As part of a session at the UCISA event ‘Using Social Media to Communicate’ I facilitated a task designed to explore attitudes to the use of social media by information services. Participants were asked to write comments about what information services should/shouldn’t do with social media and position them along a line of preference. The opinions expressed are presented here in the hope that they might be of use to services (re)considering their use of social media.
Presentation on linking the physical to digital with QR codes, augmented reality and NFC from the event Emerging Technology for Learning. Outlines simple ways to link physical objects to digital resources and considers the importance of the user experience when doing so in education. The talk was followed by a set of practical activities investigating the use of these technologies and a discussion around designing effective educational experiences with them.
A quick review of a new Slideshare feature I just tried out called Zipcasting. This lets you live broadcast your slides from within Slideshare with audio, video and chat, either publicly or with an unlimited number of invited participants via a custom URL. This looks like a lightweight, but useful, approach to remote presentation where you don’t need a fully-featured web conferencing system.
BigBlueButton is a free, open source web conferencing system that allows remote presentation with slides, audio, video, chat and desktop-sharing. The developers vision for this is to make starting a web conference as easy as clicking a single metaphorical big blue button. While that was certainly my experience with their public demonstration, I wanted to go a bit further an try self-hosting an install, so this post will touch on the hosting and management aspects, as well as the user-experience.
My lightning talk at JISC dev8D on how developers in the JISC community can communicate with a broad, non-technical audience. Whilst most of the points I make are common sense, being asked to talk about this at dev8D implies that there is still something of a communication problem between the developers of a system and it’s end-users, so it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves of the obvious occasionally.
I’ve been asked to present remotely on the JISC web2practice project and have been thinking about how best to do this. As someone who’s often in the remote audience for events, I’m aware of how difficult it can be to engage and maintain people’s interest. So, as this will be my first attempt to present to a purely remote audience, I’m hoping for some advice from those who give and receive presentations.
Despite not making it to ALT-C this year, I still felt more involved than I have at some events that I actually attended thanks to the formal and informal (attendee) amplification of the event. These are my notes on the pros and cons of being a remote participant in a tech-enhanced conference that includes streaming of keynotes, twitter back-channels, online discussions and informal amplification by attendees.
I recently ran a parallel session at the JISC Users & Innovation programme’s Next Generation Environments conference with my colleague Will Allen. The session titled Too Much of a Good Thing? Individual & institutional responses to emergent technologies explored the implications of an ever-increasing range of web services that staff and students are using as [...]
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