You are Never Alone

After months of planning our first online conference day happened on Wednesday. We began with an early, over-breakfast-for-some, session on me.edu.au, followed it up two hours later with a session on Creative Commons and finding resources, particularly images, for use in multimedia.
Then came Digital Literacies, followed by Learning without Borders. In the evening 20 or so of us met in Second Life.
Kerry J has written a couple of wonderful blog postings about it.

To the left you see a snapshot taken during the Second Life session. We repeat the experience next Tuesday with a new batch of participants.

For me the interesting thing has been the lessons that we’ve learned so far.

• We’ve always anticipated that we needed a presenter (of course) and also a person to help with any technical problems that participants might experience.
  What we hadn’t anticipated was how useful a scribe would be - another member of the team whose role it is to indicate in text what the presenter is actually saying.

• We had several “set-up” sessions for people to come into Live Classroom and make sure their microphone headset was working properly. Some people still left thta to the last moment. However some who had come in, got it all working perfectly, found at the time that things were not quite right. In my own case my computer insisted on resetting its headset options if I left it idle between sessions.
• A number of participants got permission to stay at home to access the sessions, because the restrictions through firewall and proxy server settings at their place of work would have meant they couldn’t use Live Classroom.
• We’re still learning too about being online presenters- It is a bit more than just talking to a power point presentation. Just as when you are presenting to a face to face audience you “play” the audience, so in an online session you need to engage them by providing opportunities to participate and even talk.
• We weren’t sure how many people we could cope with in a session, and so had restricted registrations to 20. In reality we probably could have managed more.
• The archives for the sessions are now available online, and we will create another set next Tuesday. In reality having handouts, archives, and even presentations online for people to access is an important part of the process.