As Scott has blogged, he came to visit us in Cardiff recently, while staying at the OU for a month on a fellowship. We had a lot of great chats, and while I failed to convince him of the ways of atheist, reductionist rationalism, I did manage to convert him to my succession metaphor for technology adoption.

I used this in my VLE book a while back, and it goes something like this (from the book):

When there is a new environment, for example barren rock, a few pioneer species, such as lichens begin to grow. The acid from these decomposes some rock particles, and their own death creates a coarse soil. This is suitable for mosses, which require little soil, and in turn these decompose to enrich and deepen the soil, until it is suitable for some grasses to grow. The process ends with the establishment of a stable, climax community.

In elearning terms, VLEs, and in particular commercial VLEs have acted as the pioneer species, moving in to the new environment and creating slight changes which make the habitat suitable for secondary colonizers. These might be seen as open source VLEs, or closely integrated systems such as portals and eportfolios. The kind of environmental changes wrought by VLEs include general acceptance of the elearning approach, integration with administrative systems, staff development, recruitment of enthusiasts, changes in assessment practice, acknowledgement of tools already used by students, and so on. Once these systems have been established, then the environment would be more receptive to systems that require more radical changes in practice, such as CMSs and PLEs.

The corollary of this metaphor is that there is a 'natural' progression. Now I think we should always treat nature metaphors with a bit of caution, but if one accepts that existing technologies change their environment, then this new environment becomes one in which new technologies can flourish. It may take time though - as with plant succession you can only jump from the barren environment to the climax community by a lot of intervention, for example bringing in lots of soil and species.

But I hadn't really taken the metaphor beyond this initial comparison, but in my conversation with Scott we began to explore it further. In particular, what are the conditions that prevent succession? It doesn't always occur in nature - for instance on a beach a big storm will wipe away some of the colonizing plants. If the barren environment is your patio for example, then human intervention by way of deweeding, will prevent the environmental changes required.

In terms of learning technology, what is the equivalent of the avid gardener, killing any weeds, grasses or mosses that threaten to grow on their patio? Because if we think that there may be a natural progression through technologies, then identifying these barriers helps the process continue. 

One such barrier might be the investment people and institutions have put into the existing system. This is like the succession getting to a certain level, and then the gardener maintaining it at precisely that state. When institutions deploy a VLE there is a good deal of investment in other systems which communicate with it, in staff development, and expertise. There are also people whose professional identity becomes allied to that system - they become the 'Blackboard guy' or whatever. There is thus a combination of personal and institutional forces which are acting to stop succession going further. In our analogy this is like we've trained a group of volunteers to do all the deweeding and clearing of an area, so to allow succession to happen would mean upsetting a lot of people.

A second, more insidious barrier is that of commercial interests. If succession is about the gradual replacement of one environment with another, then those with a commercial interest a particular environment will seek to maintain that. In our analogy it's like the council have signed a contract with the purveyors of weed killer - they don't want the succession model to flourish. In learning technology this can be achieved through software patents, vendor lock-in, long term contracts, and the general promotion of a 'we solve your problems' attitude.

A third barrier might be the emotional attachment people have to software. I commented once before that although we justify software choices in terms of rational decision making around features, it is often an emotional, irrational preference, much like supporting a particular football team. Like with football teams we can only be monoamorous with software. The problem here is that we often don't appreciate we are arguing from this emotional attachment stance and cloak it in other languages - around integration, access or features. In the analogy then this is like the enthusiast who wants to maintain the environment at a certain state (maybe there are some wild flowers they are particularly fond of) and so don't want to let it alter.

There may be more, but I think tugging at the seams of the metaphor as it were, has helped me think about these issues. My new motto: Let's stretch this metaphor till it snaps.

