
• “Most conferences should be presented like this in future. As well as Elluminate the various social network backchannels can be used for even more interaction”
• “Just wanted to thank all concerned for their hard work and the effort they put in to make this such a rewarding experience. I've developed some very important new contacts from the conference. I interacted much more than I would at a face-to-face conference.”
• “Excellent - from this distance I made better contact than I ever have at a conference before.”
• “It worked! - That's quite exciting! - To know that you can participate without too much stress is a big achievement for me - it takes some of the "fear factor" away”

Cloudworks Statistics

The following data was taken from the cloudworks site and are for the conference ‘cloudscape’ which is comprised of different elements, or ‘clouds’.

• No. clouds - 46
• No. comments - 168
• No. embeds - 59
• No. link - 80
• No. views of cloudscape - 2352
• No. registered users viewing - 392
• No. guests - 2852

Twitter analysis

The conference used the #OUConf10 hashtag, so anyone tweeting with this would have their tweet stored in an archive (using TwapperKeeper).

• No. twitterers using hashtag - 141
• No. tweets using hashtag - 766
• Av. no tweets per user - 5.43
• No. followers added over conference - 150

Elluminate analysis

The following data was gathered from analysing the elluminate sessions over the two days. Overall 287 people participated in at least one session.

The number of people who participated in each session are given below.

• Session 1 - 202
• Session 2 - 141
• Session 3 - 108
• Session 4 - 97

Conclusion

Overall the technology worked well, and most participants found the conference a useful and interesting experience. The number of participants was in line (if not a bit higher) than previous year's face to face conference, but the costs were considerably lower. In terms of benefit from the conference most participants gained as much, if not more, from this form.

A few small points it would be interesting to explore:

• I would like to perform more detailed analysis of the discussions in cloudworks, elluminate and twitter, but haven't had time yet.
• Some people commented that they felt more at liberty to ask questions in text chat than they do in a face to face conference.
• The cost and green comparison with previous face to face versions of the conference.

OU conference - areas for improvement

In my last post I set out how we organised the conference, in this one I'll suggest (with input from Karen) some things we might do differently next time.

• Ensure that speakers have good mic and earphones and have practiced in Elluminate beforehand. Unless they are experienced with presenting online, it is probably a good idea to insist on practice session.
• If speakers are based in the same location then it might be better for them to be in the same or nearby room.  The same applies for any standby speaker ready to step in if there are problems with the advertised speaker.
• If speakers are in other locations, we need to have a way to contact them outside of the platform in use, if they have not got their sound on or are having problems connecting.
• We need an agreed signal to bring to a close - the online equivalent of the 5 minute warning or card held up at conferences. (This could be achieved by placing a countdown over the top of their slides)
• It is worth including regular breaks in the programme for informal chat and a chance for ‘comfort breaks’. This should be good practice anyway in relation to looking at the screen for long periods and also the issue around comfort when wearing headphones for prolonged periods.
• Run more open, discussion based sessions, not just purely presentation based ones. As it was experimental this year, we were trying a number of different things so experimenting with the format seemed like a tweak too far, but we could do more than straightforward presentations.
• Make better use of the ‘Your contributions’ strand and provide support for this, such as video and technical teams who will help projects produce a video in the run-up to the conference. The conference becomes a means to generate content and create engagement around new technologies.
• Have a specified technical support team with clearly defined roles. As this was an experiment this year, much of the knowledge resided with the two central organisers, but as it becomes accepted practice, readily defined roles can be allocated.
• Have back up equipment ready, with several laptops.
• If bandwidth and technology allow include video and/or pictures of the presenters (and audience) as it makes the experience feel more personal.
• Presenting virtually requires slides to be more engaging than with a live audience and for the speaker to encourage interaction. We will produce a set of guidelines for virtual presentations to aid presenters. Also insist on receiving slides beforehand as uploading was not always straightforward.
• Run some hybrid sessions - for example have a number of rooms on campus where the conference is presented on a screen, with refreshments available so people can drop in. This would give some of the physical presence a traditional conference benefits from and may overcome some of the issues in people allocating time to it.

I'd welcome any other suggestions for either practical changes or more radical approaches.

How to organise an online conference

 

Or rather, how we (which is Karen Cropper and I) organised the OU online conference this year. You might like to take this as a template to use if you're thinking of running a similar event, although obviously you may want to vary the technologies, structure, etc. 

This is the first in a series of posts on the conference which will cover organisation, suggestions for improvement and evaluation.

Technology

We used two main technologies: Cloudworks and Elluminate

The Cloudworks site acted as the main web site and the asynchronous discussion forum. We set it up as an ‘event’, which adds in a button ‘Mark as attending’, so we had a means of recording who intended to come to the conference (although as Cloudworks is separate from Elluminate, we don’t know if they actually did). You can also send emails to all those who have marked as attending, which was useful (see Communications below).

