The latest production from the Pontydysgu studios! Regular readers may recall that in August we worked with the European Educational Research Association on ‘amplyfying’ their annual conference, the European Conference on Educational Research, held in 2010 in Helsinki.

One of the things we did was to make a short ‘impressions’ video, intended both as a record of the conference and as a trailer for the 2011 conference to be held in Berlin.

Most of the video used here was shot on a Flip camera and was edited with Apple’s iMovie ’09 software. Great work by Jo Turner-Attwell.

You can see more multimedia from Helsinki 2010 and find out about the 2011 conference on the ECER web site.

I talked in previous posts about our work with the European Conference on Educational Research to ‘amplify’ the conference, recently held in Vienna. This involved setting up various social media channels including a Twitter stream and a iTunesU page, producing a series of video interviews with conveners of the different networks which organise ECER and b9radcasting three live radio shows from the conference.

We also undertook to stream four keynote speeches, run in two parallel sessions as well as the opening. Easy, I thought. Like many of you I have live streamed from different events, pointing a camera or even a MacBook at the speaker and linking in to  uStream or Justin.tv or one of the other social video platforms. It turned out not to be so simple.

We were working with a community not generally used to social media. And quite simply, the idea of pointing them to a platform advertising poker, acne treatments didn’t seem a good idea. Plus we had an issue with the reliability and quality of the free services. Livestream looked a better idea especially though their premium accounts. This allows you to have your own channel and remove the adverts.but a single channel on Livestream costs 350 dollars a month, with twelve months billing in advance. And we needed two channels. Back to the drawing board. We discovered that Ustream has set up another service called Watershed and indeed for a time were tempted by this. Watershed offers per view payments, but the prices are relatively high. And the terms and conditions of service for the monthly or annual contracts was impenetrable. No problem, we thought, we will ring them and clarify the conditions. Then we discovered there was no telephone number on their site. All you cold do was ask questions on a bulletin board, largely filled with complaints about the service and the total lack of technical support.

OK – so that didn’t seem such a good idea. Last resort – ask a friend. I twittered out for anyone with ideas of a service we could use. And somewhat to my surprise, no-one could come up with a solution, other than the services we had already looked at.

Back to searching on the Internet. Of course there are many companies offering professional streaming services but they all seem geared towards corporate or media organisations, not towards education or for relatively low numbers of live viewers.

I finally stumbled on a web site from a Canadian company called NetroMedia. Their prices were not clear but they said that for one off events you could fill in a query form. So I did, not with any great hope. To my surprise about half an hour later, I had an email reply asking for more details about the event I wished to stream. And to my even greater surprise, some forty minutes after returning this a person rang me. Yes, a real live person!!!

She calculated how much bandwidth we would need and offered us a service for 100 Canadian dollars, plus 20 dollars for unlimited technical support. (Note that if you buy into this or a similar service, it is important to buy sufficient bandwidth in advance, extra bandwidth per view is relatively expensive). Woo, away we go. Even better some twenty minutes after paying them, Darren, the technical support man rung us. This was very helpful, because although the set up is relatively simple, we required two video streams going out simultaneously, and that required a little fiddling.

NetroMedia do not offer a portal for streams. Instead they provide a streaming service and you embed a Flash video player in your own web site. This suited us just fine. The up stream was encoded through the free Adobe Flash Media Encoder, which worked well on both a PC and a Mac. The only thing I would like is to have more direction control over what we were streaming – e.g to be able to switch between a feed from the data projector and the video but I am sure we can work out how to do that. I am very happy with the quality of the streaming (you can view the recordings by clicking on read more on each of the channels on the ECER video streaming web page) although we were helped in this regard by the kind loan from Helsinki University of two very good video cameras.

Of course, if you are working in a University or large organisation, you may be able to run your own streaming server.But such an investment is beyond Pontydysgu, or I guess many small organisations. Yet video streaming is going to be an important part of Amplifying future events. And we need a reliable and reasonable quality of service.  I would certainly go to Netromedia again. But I also wonder if there is some way we could collectively organise resources for streaming in the educational technology community to both share know-how and expertise and infrastructure.