Alan Levine is asking for a new round of his Amazing Tales of Openness. I didn't contribute last time, partly because I didn't think I had any amazing tales (and partly because I'm lazy). But pondering it this time, I thought of the presentation I had given recently on Academic Output as Collateral Damage, three key elements of which had arisen as a direct result of openness. For example, the Big OER and Little OER label I use came from Michelle Hoyle who did a post reflecting on a slidecast I had put up, and then when I commented over on her blog she used the phrase in the ongoing discussion. If I hadn't posted the initial talk, or Michelle hadn't openly commented on, then I wouldn't have picked up that phrase.

Even then I didn't think these were amazing, but it struck me that it is that they seem commonplace now which is in itself amazing, that these acts of sharing and developing ideas are an everyday occurrence is the thing we should acknowledge.

So here's my short vid, I'm sure Alan would like your everyday amazing tales too.

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

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.

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.

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.

I mentioned a while back that I was running an internal project called 'Podstars'. This ties into the whole digital scholarship/new digital outputs agenda. The title is somewhat misleading since the aim of the project was not to create online broadcast celebrities, but rather to raise the profile of producing new kinds of stuff for academics.

In the project we asked for volunteers, and then gave Flip cams to 16 academics. We got them together for an initial meeting, showed them the basic video editing software, talked through what they wanted to do and showed some good examples of videos and tools they might use. We then had a mid-project meeting where we reviewed contributions and discussed any issues, and then a final meeting. In the mean time we had a wiki to share contributions and ad-hoc support as needed. 

The project has now ended and we've done some evaluation, so I thought I'd share some thoughts. You can see some of the outputs here.

Feedback

The feedback was almost entirely positive. Of course, the group was made up of volunteers, but they all found the project useful and plan to take on aspects of it further. Below are a couple of representative quotes:

"It has been immensely useful to my teaching. I had created a great deal of AV and online content before, but this was all OU (or BBC) branded and I was simply not aware of all the free resources available now. The course really opened my eyes to the possibilities outside formal OU systems."

"Amazingly helpful. It gave me confidence to get on and try it"

"I'm now thinking about ways to extend use of video in my research and teaching"

"I learnt a lot about the options available for packaging and disseminating my research results. This was certainly a very useful project for me."

In general people favoured the open nature of the project (rather than giving them a set direction to film), found the wiki a mixed experience, didn't think a buddy project would work, the time required was more than expected, it was enjoyable and they felt that the number of meetings, and length of project, was about right.

Takeaway messages

Obviously with such a limited and self-selecting cohort this is not a representative sample, but I'd draw some tentative messages from this pilot study, or at least things to discuss.

• The legitimisation of 'playing' - most participants had thought about creating video before, and kept blogs or had specific projects, but had never quite found the time to make that commitment. By signing up to the project this both legitimised it in their own minds (and that of colleagues/managers) and also provided a motivation to engage.
• The switch to producer from consumer - this is small, but significant. We asked people to upload to YouTube, and although most had viewed lots of videos, none (I think) had produced their own. Once this switch has been made it will be interesting to see if it sticks.
• Different formats - although we started the project around Flip cams, I also introduced people to Xtranormal, Slideshare and Animoto, with the challenge 'you can produce something in 15 minutes'. Some participants preferred these other tools, and all could see value in having a mix. Exposure to the variety of tools (and see below, their ease of use), was a significant gain for many of the volunteers.
• An appreciation of how easy it has become - as you can see from a couple of the quotes above it was a mild revelation to many participants to realise how easy the tools are to use. This included the Flip cam and editing software (nearly all participants soon wanted to move beyond the limitations of the default Flip software for editing), and also the additional tools and services such as YouTube, Slideshare and Xtranormal. In fact the most cumbersome tool was probably the wetpaint wiki we used to share content. This is something I often stress in workshops - we've passed a threshold in the ease of use of multimedia but a lot of people don't know that yet. Seeing how easy it was to create content for themselves which can be used for dissemination, research or teaching was quite liberating.
• Context and framing is important - when you have your own blog, it is easy to construct the academic context around an artefact, eg I can embed a slidecast and then write a commentary around what I was hoping to achieve with it. Although we could have done this with the wiki, it didn't work well for the participants and thus some reported that they felt their artifacts were rather left floating. This ties in with another point which is about having a recognised output route. In the next iteration I think I'll create a podstars blog where people can then construct text around each entry.
• A non-project project - in my last post I proposed that the type of web 2.0/social media innovation organisations might want to explore doesn't fit easily into a conventional project structure, and yet projects are the means by which organisations conduct their business. The podstars project seems to be at about the right level for meeting both of these needs - it was identified as an internal project with people attached to it, there were some loose objectives associated with it, but it remained fairly lightweight and exploratory. A university may well have a higher level goal of finding efficient means of disseminating knowledge, which this would feed into, but it has to emerge out of work the academics feel is of value, rather than top-down directives. I can't guarantee these academics will continue using new tools, and scaling the project up will be an issue, but it does seem that if you repeated this often enough you would start to create an environment wherein the sort of frictionless outputs I have talked about elsewhere become a reality.
• Being creative is fun - who knew?