Within cloudworks we created the conference as a ‘cloudscape’, which essentially is an aggregation of separate elements, known as clouds. We created a number of clouds, including ones for Programme, one for each of the sessions (see Structure below), Your Contributions and Post-conference feedback.

Cloudworks allows you to embed content from other sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, etc. We added in the talks that people gave us, contributions, and interviews.

Elluminate: Although the OU has an Elluminate licence, we cannot use this for open events (because access is via the VLE requiring and OU account). Elluminate hosted it for us, setting up a different Elluminate url for each session. In the Elluminate session we recorded the event, and were then given a URL to use for playback, so people could access it after the event had finished.

Other technologies: These included Twitter (we used the hashtag #OUConf10 to track conversations), twapperkeeper which archives tweets (for the hashtag), SurveyMonkey for the post-conference questionnaire, blogs for promotion, YouTube, Slideshare, Animoto & Xtranormal (all for creating content).

Structure

The theme of the conference was ‘Learning in an open world’.

There were four live (Elluminate) conference sessions spread over two days. Each session had the same structure of three OU speakers talking for around 20 minutes each, a 40 minute discussion session, and then an external speaker (you can see the actual programme here: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/2994

The OU speakers were invited to talk as they were projects that fitted the overall theme of openness in education (eg iTunes U, SocialLearn, etc). So papers were not invited in the traditional conference manner. Instead we asked people to create multimedia contributions, such as YouTube videos and embed them in the Cloudworks space.

External speakers were invited through personal contacts, and gave their presentations from their own locations. Only one speaker was given a fee, the other talked for no cost.

Each session had 3-5 nominated ‘moderators’. These were usually ALs with experience of Elluminate. The moderators handled questions, picking up questions from the text chat window, or asking people if they wanted to ask a question over audio.

We set up some breakout rooms within Elluminate for the discussion session, but moving to these was problematic and so were only used for the first session.

There was pre and post conference activity in Cloudworks, with interviews filmed with the Vice Chancellor and others on the themes of the conference (see http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/3959) and a ‘multi-media poster’ session around the Your Contributions theme on the Friday after the conference (see http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2012

Communications

News of the conference was posted on the OU intranet site announcing the date of the conference and inviting contributions, then four follow ups with reminders and additional news. It was also listed as an 'event' in the OU calendar.

It was also announced on the TutorHome site in May and June and I did an audio interview which was published on the OU student environment, Platform

In addition, an email announcement was sent to all Deans and Directors, to the elearning community mailing list and two announcements made on the monthly elearning email news digest. Emails were also sent to contacts in the faculties who could promote the event and to faculty/unit contacts. The event was also advertised on the OU screensaver and IET internet and intranet pages and Knowledge Network.

Prior to the conference four separate blog posts were also put out here, announcing the conference, asking for contributions, announcing the agenda, and a final reminder on the eve of the conference. This was in addition to numerous messages about the conference on Twitter both prior and during the conference, using the hashtag #OUConf10. After the conference further posts were written evaluating and reflecting on the conference itself.

Within Cloudworks there is the function to email all those who have marked as attending an event. This was used to send five separate emails to attendees: detailing the agenda; asking for contributions; a reminder of the conference with practical advice on getting the most from it; a message on the morning of each day, giving the agenda and URLs again. After the conference an email was sent asking attendees to fill out the Surveymonkey questionnaire.

Planning

Two Stakeholder meetings were conducted featuring those who had an interest in the conference including some faculty representatives, communications, IT support, student services and related projects.

An open practice session in Elluminate was held the week prior to the conference, so that all speakers and moderators could check their settings, upload their presentations and discuss the practicalities of running the sessions. While all moderators joined in, only a few speakers ‘attended’.

The conference was mainly organised by one academic and one project manager (with some administrative support), with initial meetings starting in January, action review meetings every 2-3 week, and the final conference on 22-23 June 2010.

On the day the organisers set up a ‘Conference HQ’ so they were both physically located in the same room, and thus one could resolve any issues ‘in the background’ while the other continued in the virtual space.

Issues

• There were some access issues around Elluminate, particularly on campus where the proxy settings on some machines meant it wouldn’t load. The resolution was simple enough, but may have put some people off from accessing (see http://olnet.org/sites/default/files/EllumFix.pdf)
• Some speakers had poor microphone quality, which soon detracts from a purely online presentation.
• Some attendees commented that they found it difficult to isolate time and space when at work, as people assumed if they were in, they were interruptible.
• Communication could have been better and more joined up in various committees.

If you do organise an online event and use any of this (even as a model of how not to do it), then do let me know. You might like to look at the next post too, which suggests things we'd do differently next time.