Another article reporting from the European Conference on Educational Research held in Helsinki last week.

Most of my time at the conference was spent working on our Amplified project, using multi media and social software to turn the conference outwards and improve the experience for face to face delegates. More reports on this work later in the week.

But I did get to go to two sessions. The first was a symposium entitled ‘Technology WILL NOT save education – views on teaching learning and researching in the Digital Age’ .

Here is the abstract:

Deeply immersed in the Society of Knowledge great efforts, including the use of educational technology have been carried out in order to improve education. Changes in the cultural contexts where education takes place have posed new questions both in educational practice and research. Very often changes in educational practices are subject to factors within the context where they are  pursued and it is probable that the results vary depending on different cultural factors.  Within the field of Educational Technology it becomes essential to manage cultural change in order to make technology happen.

Educational institutions have to provide answers to all agents involved in the educational field: a change of methodology is needed and, in many instances, this will depend upon cultural factors. Thus, cultural contexts have to be taken into consideration in their policies and activities.  Cultural change does not come with technology but with the transformation of educational practices and the revision of  traditional  methodologies. The role of educators is key the same as the position of educational institutions which have to provide the means to facilitate cultural change.

The emergent social networks and Web 2.0 applications have given way to a great variety of educational possibilities which may help consider students, not under traditional categories of race, class and gender but instead taking into account local and global contexts and diversity. Web 2.0 applications are powerful socialization and communication tools that support the process of construction of knowledge and can have an incredible educational potential for instruction.

This symposium seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of research in different fields which provides an outlook from different points of view of teaching, learning and researching in the Digital Age. Its departing point is the assumption that technology will NOT save Education unless cultural change takes place.

The different papers  in this simposium try to account from different viewpoints for aspects which aim at improving education. Thus,  the first paper discusses the need of  networking culture in different disciplines regarding approaches and practices of researchers which have made use of web technologies.   The importante of networking is also revised as a catalyst of social and educational change. The second paper deals with the construction of a new model of curriculum more in relation to new learning needs and approaches  and the eminent role that educators play on it, especially considering their adaptation to change and their practices within teaching and learning processes. The third  paper deals with the use of Personal learning Environments as systems that help learners be in control of their own learning process by setting goals sharing ideas and  managing learning content in both individual and group basis. The last of the papers faces the educational potentialities of Web 2.0 applications as powerful socialization and communication tools that can support processes of knowledge construction and can have an incredible educational potential for Foreign Language instruction.

I chaired the symposium, with my good friends Linda Casteneda, Ricardo Torres and Maria Perifanou presenting and Mar Camacho acting as discussant.

We spent a lot of time thinking about the format, not wishing to do the usual 3 25 minutes presnetations with a short time for questions and discussion. Instead we reverted the usual order, with Mar opening by presenting a brief overview of the ideas behind the symposium and then inviting delegates to provide a brief opinion about our approach.

We then had three ten minute presentations from Linda, Ricardo and Maria. Linda presented research she had undertaken at the University of Murcia in Spain. Basically, despite efforts to introduce technology into the curriculum for student teachers at the university, she concluded little had changed in terms of teaching and learning practice. Her conclusion was that technology on its own will not change anything. To make effective use of new technologies requires fundamental curriculum reform and the development and adoption of new pedagogies for teaching and learning. Ricardo and Maria both reflected on instances of effective practice, drawn from their own work. Ricardo looked at the development of Personal Learning Environments in a programme he teaches in Barcelona. And Maria reported on the development and use of webquests for teaching Italien in Thessaloniki. It had been our intention to group the different issues raised by delegates and speakers and use them to break into smaller discussion groups. However in the end the range of issues and the different levels of experience of participants led us to move towards a single group discussion.

The discussion was successful in terms of the active involvement of nearly all the participants. However it tended to be unfocused. A series of different issues were raised. One prevalent concern was that the rigidity of assessment regimes prevented innovation in pedagogic approaches. Another was the resistance of school and institutional management to change. A third was the attitudes of students, who while expecting the use of technology in teaching and learning, were still reluctant to take control of their own learning processes in the way required for effective use of new pedagogic approaches.

