Historical OUseful Jottings on Amplified Conferences

Via a tweet, @briankelly asks for links to things I’ve posted about around the notion of amplified conferences, whatever they are (I’m starting to reconsider what this might mean in the context of Conference Situational Awareness). I fear that there’s an increasing number of posts under the OUseful.info banner that I’ve completely forgotten about, but I’ll try to round up some of the ones here that Brian may (or may not) be interested in… If you’re not Brian, I woouldnlt bother reading any more of this post. If you are Brian, I’d probably stop now, too…

To try to get my recall juices flowing, I guess I’ve muddled around the idea of amplified conferences in several different contexts:

• stuff: aka the conference backchannel, allowing participants at the event to communicate in near real-time with each other (Twitter and “Desynchronous” Communication):
  • Before Twitter there was IM: OU Messenger Doubles as Interesting Conference Application (and before that there was IRC;-) And before live blogs or Etherpad, there was Live Blogging with Instant Messaging, Plus?
  • Backchannel Side Effects – Personal Meeting Notes; related is the question So How Does the Twitter Backchannel Work When The Chatham House Rule Is in Place?
  • I wonder if we might also extend the notion a little? Amplified Meetings and Participatory Deliberation… or Meeting/Workshop Amplification at DMU
• more stuff:
  • If we think about conference presentations as lectures, then maybe we can start to think about how liveblogging conferences might also feed in to amplifying other lecture based events, or what digital skills might be transferrable between such things? Blogging Academic Lectures. If conferences are communication events, then we should really place them in the context of other communication models or contexts: for example, Blogging in the OU….
  • To get your message out, you still need to reach an audience. There’s lots of good stuff going on in conference events, but if they each have their own conference blog, it’s hard for me to find those sites so that I can tune in. Maybe it’s Time for TechCrunch, Academic?, a single site/feed I can subscribe that pulls in content from a range of conference live blogs?
• other stuff:
  • If we have a conference Twitter account that is posting “official” announcements and updates around an event, it might in and of itself provide a post hoc “what happened” timeline. Something like Visualising Twitter User Timeline Activity in R might be helpful in reporting this?
• keepy stuff:
  • Conference treasure boxes – file sharing based on physical location can be used to relieve stress on the local netwrok, as well as creating a de facto archive of files shared during an event. To a similar extent, if you get presenters to pop deliver presentations via a local machine, even if they only drop the presentation onto the machine in the minutes before they give the presentation, you can still grab an archive of files presented via the presentation machine at the end of the event. When I showed my age at #solo12 by referring to “conference proceedings”, what I meant was a copy of the publication that contained a copy of the things that folk could treat as citable entities. I guess “conference repository” might be an informal contemporary equivalent. Are there, I wonder, and conferences that operate on this basis, or that offer a “conference archive”? I guess some conference websites effectively play that role?
  • FOlk spew stuff out around a conference in all sorts of ways. Is there any utility in archiving it, or maybe mining it in order to generate “derived” or secondary products? Deriving a Persistent EdTech Context from the ALTC2010 Twitter Backchannel and Additional Thoughts on Generating a Persistent Context from an Event Tag – tag network mapping, custom search engines, blogrolls, twitter lists etc etc; mining the Twitter output and building on it, basically… Some of the general ideas were pulled out here: Scribbled Ideas for “Research” Around the OU Online Conference…
  • We can use the Twitter stream to augment/add commentary to conference videos: Twitter Powered Subtitles for Conference Audio/Videos on Youtube. THis has the added benefit of providing search hooks into the video: Searching the Backchannel – Martin Bean, OU VC, Twitter Captioned at JISC10. If we class conferences as events, and TV broadcasts as events, then we can start to think about TV and conference “amplification” in similar terms (so we can explore the notion of “second screen” activities, or conference vs TV programme apps, each in the context of the other…). We can also think about annotation products, eg around TV broadcasts. So for example, Twitter Powered Subtitles for BBC iPlayer Content c/o the MASHe Blog. In some circumstances, we might want to allow communities to be able to discuss or comment on an event “out of time”, in which case something like this may be useful: Twitter Powered Youtube Subtitles, Reprise: Anytime Commenting
• different stuff
  • What happens if we thing of courses and conferences as similar things? Can we reuse thinking about commentary/conversation in one domain equally as well in another? Chatting About Web Pages: Just Another Form of Annotation?