Summary of our conference?

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Permalink Reply by Carole Turner on February 25, 2009 at 3:08pm

I participated in the “Spaces for Interaction” online conference on Friday afternoon.

This was my first official online conference using Connect. Below are my impressions and what I learned:

George Siemens, Univ. of Manitoba, Canada was the host for the whole conference, and seemed very experienced and comfortable running a conference this size (what size was it? 400+ people, I think….) It was obviously an international conference that had such great diversity of perspective and culture (Paris, London, Alaska, Canada, Australia, USA east coast, Midwest, west coast, etc). The speakers had a nice relaxed attitude about the different time zones and easily made everyone comfortable, whether it was their day or night time.

Horizon Connect can give the presenters a very controlled atmosphere in that they give access (even on the fly) to people who want to talk. At the same time, I was wondering how to encourage more participation.

A whiteboard or short tutorial before the live event would help the novices figure out ow to hold down their mike icon (if given access to talk), and other Connect features.

The presenter talked about pros and cons of traditional conferences, but most of the one hour session was about these kind of live sessions, in lieu of a traditional conference.

The roles were host, moderator, tech support, speaker, and of course participants. The moderator got people to respond as she read through the parallel chat session in Connect, and moved the presentation along. The host introduced the session, came in when there were random technical questions. The Tech Support was “invisible” to me, although bandwidth issues were discussed. The presenter actually got “cut off” before the end of his live session, maybe because he was on wireless.

There is a organizational structure much like traditional conferences:
Before Event – Event Itself – After Event.

Before the Event, people are registering for the whole event (about 6 speakers throughout 3 days or so), going to the web site, viewing the Introduction to the Conference, reading about the speakers, watching a short tutorial, setting up their Ning profile and starting discussions. Then the moderator is there about 15 minutes before each presentation to answer questions via chat, see who was online, etc.

The live speaker event itself included the host doing the introductions, the presenter and his visuals, a picture of him (not a live video shot) along with the chat and backchannel conversation in Twitter and another tool that the presenter set up, I couldn’t keep track. (I was in Ning trying to see if there was some interaction in that space during the session; there wasn’t much if any. Some must have used Twitter.)

The session I listend to was called “PowerPoint is Tyranny,” by Jay Cross
Internet Time Group , USA., Jay was an experienced online speaker.
Then there is the After Event – the recording is available, people are still posting to Ning today.

During the session they talked about having informal “unconferences” that took less time to set up and organize, 3 weeks or so!

The URL for the recording of the “PowerPoint is Tyranny” session and other speaker sessions is at http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/speakers/

There are other interesting sessions that talk about a virtual conference environment, so I will listen to the archived speaker events.

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Permalink Reply by Alastair Creelman on February 26, 2009 at 3:19am

Thanks Carole. I made a short entry on my blog (http://acreelman.blogspot.com) but I wanted to link to other summaries too. I've linked now to your entry.

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