Reflections on attending the JISC online conference

Last week, November 23-26, I "attended" the JISC online conference Innovating E-Learning 2010, Bringing innovation to life: from adversity comes opportunity.

This was the 5th JISC online conference, attracting 475 delegates from 11 countries. For a registration fee of about €60, I had access to a number of excellent keynote presentations and invited speakers, using Elluminate, discussion areas and other resources.

I didn't manage to get to all the sessions, which were arranged in two themes: Realising the Potential and Realising the Value. I participated in the following live sessions:

Theme 1
Learning to Live in Interesting Times - What are Educational Institutions for? Keri Facer
Transforming Assessment for Learning in a Digital Age David Boud
What do students really want? Usman Ali

Theme 2
Is the Future Mobile? Graham Browne-Martin
Sustaining OER Innovation through Collaboration and Partnership Simon Thomson and Andy Beggan

I missed a few sessions, but the great thing about the online conference is that these Elluminate sessions were recorded and I can go back and look at them any time. In fact, all the recordings will be publicly available on the JISC website sometime in 2011. A couple of people have already blogged about the sessions, including Doug Belshaw and Cath Marlowe. James Clay was the official conference blogger, but his excellent conference blog is not available to non-delegates.

All the live sessions took place within the Elluminate environment and were followed up with discussion opportunities on the conference site boards. During the live sessions, participants could use the interactive features within Elluminate, including chat and voting options. There was also a healthy twitter backchannel using the #jiscel10 hashtag.

So, what (for me) are the attractions of attending an online conference, and what are the disadvantages?

The main advantage is convenience. I get access to wonderful speakers without having to travel, without leaving my family for a couple of days, without having to stay in some horrible hotel in a city I don't know. I can still discuss themes with an international peer group, although the medium is different.

In fact, on day one of the conference, I was at home - sick with flu. I couldn't have gone to work, and I certainly couldn't have travelled anywhere. But I was able to "attend" three very worthwhile conference sessions, in my pyjamas, hot flu-busting drink beside me, and go back to bed in between! If the wifi had worked sufficiently well in the bedroom, I wouldn't even have had to leave my bed.

The second advantage, for me, is that I am much more likely to interact with other delegates in the online environment. In a face-to-face setting, I'm quite shy and likely to stand around at coffee breaks pretending to be very busy checking email on my Blackberry, unless there are people that I know. Online, I am still self-conscious, but no longer a lurker.

Despite comments by Graham Brown-Martin (@grahamBM) in his talk, I really liked the Elluminate platform and thought it worked quite well in the context of the conference. Academics at NUI Galway have used Elluminate in the past for teaching students in Clinical Education.

However, despite much investigation and complaining, I still cannot access Elluminate on my office machine over the fixed network. I have no problem at home, and no problem on the campus wifi network. So, I had to do a little forward planning and ensure I had a laptop set up in my office for the duration of the conference. Working on two machines side by side is not something that I find easy.

The other issue with an online conference is that you have to be very organised to participate fully. If you are travelling to a conference, you make time from your day-t0-day work and will not be distracted by phone calls, unimportant email and calls for coffee. To really participate, I should have stayed at home all week, away from the distractions in my office.

However, I did get a lot from the experience. I enjoyed the talks and will make time to follow up on the ones I missed (just not from my office desktop). Value for money? Certainly, especially when you factor in travel and accommodation expenses!

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Blogtalk Galway 2010 (Day 2)

It has now been 2 weeks since the second day of Blogtalk 2010, but some of the themes have been mulling around in my brain since then, even though I haven't had time to write about them. As before, most of my comments will be from a teaching and learning in Higher Education perspective.

Unfortunately, I missed a lot of day 2. But I was lucky to be present at the first keynote of the day, given by Stowe Boyd. This was the highlight of the conference for me.

Stowe Boyd (keynote) Social media blur: blogs, networks, streams
Stowe Boyd talked about the development of blogging and social media over the last 10 years and also gave us a glimpse of a possible future. The blog culture has changed and people are not blogging as much any more. How many blogs do you know where the most recent entry is 3 or 4 months ago and the message is "I must get back to blogging"? People like the immediacy of social networking and social conversations such as twitter. Where people are blogging, they are linking this into their "streams", directing people to blog posts. Boyd also pointed out that comments on blogs are not social conversations, but people are using social streams (like twitter) to comment on blogs.

