The Ed Techie

Online conferences & the legitimacy deficit

(Wordle of OU Conference - we asked participants to give us 3 words describing it) 

In the second post following up on the OU online conference, I want to explore some issues around perceptions of online conferences. The feedback from the conference thus far has been almost entirely positive (I'll blog the questionnaire results later), but I have also picked up a couple of issues which I think are worth pulling out.

It strikes me that in some ways online conferences are in a similar position to distance learning 40 years ago, or elearning 10 years ago. They have a legitimacy deficit to some, and thus have to work extra hard to overcome it. When something is new there is an understandable tendency to take that instance as representative of the whole, in a way one never does with accepted norms. Thus if you have never met someone from a particular country people will often take the first person they meet to be representative of that nation. And yet they wouldn't expect any random person off the street to be representative of their own country. So when you are pioneering in something you have this representative burden, which I think we just have to accept, but it underlies some of the points below.

Online conferencing doesn't separate from daily tasks sufficiently - this is also one of its strengths of course, in that you can attend, when if you had to give up two or three days you may not. But a few people commented that either they weren't allowed to prioritise virtual attendance over other work, or that if they were in the office, then people assume they are interruptible. If you attend a face to face conference the physical separation immediately performs this function. I did think this was just one of those things we'll get better at, and learn ways of coping, but maybe not - the physical will always trump the virtual for attention.

Online doesn't command as much attention - on a related note, although attendance was about the same as the physical event held the previous year, I might have expected it to be higher. When you have a physical conference on campus you can't help but notice it is going on - there are signs, catering, people looking lost. A virtual conference, despite all the communications you might deploy, loses some of these cues.

Commitment to online is lower - when you are travelling to a physical conference you need to make some preparations: accommodation, transport, child care cover, etc. The beauty of an online conference is that you don't need to do all this (and thus people attend who couldn't normally). But it also means it doesn't foreground in your attention until the day. We had some people with connection problems, which was easily fixed, but because it happened on the day it was too late and they gave up. We had sent out instructions about checking the connection prior to the conference, which might be seen as the equivalent of booking your accommodation, but it doesn't register in the same way as making physical arrangements.

The camelot comparison - when being compared against an existing practice, there is a tendency sometimes to accentuate the positive elements of the entrenched practice. Not every face to face conference is a success. Not every speaker is engaging. Not every location wonderful. But the new version is often compared against the idealised version of this.

Unrealistic burdens - with new formats unrealistic demands are sometimes placed upon them which are never asked of the existing practice. An online conference doesn't need to be for everyone. Not every physical conference is meant to appeal to everyone. The whole conference format doesn't appeal to many people, but we don't hear from them, because they don't go to conferences. Some people will have a very strong preference for face to face only, which is fine. This is one way of doing conferences, it isn't trying to be the only way.

But to summarise, online conferences are different things to face to face conferences. They have different advantages, disadvantages, modes of operation, and interactions. Just as with elearning it is a mistake to only compare them with the existing practice, because it's what they do differently that's intriguing.

Some thoughts on open conference contributions

Over the next few posts I'll be commenting on aspects of the Open University conference which I've just finished running. You can view the playback of all sessions from here.

 I'll cover reflections on the conference and what we did in separate posts. In this one I wanted to look at some of the contributions we got from people in Cloudworks. We had a fixed agenda of speakers (I thought multiple strands would be too confusing in Elluminate), but asked for multi-media contributions from anyone, highlighting their project. You can see all the contributions here. 

To be honest I don't think we used these as well as we could have in the main sessions, and I'd need to think about how we get better engagement around them for any future conferences, because many of them are excellent. But what I wanted to do in this post was pull in a few of them and what thoughts they had given rise to. What is key in this is that the format really helps. It's almost like, erm, the medium is the message.

First up is something very simple, but it made me reflect on how important personal contact is. Heather Richardson, a tutor on the creative writing course, created a short hello video for her students and showed them around some of the course materials.

