I finished my work for the Maryland School Boards Association around 11:30 yesterday, so I spent the rest of the day driving home. The rental was comfortable enough, though I’m probably the only person in America who isn’t thrilled when I’m upgraded to an SUV. Under normal circumstances I would have been happy to take the Chevrolet Aveo (tiny and the only thing they had besides SUVs), but with the 10+ hours of driving in front of me, I opted (reluctantly) for the larger car.
I also had a good book for listening, William Gibson’s latest, Spook Country. ..and I got more than half of the way through before overdosing on his rich, poetic, deep, and incredibly demanding prose. Just too much to decode in every sentence. So I caught up with some podcasts that had been sitting for weeks in my phone. The one that got me thinking the most was an EdTechTalk show, I think it was 21st Century Learning #7. They were talking about how to expand conferences using Web 2.0. In their case it was NYCIST, the New York independent schools technology conference.
Alex or Arvind mentioned Hitchhikr, but this is a very generic, every conference tool that only points to some possibilities. So here are some ideas that occurred to me, while I was listening to this very engaging podcast.
- I think that their discussion of setting up a Drupal page for the conference was great, especially as you could draw blogs, Twitter, and probably Flickr artifacts of the conference into pages using RSS. It’s been a long time since I’ve played with Drupal, but as I recall, it did have the ability to aggregate feeds.
- I thought that what Jeff Utecht did with Ning for the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai was brilliant.
- In the podcast, Alex and Arvind suggested that merely aggregating every photo, every blog, and every Tweet would be way too much information, and I agree, though this is not necessarily a bad thing.
- One of the goals of giving voice to conference goers (and classroom learners) is that the focus experience (conference event or classroom lesson) is extended in many different directions, and that this extension is trainable (RSS aggregation tools), and it is archived. Meaning that you can syphon off content, insight, and conversation for a long time to come.
- But overload of information is still an issue. So what occurred to me is a page on Drupal (or Ning or whatever) that is maintained by a conference editor (or classroom editor). The editor would scan through the waves of content being contributed by attendees, and pick out just those articles, photos, and Tweets, select those that are of most immediate importance, and then feature them, or experts of them on that Drupal (or Ning) page.
- I think that one aspect of this desire to extend our conferences is that the organizers of many of these conferences are simply not capable, for many good reasons, of putting together these information landscapes. So another direction is ways that enterprising attendees can contribute. This is what Hitchhikr is about. Anyone can register a conference and suggest a conference tag(s).
- Steve Hargadon exemplified this model of conference attendee structuring the conferences cyberlandscape by suggesting tags for each session at NECC (NECC 2007 Session Tags and Feeds!), an enormous task that was enormously useful, and continues to be useful.
- The fact is, with a little knowledge of RSS, and access to a free wiki engine (PMWiki), a person could ….. (hmmmm — more later).
- I think that the ultimate will be when we have the tools for each of us to shape our own extended conference experience by aggregating only the speakers, topics, and conversations that are of most value to us.
- 2¢ Worth
Being a teacher in Maryland, I’d love to know what work you did with the MD School Boards Association and how it was received.
Hello, David,
We’ve been thinking about some similar issues, and as a though exercise/research for another project, we put together a rough proof of concept — for a sense of what users can do at the site, look at http://educon20.org/adding-content
As the site currently works, each session auto-generates tags, and links to flickr, google blogsearch, and technorati. Additionally, each session has its own session group blog where every member can participate, in addition to a session-specific resource (ie, a bookmark, a file, etc), and a backchannel chat. Each session also generates its own rss feed with all activity, so remote users (in addition to participating via the chat) can track sessions via the feed. And, when the dust settles, the site still exists as an archive of what transpired. And, if people want to continue the conversation, they have a place to do exactly that.
Cheers,
Bill
OK, Bill! You’ve got my attention. What’s Educon20?
— dave —
Hello, Dave,
Educon20 is a session that Chris Lehmann is putting together at Science Leadership Academy. As he describes it:
His full post is here: http://www.practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/894-EduCon-2.0-A-Call-for-Conversations.html
The site I pointed at in my earlier comment may or may not be used in relation to the conference, but it was something we put together as a way of thinking through some of the issues/processes involved in extending the learning process/conference experience away from something rooted in time/place, and more toward something rooted in experience and communication.
Cheers,
Bill
David:
I’ve put together a page of thoughts about what conferences could look like utilizing Web 2.0 technology: http://edtechlive.com/Conference+2.0.
CUE has contracted with me to implement several of these ideas for their upcoming 2008 conference, including a Ning network. I have some fun ideas of how to structure it, including a forum thread for every conference session.
Hopefully, we can expand and extend on EduBloggerCon and the Bloggers’ Cafe (both to your credit) at NECC.
Hello, Steve,
All the functionality you describe, and then some, is already present in the Drupal site (http://educon20.org) I literally threw together as a thought project/research piece — additionally, the site I laid out has some google maps integration to enrich the experience for the f2f attendees — this type of functionality is not possible/not easily accessible within Ning.
I put this site together in literally 20-30 hours, with maybe 30 minutes dedicated to the graphic design. To emphasize: this is a proof of concept, and not a polished work, but the core pieces are all there — the tags by session, the links to aggregated posts from external services, the chat backchannel, the ability to podcast, and the ability for participation by session members. Moreover, all this functionality is accessible via the web UI, and doesn’t require anything more complex than filling out a form. Tags and links are generated automatically as users create sessions.
Not present in the site, but easily added, are moderation of session proposals (ie, people make submissions, which are then approved/not approved), user rating/voting, and ecommerce (to handle registration fees). Add in a service like ustream.tv, with a desktop application that allows screensharing/split camera, and the site could function pretty well as a means of adding a live video feed to sessions.
So, using an open source tool (in this case, Drupal) as the core component, you could have a site that manages your conference, manages your sessions, provides a conference-specific social network, allows users to participate in sessions by contributing to the session blog, sharing bookmarks, audio, video, and files, and, by using a third-party service like ustream.tv, gets a lightweight live video stream for the session.
Is there a need to have this in Ning? You can get better functionality and more control over your data by not using Ning, and by using an Open Source alternative as the core component. If you dedicate a little time to the graphic design element, you could have a cloneable, scaleable site that, unlike most of the Ning presences, isn’t visually cluttered.
Cheers,
Bill
Bill, I look forward to digging into your Drupal site, and am hoping, desperately, that I’ll be able to attend EdCon20 for one day.
I think that the difference between what I did with PMWiki and what you’ve done with Drupal, tugs at my continued thinking about personal learning networks. Conferences are just now starting to realize the potentials of capturing the blogospheric conversations that have been taking place for a couple of years now.
But what’s more true to the spirit of Web 2.0 is that attendees can harness the conversation as well. I am not one of the planners of K12Online, only a presenter, and I put together those pages without their knowledge, nor their permission. I did it for me and for anyone else who’d like to use it.
Great luck to you on your conference, on your amazing Drupal site. I’ll be watching.