Echo 360 Community Conference Europe 2010

On 5th February 2010, I attended the Echo 360 Community Conference in the University of Birmingham. I also presented a poster, with preliminary results from a survey of over 100 students (mostly in the School of Medicine) on their use of recorded lectures over a one year period.

Echo360 is growing by about 100 new customers in Higher Education every year since 2005, and has customers in 24 countries. Their commitment to the UK and Ireland was very much in evidence at the event, with strong representation by senior technical staff. Mark Jones, president of Echo 360, gave an initial presentation, introducing the members of his team and highlighting lessons learned during 2009.

During the day we found out about the latest release and plans for future releases. Version 2.5 (update 2) was released recently (though NUI Galway hasn't had a chance to upgrade yet) and promises a stabilised environment with improved reliability.Version 2.6 is scheduled to be released in July, with version 2.7 to follow in December 2010. Future features that are of particular interest to us include: a defined scheduler role and external LDAP authentication (2.6); devolved administration, improved user interface, calendar based scheduling and more (2.7).

Also of interest to us are two new products from Echo360. Both of these seem quite promising for our situation.

Podium Capture is software that sits on the fixed pc in a venue allowing visuals and audio to be captured, but no video, and processed as Echoes. The content is sent to the Echo360 server by ftp and recordings can be scheduled. This can be bought as a site licence and does not require purchase of an appliance.

Personal Capture can sit on a laptop or pc, allowing Echoes (with video from a webcam) to be recorded and processed (locally or on the server). It is being sold in bundles of 5 licences and each licence is associated with a person (rather than a venue).

Mark Jones also highlighted the new community portal, lecturecapture.com and announced the next round of the grants programme. The call will go out on 5th March, with a closing date of 2nd July. There will be 4 grants available, each worth $10,000. More information is at www.echo360.com/grantsprogram.

iPad overview

The iPad - watch more funny videos

We think

Steve Wheeler's Web 2.0 Wonderland

Any Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass fans out there (and I'll admit that I'm one), you definitely will enjoy this take on Jabberwocky by Steve Wheeler on his blog, Learning with 'e's.

Atmosphere

Whilst OEB are producing their own videos of the content of the presentations, here's a rough cut of some random scenes that capture some of the atmosphere of the event and the host city.

Podcasts, interviews, etc

Now that OEB do their own podcasts and interviews, and given how busy it is in the sessions, as with last year, I deferred to their work rather than stringing together a series of my own as I did in the early days. Here is the main link to the interviews plus recordings from last year - a really useful resource.

(photo: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Germany License.
Photographs by David Ausserhofer. All copyrights by ICWE GmbH.)

Stroll

Cold but clear day in Berlin, left just enough time to walk along the Tiergarten, past the Soviet Memorial, to the Brandenburg Gate, on past the American, French and British Embassies, down to Potsdamer Platz then along past the diplomatic area (filled with all the new embassies) back along the park, through to Wittenbergplatz, quick sneak into KaDeWe to see the Christmas displays before back to the hotel on Budapester Str. Great walk, probably a little too fast, but always love doing this. Normally, when I have more time, I go on along Unter den Linden all the way past Humboldt University, Museum Island and into Alexanderplatz, turning at Karl Marx Allee, but not enough time this year.

Berlin is a fascinating city and well worth a visit anytime.

Danger - if you're reading this online your brain is at risk

Well I'll admit to having been much worse at updating the blog this year at the event, but that's because I've been so engrossed in conversation and busy twittering away...quite apart from the outrageous socialising with all these nice people at one time or other associated with Humboldt University!

Anyway, today was a mixed experience, as with all conferences. Many folk twittering about sales pitch type talks, I didnt experience many of those, due to my choice of session probably. Closest to that was the one by Polycom, but they did it well by having a user to describe experience of using videoconferencing for music tuition and the issues in sound quality etc. They are doing a live link up with the Manhattan School of Music tomorrow to demonstrate.

