Learning with the Fang

I have been a keen observer and frequent participant in the online component of many events and conferences. It appears to me that an event with a healthy online component creates value for its organisers, participants, those who cannot participate in person and the world in general. Allow me to illustrate by way of some recent examples.

Last week I was a keynote speaker at the ‘ edayz08 ‘ conference in my home city Adelaide, South Australia. While researching my talk I participated in several closely related events online that I could not attend in person. The new material and insights gained from doing this had a profoundly beneficial effect on my own talk and motivated me to look at ways of improving the online component of future presentations. Audio, slides and images from my talk were published on the day of the talk and I hope to be able to publish some video and other material as soon as it becomes available – this way others can incorporate my work into their own if they wish.

Lets take a closer look at some specifics.

#lt08 – 2008 conference, Mooloolabah, Queensland

Just prior to preparation for my keynote presentation I received a phone call from an old colleague (Mark)  who was looking to use some of my work in his presentation at an approaching conference (#lt08). After a brief chat we identified some flickr images and blog posts that might be useful, I explained that he did not need to ask my permission to use them because by licensing them creative commons:attribution I had already granted permission in advance – all he need do is give me attribution. I learned that some colleagues who are very active in on-line social networking would be attending and marked my diary to check in with them while the event was on.

To my delight I discovered (through twitter) that the person who convinced me to do the #edayz08 keynote was live-blogging sessions from the conference and would be attending Mark’s talk. Being the slightly narcissistic chap that I am, I decided to work from home that day and to tune in live and see if I could glean any information about how my work was presented and how it was attributed. I’m glad I did, because, to my great surprise I found that the previous day’s keynote by George Siemens had been recorded and was available as a streaming video via MySpace. So, for the first time in over a year, I logged into MySpace and watched the first few minutes of the video (which, annoyingly downloads in full and auto-plays every time the MySpace page is refreshed – more on that later). While the video was playing in one window, I discovered that George had uploaded his slides to slideshare and that there were recordings of other sessions, one from another colleague Garry.

I decided to see if I could find some podcasts from the event so I could download small .mp3 files and listen to them on my iPod away from the distractions of the other windows on my computer (and in the beautiful spring weather by the beach near my house). Meanwhile, Mark’s talk was in progress and I tuned into the text based ‘coveritlive’ live blog. To my delight, the live blog included links to flickr images taken at the beginning of Mark’s talk and of key slides where my work was used. This was a really engaging experience for me, making me wish there was a live audio stream I could ‘listen in’ to.

Inspired by engaging experience of the live blog, I started to look around on tweetscan for other people at the conference who were using twitter. Before long I discovered Carol, who seemed to be in the know about recordings and publications from the event. I twittered a whinge or two about MySpace and the inconvenience of streaming video for me and before long recieved a link to a ning community site with comprehensive coverage of the event. Still frustrated by the lack of download-able audio (or video) I decided to make my own and to share it with the community. Armed with google and notepad it took me 15minutes to figure out how to download the .flv behind the allegedly read-only video streams. My trusty video conversion swiss-army knife (visualhub) took care of transcoding the video for my iPod touch and stripping out the audio to create an .mp3 file. I uploaded the .mp3 files to my own server and shared the links with the ning community (I figured sharing downloadable video might create issues for the conference organisers so I did not do that).

The next morning (after a few tweets) the conference organisers published .xml file with an RSS feed of downloadable .mp3 files from some of the conference sessions – how cool is that!! I subscribed to that RSS feed in iTunes and watched the recorded audio from sessions automagically appear on my iPod – just the way I like it. Listening to my home-grown .mp3 files I was inspired to create an audio mashup from key lines about ‘the focus of control shifting to the individual’ that resonated with my talk from George and Garry. A few days later I heard a similar line from a talk by Anne and incorporated that in my mashup too (this would not have happened if that talk was not automatically transferred to my iPod). I decided to leave comments and links to my work alongside the streaming videos of each speaker via the ning site. Sadly, each time I navigated to the ning page for a talk, the entire video would download to my computer (again) and start playing – slowing the commenting process to a crawl and blowing my entire months bandwidth in a just a few days. Please, if you MUST embed streaming video, try to prevent it from auto-download (ning, blip.tv, myspace and others – please make this the default).

Inspired by the serendipity of all this I went searching for other podcasts where the ‘focus of control’ line had stuck in my mind. To my amazement, google sent me to my own blog  ‘ePortfolio’ – where I found reference to Howard Rhiengold speaking at the very same event (edayz07 – last year) that I was to keynote. This, ladies and gentlemen, is engaged learning at its best (and a great use of MY Personal Learning Environment (MyPLE)).

