Twittering at Conferences

I really missed the Edumedia Conference in Salzburg this year. I have pleasant memories of last year's conference and the beautiful city of Salzburg. Last year there were some great presentations, many productive conversations over coffee and I made several new friends with some really smart and knowledgeable professionals. This year's Edumedia Conference held in the idyllic Alpine surrounds of St Virgil, seems to have held some similar promise, and I avidly followed the tweets from those attending the conference. Although I wasn't physically present, I at least managed to get a flavour of the event, and saw some twitpics via Twitter.

My attention this morning was drawn in particular to a very relevant paper from the conference presented by Wolfgang Reinhardt (@wollepb), Martin Ebner (@mebner), Gunter Beham (@kamelg) and Cristina Costa (@cristinacost), entitled 'How people are using Twitter during Conferences'. The authors make some interesting points and attempt to summarise the uses of Twitter as essentially a backchannel for the reportage of live events. They make an interesting point that Twitter can be used for the fast exchange of thoughts and ideas as well as information exchange. They also warn about the distractive tendencies of microblogging and the potential for it to socially isolate some individuals. Here's the conclusion in full:

Microblogging at conferences seems to be an additional way of discussing presented topics and exchanging additional information. It is not limited to the face-to-face audience or the location of the conference. Microblogging rather allows virtually anyone to actively participate in the thematic debates. Our research shows that several conference speakers and attendees are using Twitter for various purposes. Communicating and sharing resources seem to be one of the most interesting and relevant ways in which one microblogs. Other microblogging practices in conferences include following parallel sessions that otherwise delegates would not have access to, and/or would not receive such visibility. Content attached to tweets was reported to be mostly limited to plain text and web links.

To further research on microblogging in conferences, we will have to work closely together with organizers of conferences as to better promote microblogging as an information channel directly associated with the event. Sending out links to the survey during or shortly after the conference seems to be a crucial point for later examination, as people have mostly filled out the surveys during the days of the conference.

Reference: Reinhardt, W., Ebner, M., Beham, G. and Costa, C. (2009) How People are using Twitter during Conferences. In V. Hornung-Prähauser and M. Luckmann (Eds.) Creativity and Innovation Competencies on the Web, Proceedings of the 5th EduMedia Conference, St Virgil Conference Centre, Salzburg, Austria. p. 145-156.

Link: Twitter as a conference backchannel (by Tony McNeill)

Image source

Salzburg, Soccer and Sachertort

A lot of decent things came out of Edumedia 2008 this week in Salzburg. Ralf Appelt has posted a useful blog reporting on the highlights of the event, and Graham Attwell's team are cooking up a whole host of sounds and interviews from the conference for podcast. Adesigna's Flickr photos are particularly evocative (this picture of the river at night is simply beautiful). One of the most innovative aspects of the event for me was the introduction of the Twemes application to capture an aggregate of all the best snippets (Flickr photos, Delicious tags and Twitter posts) from the event. The Edumedia Twemes page has grown with a number of useful artefacts from the event. The Salzburg Tagit project was interesting to hear about, and it was great to finally meet up and have a few beers with the likes of Jay Cross and Marcus Specht.

Tell you what though, I'm glad I'm out of Salzburg with the Euro 2008 football tournament starting. The place was swarming with paramilitary and police yesterday as I took one final wander around. There are barricades everywhere around the fanzone and the place is thronging with people wearing flags, football shirts and ...yes... shaven heads.

Salzburg will be remembered by me for some good thought provoking presentations, plenty of constructive and challenging dialogue (I was interviewed, photographed and videod more times in two days than ever before - Mark Kramer even has a Qik video of me talking at coffee about social software) and some stunning Alpine scenery. I visited the bier garten and tried the Stiegel beer (accompanied with the eponymous frankfurters) and also sampled the Sachertort in a wonderful little cafe just off the main tourist drag. I even sat with some colleagues atop one of the hotels over looking the river at night, and looked over the city as it dazzled with a thousand lights below. All memorable. Ein Schon Stadt. I just hope it doesn't get wrecked by the footie boys....

Twemes means memes

We have been enjoying using the Twemes (Twitter Memes) application here in Salzburg these last two days. Although the wireless network connections have been playing some games with us, several of us here at Edumedia have been able to Twitter and then direct our tweets to Twemes where they are aggregated in with a stream of images (Flickr) and tags (Delicious) from the conference. Anything on these tools that is tagged with #edumedia08 is fed directly into Twemes. Pictured are Graham and I, with me in full flow talking about some research I have done on blogs and wikis for nomadic learners (Picture taken by David Roethler and uploaded direct to Flickr via Shozu).