Other issues included digital literacies and teachers dispositions towards using technology for teaching. Whilst they were happy to use it for preparing lessons, for presentations and for administrations, they were less comfortable to use it for teaching and learning in practice.

One interesting issue was who should “set the agenda” for change. One participant was concerned that the way technology was being introduced in education was taking away ‘agency’ from teachers in the classroom.

It was a enjoyable session. But whilst most seemed open to and supportive of our hypothesis, there was little consensus on a way forward.

Very busy last day on the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki on Friday and travelling on Saturday made it a bit difficulty to upload the podcast version of the last of our radio programmes. Further details will follow.

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Here is the podcast of our todays Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE internet radio show from the ECER 2010 conference in Helsinki. More details will follow soon.

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The Pontydsygu team is hard at work in Helsinki working on multimedia at the European Conference on Educational Research. The idea is three fold – firstly to start a process of turning the conference, which attracts over 200 delegates every year, outwards to those unable to attend face to face. Secondly we aim to enhance the conference experience through the use of social software and multimedia and thirdly to produce a rich record of ideas and discourses surrounding the conference.

ECER is a traditional research conference, organised through a series of different disciplinary and topic networks. It will take more than a year to change such a culture but we have made a modest beginning.

We now have a shared flickr group and a Twitter account. Both of those are integrated into the ECER web site. Compared to an educational technology conference, the us eof Twitter is limited but some delegates are beginning to ‘get the point’ and are using the conference #ECER2010 hash tag.

We are producing twelve videos based on interviews with the link conveners who coordinate different networks. Video is a new medium for many of these researchers, used to expressing tehir ideas through research papers, books and symposia. But I am happy with the interveiws we have undertaken so far and think hey will add a new dimension to explaining and sharing ideas.

I have mixed feelings about the video streaming. At a technical level we have learnt a lot. One of the things we wanted to do was provide high quality video. This is very different from the adhoc streaming from a webcam to ustream or Justin.tv. For one thing we felt that the advertising on these channels would be unacceptable to many of our potential audience. And the quality is simply not good enough. After a lot of investigations, we bought in streaming services from a Canadian company, Netromedia. Netromedia is not a portal, but instead provide a feed which can be embedded within a web site. And we have embedded Flash viewers in the ECER conference web site. We agreed to stream the keynotes from the conference. We patched the stream from the audio system in the rooms the keynotes were held, and mixed that with our video feed. The quality was on the whole extremely good. I am less convinced with the content. that is not to detract from the scholarly content of the keynote speeches themselves. I am just not sure that a 45 minute academic keynote is the best content for streaming from a  conference. Better may be to focus on more interactive sessions, in which we can involve remote participants. More reflections on this in a future blog.

But now for the next interview…

We had today the first of our three live internet radio shows from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki, FInland. Here is the podcast version of this 30 minute programmes.

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Some four or so weeks ago I wrote about the work Pontydysgu are doing with the European Educational Research Association, EERA, around their annual conference, The European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). The conference starts this Wednesday in Helsinki and will involve hundreds of sessions with some 2000 delegates organised through 26 different networks.

ECER has an extensive web site but has until now not ventured into the Web 2.0 field. We are supporting them with the use of social software and video to enhance the conference experience for delegates, to promote knowledge sharing between delegates from different research areas in education, to produce a multimedia record of the conference and to help those unable to attend in person to participate in at least some of the conference events.

We have already agreed and publicised a conference hash tag – #ECER2010. We have set up a twitter account – ECER_EERA and have slowly gathered 42 followers. We have a Flickr group. We have installed plug-ins to the ECER web site which is run on the Open Source Typo3 Content management system to integrate the flickr and twitter streams.

And now it is time for the live conference. We are planning three main activities this week.

Video streaming

We are streaming the opening ceremony and the four keynote sessions. Because the keynotes are being held in parallel sessions, we have set up two different streaming channels. You can access the video channels here.