During the conference a number of people said how good it was when the speaker put up a photo of themselves, just so they could make that human connection. I think Heather's video is a good example of this. It is also important that it isn't a course team video, but that it comes from the tutor as this is the student's point of contact. I think it's also significant in that it isn't high quality video production - the implicit message in this video is that I'm one of you, and also, you could do this too. I'd like to see more tutors doing this sort of thing.

The second video is from Janet Haresnape which sets out an activity for demonstrating genetic drift in evolution. The audio quality isn't great, but I think it's a really good experiment. With a day's recording effort and input from one AV professional I reckon we'd have a useful learning resource that many others could use. And there must be many more examples like this around. What we need is for people like Janet to have a go at creating something and then the OU can pick some to add a bit more gloss to and you'd have more 'learning objects' than we ever got from learning object approaches.

In the next clip Jennefer Hart asks 'What is  design atelier?'. This is part of a research project, and what I like about this short movie is that it isn't telling you about the project but rather prompting you to think about it. One could imagine taking this to the next step and asking people to respond with a YouTube clip and then you'd have a nice playlist, which becomes a meaningful resource.

Creating adverts or promotional videos for courses is something we'll see more of (both Tony Hirst and Alec Couros have started doing really good ones). This one from Giselle Ferreira is exactly the sort of thing I have in mind.

And lastly, mainly to wind up AJ Cann, here is an excellent video about the Second Life activity for postgrad students:

Now I could have got all this from traditional papers, but I think asking for multimedia content had two key benefits for me: firstly it encouraged some people to produce content when they hadn't before; secondly seeing the content made me think about how the OU can use and generate digital artefacts in different ways.

I've only picked out a few contributions here to make some more general points, they're all worth looking at.

OU conference agenda - officially awesome

As you may know I am organising the annual OU conference this year: Learning in an Open World. It is online only (in Elluminate and Cloudworks), and open to all to attend (not just OU people).

It is based around four sessions over the 22nd-23rd June and the theme is exploring Openness in Education. Each session has three OU speakers talking about a specific project. There is then a moderated discussion session where people can go into one of three (or so) Elluminate rooms to discuss issues from the talks. Then everyone 'reconvenes' for an external speaker.

I've just released the agenda, which may be subject to some change, but at the moment looks like that below. I think it's a good line-up exhibiting work the OU is doing in relation to the theme of openness, and a great group of external speakers.

If you fancy being part then register in Cloudworks and mark as attending on the Cloudworks page. At the moment the Elluminate sessions are set to a limit of 300 users (managing discussion becomes difficult beyond this), but if we look like getting more we can investigate alternatives, so it's useful for us to know who is planning to attend. We will record the sessions also, so you can play them back later, if you can't make it.

June 22nd Morning - Open Content

• 9.30 - 10.00 Welcome to conference - Martin Weller
• 10.00 - 11.00 OU Presentations:
  Cloudworks (Grainne Conole)
  iTunes U (Peter Scott)
  SCORE (Chris Pegler)
• 11.00 -11.40 Moderated discussion - in separate 'rooms' in elluminate
• 11.40 - 12.30 - external speaker: Prof. Frank Rennie (UHI)

June 22nd Afternoon - Open Learning

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU presentations:
  SocialLearn (Simon Buckingham Shum)
  OpenLearn (Laura Dewis)
  OLNet (Patrick McAndrew)
• 2.30 - 3.15  Moderated discussion
• 3.15 - 4.30 External speaker - George Siemens (Athabasca)

June 23rd Morning - Open Teaching

• 9.30 - 10.30 OU Presentations:
  Creating open courses (Tony Hirst)
  Digital Humanities (Linda Wilks/Elton Barker)
  Open CETL (Steve Swithenby)
• 10.30 - 11.15  Moderated discussion
• 11.15 - 12.00 - External speaker: Anne Faulkner, UK Online Centres

June 23rd Afternoon - Open Access

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU Presentations:
  iSpot (Doug Clow)
  The OU in Africa - HEAT (Lesley-Anne Long)
  Researching the Environment in the open (Joe Smith)
• 2.30 - 3.15 Moderated discussion
• 3.15- 4.00 Closing Talk: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
• 4.00 - 4.30 - wrap up, Martin Weller

Academic output as collateral damage

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was also an example of the type of output I had in mind.