<Image coffee love http://www.flickr.com/photos/javaturtle/133316103/>

Stephen Downes pointed at this piece from Tony Bates arguing that the choice facing higher education institutions is often phrased as one of 'innovate or die'.  It prompted me to blog some half baked thoughts I'd had around innovation recently.

In my presentation on Academic output as collateral damage I suggested that organisations like projects. They are set up to work with project structures, which have lines of responsibility, a set of deliverables, milestones, and fixed budgets. I understand this and for a lot of tasks it is the best way to work. But here are three statements I would like to put forward:

1) The small scale, web 2 type innovation we need to see doesn't fit well into conventional project structures.

2) As money becomes tighter in higher education, there will be a strong push to control resources more, with everything and everyone allocated to a specific, accountable project.

3) The organisations that do best in the financial crisis will be those that can manage small scale innovation, and transform this into a varied offering, so that at low cost they can meet a wide range of needs.

You'll see the dilemma here - in economically straitened times, the instinct is to control everything tightly through a project structure, but this project structure is not well suited to the type of innovation you need to engage in to perform well. The institutional instincts may be contrary to the overall well being of the institution as a whole, rather like a wounded animal fighting off a vet.

A very, very, small example of this happened last week - I wanted to try a video experiment with a few people at the OU. I asked if we could provide them with coffee and biscuits to entice them along and help with the ambience and was told no, unless it was related to a specific project. In fairness I think I could have got the coffee money if I'd tried a different route (and we didn't go ahead with the experiment anyway). But it's the type of example we've all come across probably. My point here is that this might be exactly the sort of innovation you want to encourage, or maybe it's providing pizza for a bunch of developers (what cliche?), or getting someone's time for a couple of days. All of these types of informal projects become increasingly difficult in a project-centric approach.

The solution is probably to set up a non-project project, or something like Google's 10% time when people are free to explore other approaches, but these are by their very nature, unpredictable and uncertain. And in times of financial crisis unpredictability and uncertainty are not favourable characteristics for a proposal. We know, however, that these are precisely the qualities that lead to exciting developments online. So, how to square that circle?

I am giving a presentation on digital scholarship tomorrow at the OU, but in order to save people you know, actually turning up, here is the slidecast.

I'm putting together a book proposal around digital scholarship which will build on some content from this blog and explore some of these ideas, so the presentation was really a way to start exploring some of these ideas. The audio is a bit quiet but the slides are reasonably self-explanatory anyway. This is really an amalgamation of other bits, so not a lot new here, but it's a bit more than old wine in a new bottle.

What I'm interested in is whether the views we have of scholarship now, and particularly Boyer's definition hold true for digital scholarship. Put bluntly is it a case of doing the same things differently or are we starting to do different things?

I've characterised the digital scholar as being open, digital & networked. These are terms we use so frequently that they seem trite, but actually the combination of all three marks a very significant alteration, and potential for changes in scholarly practice.

Here is the slidecast:

Thoughts on Digital Scholarship

View more webinars from Martin Weller.

BTW - I'm also playing with Wallwisher, so may use this to stick ideas on, feel free to stick stuff up there too, we can make it a general space.

(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.

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.