Wednesday 25 August

17:45 – 18:45 (Finnish time) 18:45 – 19:45 (CET) Keynote 2 – Marie Verhoeven Marie Verhoeven is Professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. At ECER 2010, she will analyse how cultural domination through schooling process has to be rethought, in a context which combines cultural and normative pluralism, globalized international policies and normative discourses, and “post-massification” equality of opportunity policies (often articulated with educational “quasi-market” mechanisms).

Friday 27 August

13:30 – 14:30 (Finnish time) 14:30 – 15:30 (CET) – Keynote 4 – Fazal Rizvi Fazal Riszvi will discuss issues of diversity in education, and how the various transnational processes require them to be conceptualized in radically new ways The title of his lecture is “Re-thinking Issues of Diversity within the Context of an Emergent Transnationalism”.

Conference Internet radio

We will be producing three LIVE internet radio broadcasts from our radio station, Sounds of the Bazaar.. The shows will be broadcast from 1200 – 1230 Central European Time on Wednesday 25 August and Thursday 26 August and from 1100 – 1130 Central European Time on Friday 27 August (Don’t forget, if you are listening from the UK it is one hour earlier). You can access the shows by pointing to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u in your browser. This will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice.

Videos and iTunes U

We will be making some thirteen videos at the conference – twelve interviewing conveners from the different networks and the thirteenth a mash up of vox pops from delegates. And we are setting up an iTunes U site to access all the different outputs.

It is going to be a busy week. We hope you will be able to join us for at least part of the fun.

The Sounds of the Bazaar summer series of LIVE Internet radio shows continues. This week we will be broadcasting three live shows from the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in Helsiniki.

The shows will be broadcast form 1200 – 1230 Central European Time on Wednesday 25 August and Thursday 26 August and from 1100 – 1130 Central European Time on Friday 27 August (Don’t forget, if you are listening form the UK it is one hour earlier).

ECER is Europe’s largest education conference with some 2000 delegates from every area of educational research. It is organised through a series of networks. We will be talking to some of the network chairs as well as to conference delegates.

You can ‘drop into the conference’ by tuning into Sounds of the Bazaar. Just go to

http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u

This will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice.

I’ve just read a neat article by John Popham on “How to amplify your event“. I actually didn’t realise what the word amplify meant in this context. But Pontydysgu is working with the European Education Research Association to ‘amplify’ the European Conference on Educational Research this year. The conference, as far as I know the largest Educational Conference in Europe with some 2200 delegates, in being held in Helsinki from 25 – 27 August. The theme of the conference is “Education and Cultural Change.”

One obvious question is what do we want to achieve? Basically we have three aims. One is to enhance the confernce experience for those attending. ECER is run by some 27 or so networks and with so many attending, it can be difficult to keep in touch with everything going on – or even to just find old friends. We hope the use of technology will help get people together, find old and new friends and allow discussion of ideas – before, during and after the conference. Secondly we hope to start to open the conference outwards – to involve those not able to attend face to face and to enhance connections with the wider communities of education research. And thirdly we are trying to build a small history of the conference – not just through papers – but through recording people’s reflections of their experiences and learning.

Now down to the technology – what are we doing?

Firstly we have agreed a hashtag – #ECER2010 and are encouraging delegates to use the hashtag.

We have set a twitter account – EERA_ECER – and are sending out regular tweets (followers very welcome). We have also added a plug in to the ECER web site to accumulate our tweets – http://www.eera-ecer.eu/ecer/ecer2010/twitter-news/?no_cache=1

We have also set up an ECER2010 group on Flickr and are asking delegates to add their photos to that group. Just go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/ecer2010/ and join the group.

We are planning to stream a number of the keynote sessions – more details soon.

We will be making short videos with twelve of the different network conveners as well as vox pops with conference delegates.

And finally, we will be broadcasting 3 special issues of the Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE internet radio programme from 1300 – 1330 Finnish time (12-12.30 Central European time) on 25, 26 and 27 August. Point your browser at http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u and this will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice. You can also send us your questions and comments by Twitter using the #ECER2010 hashtag. And to follow Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE events throughout the summer join the SoB Facebook group.

So this is our idea for the European Conference on Educational Research Amplified. But what have we left out? What else could we do? All ideas very welcome.