The sessions were rounded off with a 'debate' on the proposal that the internet is destroying our children's minds. A motion led by Aric Sigman who shouted and attempted to scare everyone. His extremely aggressive style offended some, particularly those unfamiliar with him (the vast majority of the 2,000+ international delegates), but for others gradually seemed like a raving madman. He attacked the audience as being pushers of this mind-rotting technology..not a great debating tactic, but he gives the impression of a man who cares about nothing other than his ego which was bloated by the use of the video projection screens, sadly.

He then was robustly challenged by Donald Clark who did a great job and was happy enough to show some passion and contempt for the scaremongering. The next two speakers were less effective. Bruce 'the Brute' (see Private Eye) Anderson, a veritable caricature of a fleet street hack, his tie slung askew muttered along the lines of trying to support the motion but being 'reasonable' (the old good cop/bad cop pairing), then some guy 'from Silicon Valley,' Jerry Michalski gave a fairly anodyne response to that...his analogy of the development of the 'automobile' with the net currently being at Model T wasn't a good one for a European audience, as a bicycling Dutchman commented!

Anyway, what needs to be said to those unfamiliar with Dr. Sigman is that cherry-picking (ie selective use of some reports and wilfully ignoring of other contradictory findings) seems to be his speciality, as pointed out by Ben Goldacre who he seemed to have a pop at during the session. If you want more on this aspect and some examples then visit this link.

'Informal' learning

Here's Zenna Atkins who gave the talk that was best received (judging by the tweets and laughter) partly because of its informality (to say the least - when was the last time a keynote spoke about 'puking in a bucket'?) and also because she only had one slide!!

In the beginning....

Sorry about the delay. Twittered this this morning, but here it is. The start of David Puttnam's presentation. The full recording will appear later courtesy of OEB themselves. He read out his speech, so will resonate with traditional educators ;-)

It's that time of year again...

Yup, Online Educa is about to start here in Berlin. The preparations are being made in the main plenary venue for the opening address by David Puttnam and others. Twittering on the event can be found at #oeb2009 - get good updates, if you speak Dutch! Each year there's rivalry to see which country (apart from Germany) sends the greatest number of participants and usually a two-way race between the UK and the Netherlands. Interesting to see if budget cuts knock out the UK this year or not.

Some Thoughts on Twitter Lists

Lists. A great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts.

So says the banner appearing at the top of my twitter page on twitter.com. So, I decided to give lists a try and see what use I could make of them.

A twitter list allows you to create a group of people that you can follow all at once, without necessarily following each person individually. When you look at the twitter page for that list, you see all the tweets from only that group of people.

My first thought was that it might be useful to create a celt09 list, containing the participants from our Learning Technologies module in the Postgraudate Diploma in Academic Practice. (You can find this list at sharonlflynn/celt09.) Until then, we had been using a hashtag (#celt09) to filter course-related tweets. Having used this list for a week, I can now observe:

• This is great for following members of the group with locked (private) Twitter accounts. Their tweets, even using the #celt09 hashtag, don't appear in the search, but do appear in my list.
• Sometimes participants forget to use the #celt09 hashtag, but I still see their tweets in the list. That's another thumbs up for lists!
• Most of the class participants are new to Twitter, so most of their tweets are currently course related. Thus, most of the tweets in the list are related to the course. But this is not always going to be the case.
• Sometimes other Twits (no offence) reply to the class using the #celt09 hashtag, making a (potentially valuable) contribution. These don't appear in the list. That's a disadvantage of lists!

So, I'm still unsure about the use of lists, apart from using them as a way to organise people you follow. Grouping people together around a theme doesn't result in a twitter stream on that theme. It might prove a useful starting point though.

For the moment, I'm going to combine my use of the hashtag with the list, so that I can see everybody and see what everybody is saying about the course.

One area where lists might give added value is around the participants in a conference. Here the list is a short-term artefact, and might result in something close to the theme of the conference. It couldn't replace the conference hashtag though, which has become such a useful backchannel, allowing those not at the conference to follow and participate.