The (poor audio quality) slidecast is below:

Academic output as collateral damage

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

My main points were that you can view higher education as a long tail content production system. And if you are producing this stuff as a by-product of what you do anyway then a host of new possibilities open up. You can embrace unpredictability - which if you are spending £1000s on a TV series you don't want, but online unpredictability is a good thing, it's where all the innovation comes from. But most importantly I think it means we can do things we couldn't do before - George and Dave's open course is an example of this and we've only just begun to explore the possibilities that this new relationship with content affords.

The Open University conference is Open

<Image OU Campus by Karen Cropper http://www.flickr.com/photos/dentonpotter/4480661125/in/set-72157623621643665/>

Every year the OU has an internal conference focused around learning and technology. It's a chance for us to share research and projects, broadcast about big initiatives and discuss some interesting ideas. It's usually a two-day event on campus, aimed at OU staff.

This year I have been given responsibility for organising it (I know! Who thought that was a good idea?) and  changing it a bit. So, this year's OU conference is completely online and is open to all (not just OU people). It will have an OU focus, but anyone is welcome to join in.

Theme

The theme for the conference is 'Learning in an open world'. As readers of this blog will know, I am interested in the manner in which the term 'open' has evolved in education since the OU's inception in 1969. With projects such as openlearn, cloudworks, Moodle, iSpot, etc this dialogue around what 'openness' means is important to the OU's sense of identity in a digital age, and this is what the conference will try to explore.

Structure

The conference is the 22nd and 23rd June. There are four sessions, each around a particular area: Open Content, Open Learning, Open Teaching and Open Access. In each session we will have an invited keynote speaker, four or so speakers from the OU who will address the key question of 'how does openness affect this area?', and an opportunity for discussion in breakout rooms. These synchronous sessions will take place in Elluminate.

There is also an asynchronous element hosted in Cloudworks, where each of the elements can be discussed, going on beyond the conference end.

Contributions

The main elluminate sessions will be from invited speakers, but instead of papers we would like people to submit contributions in any acceptable multi-media format: YouTube, Slideshare, Animoto, Xtranormal, etc. These can be embedded in the relevant Cloudworks area. We will then pull these contributions into the discussions in the main sessions and use them for the asynchronous discussion.

What next?

If you are interested in attending (even if it's only one session) pop along to the Cloudworks space and click the 'Mark as attending' button. This doesn't get you anything but it does gives us an idea of numbers and also means we can communicate with those who are coming.

If you want to contribute, please do, otherwise sit back and await further info as we sort out the agenda.

The twitter hashtag is #OUConf10

Here are some movies I've made to encourage contributions:

Why not try Slideshare?

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

Remote conference participation - flash debate

<Image Waiting for it all to begin by Unhindered by Talent http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/2380602382/>

One of the things I am interested in is the subtle ways in which new technology begins to alter standard practice over time, and without these changes being planned. In the academic world I think the conference is one such area. The academic conference can be seen as one of the core practices in higher education. It achieves many vital functions in academic practice, including:

• Knowledge sharing - you get to present and listen to other talks
• Validation - by sharing research and ideas within a subject community you get validation
• Networking - you establish a network of peers
• Recognition - publishing conference papers is often a first step for researchers to publishing papers and are recognised outputs
• Socialising - slightly different from networking, there is a social element to conferences which make them enjoyable

Over the past few years remote participation has become more commonplace. By remote participation I don't mean solely online conferences, but rather the sort of vicarious, casual participation many of us undertake. This type of participation is often unofficial, and uses low key, free technology. It is often a hybrid of the following examples:

• Twitter hashtags
• Live streaming (whether official or via an individual)
• Blogging
• Live-blogging
• Video/audio updates
• Flickr streams
• Slideshare presentations
• Cloudworks/Friendfeed aggregations

There are a few things that interest me about this. The first is how does it change the nature of the conference to have this broader participation? Secondly, how can conference organisers and presenters best take advantage of it and incorporate it into the conference? Thirdly, what is the experience like for the remote participant compared with the 'real thing'? For this last question, I have created a quick 5 question survey to get a feeling for how remote participation compares with real attendance.

