Online Conferences-Blogging Takes a Turn
The idea of online conferences has been exploding. Googling "online conferences" produced more than 181,000 hits on 4/13/2006. Some blogging only conferences have recently been spotted. Explore the blogcon links to them below, then ponder the strengths, weaknesses and questions this raises.
http://www.globalprblogweek.com/about/ September 19-23, 2005
http://www.higheredblogcon.com/index.php/about/ April 3-28, 2006
The second blogcon built on the ideas of the first, spreading out topic themes over a longer period of time. Nice. With podcasting now capable of encapsulating any media, the real challenge is to teach the necessary recording and composing skills to build the online presentations. That can easily be a series of online screen movies. Online conferences can capture much of the immediacy and interaction of face-to-face conferences. Their slightly slower pace of many of the online formats could also be seen as an advantage for stimulating deeper reflection. Online format also creates a kind of instant archive which is so expensive to reproduce with live events. Yet nothing online matches the "full bandwidth" of face-to-face interaction in a crowded audience of people during question and response time. This full-bandwidth communication makes it harder to misinterpret a speaker's tone and emotion. Physically relocating removes so many distractions to focusing on new ideas, but the physical return after the conference often leaves that focus behind, failing to create the change that was the intent of the conference.
What about new directions? Face-to-face and online conferences as unique species are easy to find. Where are the hybrid entities, conferences that attempt to combine the best of both? Will there be parallel play or will there be cross-over with live audiences mixing in with the online audience? We think of such events as being more powerful the more global they become, but what about the opposite, the opportunity for a company or an institution to have a hybrid conference day, like a required assembly, where everyone either is either presenter or audience for a day, and visible either live or online to all members of the hybrid audience?
The potential of hypbrid events for rich interplay of multiple media is immense.
Some are building open source tools to make online conferencing free.
http://dowire.org/wiki/Open_source_tools_for_online_conferences
http://www.globalprblogweek.com/about/ September 19-23, 2005
http://www.higheredblogcon.com/index.php/about/ April 3-28, 2006
The second blogcon built on the ideas of the first, spreading out topic themes over a longer period of time. Nice. With podcasting now capable of encapsulating any media, the real challenge is to teach the necessary recording and composing skills to build the online presentations. That can easily be a series of online screen movies. Online conferences can capture much of the immediacy and interaction of face-to-face conferences. Their slightly slower pace of many of the online formats could also be seen as an advantage for stimulating deeper reflection. Online format also creates a kind of instant archive which is so expensive to reproduce with live events. Yet nothing online matches the "full bandwidth" of face-to-face interaction in a crowded audience of people during question and response time. This full-bandwidth communication makes it harder to misinterpret a speaker's tone and emotion. Physically relocating removes so many distractions to focusing on new ideas, but the physical return after the conference often leaves that focus behind, failing to create the change that was the intent of the conference.
What about new directions? Face-to-face and online conferences as unique species are easy to find. Where are the hybrid entities, conferences that attempt to combine the best of both? Will there be parallel play or will there be cross-over with live audiences mixing in with the online audience? We think of such events as being more powerful the more global they become, but what about the opposite, the opportunity for a company or an institution to have a hybrid conference day, like a required assembly, where everyone either is either presenter or audience for a day, and visible either live or online to all members of the hybrid audience?
The potential of hypbrid events for rich interplay of multiple media is immense.
Some are building open source tools to make online conferencing free.
http://dowire.org/wiki/Open_source_tools_for_online_conferences
posted by Bob Houghton @ 8:38 AM
2 Comments:
At 8:56 PM,
Laura Gardiner said…
The techonology available is astounding! It seems like their trying to expand blogs to a third dimension.
At 9:29 PM,
baileygr8dane said…
The idea of conferencing using blogging is very interesting. The pros and cons between face-to-face and the computer are close. This idea may be appealing to some, but I find it disappointing that the human contact, the face-to-face conferences are becoming less. Will our world one day stay at home or in buildings, communicating over the internet instead of face-to-face? If that is the case, I think we will all be missing out on all the advantages of personal connections.
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