Finally, on the day of my talk at #edayz08, carol from #lt08 sent out some ‘tweets’ that contain links to all the materials from her event in a neat package, and at the same time, forging a link between the two conferences:

Amazing – clearly the ‘high water mark’ of my online event experience / interaction to date! Also gives me some ideas for minor improvements that I am going to pitch as consulting work to prospective clients. (and share openly with y’all when I figure out how to articulate them)

George Siemens masterclass – Adelaide, South Australia

Once again thanks to twitter for tipping me off that George Siemens (whose @lt08 keynote I really enjoyed) would be in my home town of Adelaide presenting a ‘masterclass’. I went to register to attend face to face (and hopefully meet George) but found myself lacking a required ‘DECS Employment ID:’. Fortunately, I was able to attend ‘online’ via centra, and even more fortunately you can view a recording of the centra session (if you can get centra installed and running on your computer).

theother66 :

Testing Centra link to George Siemen’s Masterclass due to start at 4.30 pm Adel time: http://www.centra.sa.edu.au…

2008-11-10 23:34:48

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EdTechTalk weekly webcast – Global

All this inspired me to try and stream the audio from my own presentation in real-time because I knew KerryJ would be live-blogging and hoped people in the room could take photos and upload them to flickr while I was speaking. The absolute world-leaders in live audio streaming are Jeff and Dave from EdTechTalk.com, so I tuned into the stream of one of their weekly webcasts, introduced myself via the text chat and was invited to join the conversation via Skype. I did so and asked for tips on best practice for streaming my own audio. Within minutes I had a bunch of links to detailed notes and a high level of confidence that a combination of ustream.tv and shoutcast (using nicecast client on my mac) would do the trick nicely. How’s that for just in time learning!!

#edayz08 – TAFE eDayz 2008 conference, Adelaide, South Australia

You can find all the output from my keynote presentation via THIS link, the audio mashup I mentioned above is HERE for quick reference.

Now it’s time to describe what happened behind the scenes at my own keynote presentation – which was an absolute hoot and a learning experience of another kind! I had completely re-written my usual Web2.0 talk to include my recent learnings from my online participation in the events I describe above. I had published my slides, audio mashup, some flickr photos and a blog post of notes for those attending my talk. Furthermore, I had plans to use my nokia N80 and qik.com to stream live video for a small portion of my talk (from my Point of View – looking at the audience) and to stream audio live from my Mac using Ustream.tv and shoutcast. Rehearsals had worked well and I had even made contact with the network administrators and audiovisual team from the venue to make sure these sites were not blocked by any internet filter.

The best laid plans of man and mice…

Turns out that even the network administrators could not help me configure my nokia N80 or my iPod touch to connect via the wifi in the auditorium. A quick rehearsal of the audio streaming showed that while the web sites were not blocked, the ports required for my outbound audio stream and the associated text chat were closed and not able to be circumvented in the time remaining. NETWORK SAYS NO – Which will be the topic of a whole separate post about my new found vigour against any form of ISP level filtering that is on by default.

Apart from the blockage of my planned live streams, the talk was fun, and judging by the reaction inspired some rather creative forms of ‘unauthorised media’ coverage that I hope to expand on later. KerryJ’s live-blog coverage was great, there was much twitter activity and several photo uploads to flickr while my talk was in progress. I recorded my own audio of my talk and was able to post-produce that within 10 minutes of completing my talk and managed to upload it thanks to Stuart and his brilliant ad-hoc ‘portal’ to the internet (bypassing completely the restricted wifi for campus network at the venue).

So, in conclusion, how does all this “healthy online activity” create value for its organisers, participants, those who cannot participate in person and the world in general? For a start, anyone reading this post is now more aware to the fabulous events I have mentioned – and hopefully some of you will pay attention to future events. I am going to make every effort to attend the #lt09 event next year and will be encouraging many of my social network to do likewise. While there might be an initial dip in attendance of events with a strong online component it seems pretty clear that if the events are any good, the face to face attendance will eventually increase through the ad-hoc publicity and the fact that while information translates well online, inspiration and deep social contact are better done in the flesh. Those who cannot attend in person get some level of engagement through highly social tools like twitter, and openly licensed, downloadable audio (and possibly even video) provide re-useable learning objects for all future generations.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

p.s. Update with more links coming soon.

p.s.s. On the way to work this morning I randomly stumbled over the most delightful web2.0 talk I have ever heard (given by a stone-mason) that I would never have discovered if it had not automatically appeared on my iPod – testament to the importance of the ‘last mile’ difference between online streaming video and a real podcast!!!

p.s.s.s. Mark – this is my ePortfolio, it works, and it is a great sales tool ;-)