Graham Attwell, Veronica Hornung-Praser and I have just done a session on mobile self organised learning which will be podcast by Graham via his Bazaar webcasting service later this week. The weather is a little cooler today, but the discussion is just as hot, centred upon self organised learning and social software. This morning, in our first session, we enjoyed two hours of World Cafe discussion, where the white table cloth became our notepad and where the groups constantly rotated around the room discussion key issues. A fabulous idea in every way!

Hot, Cross and bothered

We are cooking here in Salzburg. The weather is just as warm and humid as it was yesterday. But we are cooking in another way too. We have just enjoyed a very good and very interesting opening session at Edumedia 08 here in Salzburg. Jay Cross has just spoken about informal learning and made some interesting and thought provoking points. He tells the story of how an American professor told two groups of students to read a paper in preparation for an examination. He also told the second group that the paper was controversial and not to be trusted. On average, the second group of students scored higher grades. His conclusion - uncertainty creates better learning engagement.

Jay made the point that with the exponential rate of change in the world, particularly in technological terms, knowledge is rapidly and continually going out of date. He argues that instead of teaching students knowledge and content, we should be training them how to adapt to changes instead. The connections, he remarked, are more important than the nodes. In other words, people communicating with each other in conversation and collaboration is more important than content. Content becomes important to the students when they generate it themselves. Then it becomes personal and personally relevant. Presenting challenges, said Jay, is more effective than offering solutions.

To the left is a picture (courtesy of Stefan Karlhuber) of me with Jay Cross, Graham Attwell and Marcus Specht, in an unconference mode. I have had a devil of a job Twittering from the conference though, as you will see if you have tried to follow my comments. The connection from my iPhone to the network has been atrocious, and I am hot and bothered by this, because I have lots of thoughts, and cant get them posted very easily. Graham Attwell and Mark Kramer have both had much more success, the rotters. Graham tells me he used Skype, and it worked a lot better than my iPhone....

Oh, and I was mentioned in dispatches. My photo (taken last night by him in the beergarden) was featured in one of Jays slides. Makes me feel a little better...

EduMedia in the Alps

Its all quite beautiful here up in the middle of the Austrian Alps. I am in Salzburg to speak at the EduMedia conference this week. The weather is hot and sunny and the birds are singeing in the trees. The theme of this conference is Self Organised Learning in the Interactive Web. I have already enjoyed some interesting and stimulating conversations with the likes of Jay Cross (USA), Mark Kramer (Austria) and Wolfgang Greller (OU Netherlands) and I am looking forward to listening to the first keynotes in approximately 10 minutes time. Jay actually did a video interview of me over breakfast which he says he will post up on his website later on. Hope I dont have egg on my face....

I will try to blog and twitter from the conference as the sessions go on, but network connections here are a little flaky at times. More later, including some stunning photgraphs of the area....

Who you calling an idiom?

Arrived back home safely (and on time) after a week teaching in the Czech Republic. I have been teaching bright young things from Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland, and we have been doing fun things like role play, lively debates and the study of English idioms... The foreign language counterparts to 'beating around the bush' and 'raining cats and dogs' are outrageous, believe me. I also set them up with a group blog, and there are some interesting posts on there.

I'm already a little tired, and I have 3 more trips to make in the next 3 weeks. I am speaking at Edumedia in Salzburg on Tuesday and then the following week it is EDEN in Lisbon, and then a keynote presentation for the Virtual University Conference in Warsaw on June 19th. It could have been a lot worse than it was. We were stuck in heavy traffic outside Prague for what seemed an eternity, and I just managed to catch my flight back to the UK by the skin of my teeth (an unsavoury idiom for which even my clever German, Czech and Polish students might need substantial explanation). Sitting in the back seat of my chauffer driven car (yes, you heard right), I was beginning to make plans to find a hotel in Prague for the night and then take the train down to Salzburg the next day. That might have been a better option, as I now need to get from Plymouth to Gatwick Airport on Sunday morning to check in at 0900...

I'm trying to think of an appropriate idiom to describe my plight, but unfortunately I'm three sheets to the wind already...

Scaling new heights

I'm very pleased to have been invited to speak at this year's 4th EduMedia Conference: "Self-organised learning in the interactive Web" - A change in learning culture? which will be held 2-3 June at the University of Salzburg, Austria. I have also been roped into serving on the scientific committee for a special track entitled: Technology Support for Self-Organised Learners, which is being organised by Marco Kalz. Marco and I spent some time working together last year in Austria and Holland, and he works at the Netherlands Open University, in Maastricht, my old stomping ground.

I'm looking forward to meeting up again with Marco and his colleagues, and also to hearing some interesting and stimulating papers from the presenters that are lined up. The theme of cultural changes mirrors some of the work colleagues and I are doing in preparation for the new book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', which will be published in the U.S. in the Autumn. I shan't be indulging in any mountaineering in the Alps while I'm out there, but I do hope that learning about emerging technologies will help us to scale new heights.