I found this interesting from my own work perspective in two ways. First, my blogging habits have definitely slowed. When I do write, my posts are more thoughtful. Quick links and pointers I leave to my twitter persona.

My second observation, though, is that the use of social media in teaching and learning is a long way behind the trend indicated in Stowe Boyd's talk. In supporting academic staff use of learning technologies, we are still moving people along from discussion boards, to using student blogs for reflection and wikis for collaboration. For the majority of staff, these are new and exciting ways to engage students. The use of facebook or twitter in teaching and learning, while happening, is still unproven for the majority of teaching staff.

As for the future, I was relieved to hear that it is not facebook. In the future, the "like" button will be part of the operating system. The next generation of operating system will contain social interactions as primitive; users will take this as a given.

I missed most of the rest of the day, including the keynote by Deanna Lee from the New York Public Library. (Deanna Lee keynote) However, I did manage to get back in time for the afternoon panel session.


Panel Session on The rise of location-based media sharing and social networks
This was chaired by Mark Cahill (Social Bits), and involved Laurent Walter Goix (Telecom Italia), Fergus Hurley (Clixtr) and Ronan Skehill (Cauwill Technologies).

I'll be honest, I don't get location-based social networking. Maybe I'm too old - I'm certainly older than Fergus Hurley's sister! I hate to think of people being able to track my every movement. So, this was an interesting session for me. Mark Cahill gave a good case from the marketing point of view, but I don't want to be such an easy target.

Mark asked the questions "Why do people check-in? What is the value of a check-in?" I can see the use if you are a stranger in a foreign land looking for recommendations of where to go and what to do. There was some discussion about whether people would check-in (clock-in?) at work, or if it is because people want to be "seen" in a particular location. The consensus seemed to be that you check-in if there is some benefit for you, and Foursquare has not (yet) found the right application.

So, I'm wondering, what would entice a student to check-in to a lecture? We're having this discussion at the moment as we support the launch of a College of Science PRS "clicker" initiative. The focus of the initiative is to engage students, but there is a fear (among students) that the devices will be used to track attendance. Maybe we can introduce a reward scheme for lecture attendance, such as "Mayor of the O'Flaherty Theatre", or it could show up in their twitter feed "I'm at the Kirwan Theatre w/300 others". I don't think so.

I also got to hear talks from Gabriela Avram and Brian O'Donovan, Who am I: social identity in enterprise social networking, and Ted Vickey, Social media and LinkedIn for business. Both of these were interesting and enjoyable, though probably less relevant for T&L in HE.

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Blogtalk Galway 2010 (Day 1)

Last Thursday and Friday I attended some of Blogtalk 2010, taking place on the campus here at NUI Galway. Of course, attending a conference on campus means that you get called away to meetings and try to keep up with email and issues as they arise during the day. So, I didn't get to as many sessions as I'd have liked. But I did very much enjoy those sessions I did see.

The conference was very well organised by John Breslin, leader of the Social Software unit at DERI, co-founder of boards.ie and member of staff in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering discipline at NUI Galway.

Unlike some of the other bloggers who have written about the conference (Mark Cahill, Emer Lawn), I was there very much from a teaching and learning in Higher Education perspective. So any of my comments will be from that angle.

DAY 1

Darragh Doyle (boards.ie) who we are, what we do, where we are going
This was a great talk from Darragh Doyle about boards.ie which is quite unique, there is nothing else like it in Ireland or the UK. It is the most popular forum in Ireland and Darragh suggested that it has replaced the town hall in the community. What I find interesting is the social networking going on in the NUIG forum, with students asking questions about their courses and college life before they even arrive on campus. Everyone is welcome and every question is answered, sometimes helpfully, and other times with a large dose of mis-information. It's a lesson for those of us who spend so much time trying to get accurate information out to students.
Anyway, Darragh's talk has inspired me to actually register with boards.ie, though I haven't posted anything yet, I'm doing a bit of lurking.

After the first talk, I had to attend meetings and follow up on a couple of small crises before they got any bigger. So I didn't get back to the conference until lunchtime.

