Thursday, November 6, 2008

Conference update

I was entirely gutted to have to miss Grant Comber's interview in Second Life this morning. I thought the blockages for my access to Second Life had been fixed, but when I tried, they were not. Such is life when trying to work from within institutions :( I really hope Grant will let us know how it all went, and that someone grabbed a postcard of the meeting.

I did manage to catch Vida's session discussing an audio recording Vida had published, asking a Civic Facilitator about his work. I couldn't use voice, another limitation in my institution it seems, but the chat was alive. Nellie is all over these events and really helped Vida's session along. I think we have an interesting discussion in Chat conference with several of Nellie's contacts.

Bronwyn Stuckey, Jeffrey Keefer, Sue Wolff and Sylvia Currie's week long discussion about multimembership is going nicely, with a great Voicethread capturing a lot of audio discussion (see in embedded below). Below the VoiceThread are a range of text based discussion threads all discussing ideas and methods about managing workload and membership online.



Some of us may be experiencing low turn out to our events. This is to be expected and is something to learn about. It is a false idea to think that "if we build it they will come". Much of that thinking comes from the rhetoric and media hype about the Internet - the World Wide Web, the Global Super Highway.. and fears about everyone watching you online. The truth of the matter is that it takes a lot of work to facilitate and bring together a successful online event - let alone develop an online community. My hope is that low numbers will give us pause to think about this point.

What's coming up? (remember, these are UTC times)


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