I think there is a lot to discuss here, so I have set up a space in cloudworks for a flash debate. I'd be interested in your thoughts on any of the three questions above, or other opinions. Of course you can add comments here too - I'll post them over in Cloudworks also.

Social media learning principles

At the LAMS European conference I gave a talk in which I explored what we know about learning, and what I've deduced about social media. My conclusion was that we develop tools to represent the complexity of learning (such as LAMS), but that the social media/web 2.0 approach takes a different angle and instead of trying to represent complexity in the tool, creates simple tools and lets the network create the complexity.
The presentation is below:

Learning and social media

View more presentations from mweller.

I had 6 principles of social media which are:

1.  <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it.
2. Simple with reach trumps complex with small audience.
3. Sharing is a motivation to participation - so make it easy and rewarding to do.
4. Start simple and let others build on top
5. Providing limitations frames input (Cf twitter, 12seconds, etc)
6. Complexity resides in the network not the application

If these are true, then number 6 in particular strikes me as having profound implications for what we do as educational technologists.

OpenEd conference - be afraid

Scott asked me to be on the committee for the Open Ed conference, which is in Vancouver this August. These are dangerous people - unfortunately I can't go, so I urge other right thinking Europeans to submit papers so they can go undercover and report on their activities.

[For non-UK readers this is a remix of the current paranoia posters in the UK. See Boing Boing for better remixes.]

LAMS 08 Animoto

Just playing with Animoto - here is a movie from the LAMS conference

The question around learning design

Intellectual powerhouses (and me) - Stephen Downes, James Dalziel, me, Grainne Conole

I’m at the LAMS European Conference in Cadiz, where we’re presenting some of the work from the OU Learning Design project. Grainne gave a keynote on Thursday morning, along with Stephen Downes. Simon and Andrew presented their work in the afternoon, and I got co-opted (read press-ganged) onto the panel at the close.

Stephen was talking about he made an Audacity recording of his presentation, and that constituted a learning object in his view, although it wouldn’t meet many of the strict definitions of one. Grainne was talking about our Cloudworks project (loosely based on the Flickr for learning design concept) and the importance of adding in the social factor to encourage educators to share. Listening to Stephen and Grainne talk one thing struck me – education often seems very bad at solving some of these problems. For instance, learning object repositories haven’t been a resounding success despite being such a plainly good idea. And yet Slideshare is very successful and could be thought of as a repository. So why did they succeed where many smart, dedicated people in education failed? Here are my suggestions:

1. Educators tend to see all possible problems and thus create an overly complex solution – e.g. masses of metadata fields to cover every possible element of reuse.
2. Educators don’t actually like sharing much when it comes to teaching, but Slideshare is like sharing research.
3. Many of the projects have definite deadlines, and project milestones, etc. These can get in the way of the flexible, lightweight development you need.
4. The learning object repositories were too content-centric and didn’t utilise the social motivation – people put stuff up on Slideshare partly for altruistic reasons, but also because they get ego boosts from people favouriting, or commenting on their presentations.

So the question this raised for me was ‘is there an equivalent change we can do for learning design that happened for learning objects?’. I’m hoping it’s Cloudworks, but it may yet be some smart start-up in San Francisco.

Photo story: In the conference bags the LAMS people gave away a lamb in a can. My bag was devoid of this item, and I tweeted to this effect (it could constitute my travel gift for my daughter). An international incident of bodyline proportions was thus avoided when one was donated to me.