Comments on: Some thoughts on the Cascading Change (CaCha09) symposium at ASCILITE09

By: It’s about the conversation… « e-Learning Stuff

It’s about the conversation… « e-Learning Stuff — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:20:14 +0000

[...] Fiedler on his symposium said in his blog: Altogether, our slightly eclectic individual statements/presentations apparently worked as a [...]

By: John Graves

John Graves — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:46:57 +0000

Here are three examples to consider:

1/ NING. I’m a new PhD student from Auckland volunteering some time to help get a New Zealand Computer Society Artificial Intelligence Specialist Group launched, including a website at http://nzaisg.ning.com It was remarkably easy to set this site up. There is a sub-group for AI in Education which you are invited to join.

2/ WIKI. LCA, coming up in Wellington in January 2010, has opened their event website up in a wiki-style. One fellow, Mitch Davis, used this flexibility to add an entirely new feature to the site to help attendees coordinate taxis, etc:

https://conf.linux.org.au/wiki/Shared_arrangements_organiser

3/ SLIDES+TV. Kiwi PyCon 2009 in Christchurch did a notable job of collecting SlideShare presentations and blip.tv videos:
http://nz.pycon.org/
http://www.slideshare.net/tag/kiwipycon
http://kiwipycon.blip.tv/

By: Bryan Alexander

Bryan Alexander — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:56:11 +0000

I don’t know this conference, but the situation is one I’ve seen throughout the past few years.

There’s got to be a way to mix up styles.

Your cloud idea sounds good. Keep me posted, if I can participate.

By: Sebastian Fiedler

Sebastian Fiedler — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:03:03 +0000

Hi James,

you are certainly right on the institutional demands. We were debating this a bit with George and Rob over dinner the other night. For example, we were pondering the idea to combine a pre-conference workshop with a symposium (in the actual conference programme). ED-MEDIA actually offers contributors of an accepted symposium the possibility to submit a short paper that is included in the proceedings. Such a mechanism allows colleagues to meet their institutional requirements… and then one can still run a more conversational (unconference) format as the actual event.

cheers,

Seb

By: James Clay

James Clay — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:53:48 +0000

I ran two events with that kind of format this year. I followed the unconference format. Both of the events went down really well with the delegates. Great conversations were had by all that attended.

There were some issues.

Some people can only attend events if they are presenting a paper which means an open unconference format can be a barrier for some.

Others have to justify their attendance to managers and without a formal programme it can be difficult to justify.

My view is that conferences such as Ascilite and ALT-C should have an open strand for such conversations. Providing space and coffee.

Cheers

James