Dan Gillmor (Keynote) A new kind of media literacy
Dan Gillmor is director at the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and a respected American technology writer. He raised some interesting points around the question "what is journalism" in this world where everybody can easily report on what is happening around them. I was particularly interested in his point that consumers need skills in judging the credibility of news. They need a "credibility scale", which should include negative points. Of course, this is something that we've been aware of for a long time in HE, with many major initiatives around information literacy for students. Wikipedia is the least of our worries.
Gillmor wants to persuade consumers to be "active media users", to be sceptical of everything. This is an extremely important life skill, which should be addressed not just in higher education, but also at first and second level.
Finally, Gillmor spoke about principles for journalists (accuracy, thoroughness, fairness, transparency, independence). He asked why there isn't a revision history for journalism; at least with wikipedia we can trace where the information came from.


Charles Dowd (Facebook) The Facebook Platform
Charles Dowd has the "best job in Europe", as manager of platform operations in Europe. He described how popular facebook has become, particularly in Ireland where there are 1.4 million monthly active users (and I am one). He spoke about the "like" button and how it works - just 5 "friends" liking something is a magic number.
After this, though, things got scary, as Dowd spoke about the facebook future and the ways that applications will be able to interface with our data. I know I wasn't the only person in the room with concerns, but probably among the minority. Sure, we can set our own privacy levels, but there are also social norms involved and I'm not sure that these are being considered.

Panel Session on Social networks versus conversational networks
This was chaired by Ade Oshineye (Google) and involved Charles Dowd (Facebook), Blaine Cook (Osmosoft) and Darragh Doyle (boards.ie).
Ade presented a nice social network spectrum with social at one end (Facebook) and conversational at the other (Twitter). The classification was interesting, and reflects my own use of the tools, but is an oversimplification. The lines are definitely becoming blurred and, as Darragh Doyle put it, what about social conversation?
There was an interesting conversation about authenticity. Apparently Facebook supports authentic identities and connections, reflecting the real world. Hmmm.

At this point, I had to get back to work and so missed the final keynote of the day from Bill Liao. By all accounts it was excellent, so I'm looking forward to seeing the recording when it becomes available.
(Update: here it is Bill Liao Keynote)

Post about DAY 2 to follow....

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Irish Human Computer Interaction (iHCI) Conference - Call for Papers

For the fourth year in succession, the iHCI conference is inviting papers on a wide range of topics, including submissions exploring, discussing or challenging the many boundaries within our community today: the traditional boundaries between academia and industry; the physical boundaries which influence our work; the boundaries between creativity and code; the boundaries between research and real-world use; and the boundaries between 'traditional' desktop systems and mobile, tangible, or ambient interaction; and pushing boundaries into novel or challenging spaces. The event takes place at Dublin City University on September 2-3 2010.

Contributions are also welcome that include, but are not limited to, any of the following topics of interest:
- Accessibility & Universal Access
- Case studies
- Collaboration, groupware and social networks
- Context-aware systems
- Ethnographical and field studies
- Evaluation methods and frameworks
- Group interaction, collaboration and social media
- Human-centred design practices, tools and methods
- HCI Theory and Practice
- Information visualization and presentation techniques
- Novel user interfaces, interaction techniques and technologies
- Mobile, Ambient, Augmented or Tangible HCI
- Multimodal interaction and interfaces
- Interaction in multi-cultural settings
- Ubiquitous, pervasive, and mobile interaction
- User-centred design
- Usability investigation and evaluation
- Wearable computing, smart clothes, new devices and sensors

The iHCI 2010 Programme will follow the theme by including an Industry Session (Co-Ordinated by the IxDA Dublin and Limerick Groups), a Student Forum, a Poster and Demos Showcase. We are also delighted to announce that Professor Richard Harper (Microsoft Research Cambridge) will deliver the opening keynote address.

Contributions that advance the theory or practice of any aspect of HCI are welcome. This includes for example theoretical papers, practice case studies, empirical evaluation and methodological work. The conference proceedings will contain all papers (Full, Short, Student, Demos and Poster overviews) and will be published with an ISBN. This will also be made available online.

Web: http://www.clarity-centre.org/iHCI2010/index.html 
Follow the event on twitter (@iHCI2010) for regular updates.