Monthly Archives: April 2009

What’s plan B?

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A week ago, Steve Wheeler was supposed to present on Edupunk in the Forth Online Round Table of educamp. Unfortunately, his tech equipment and the university servers left him in the lurch. While Steve was trying frantically to get back online, Graham Attwell rescued the situation with PowerPoint Karaoke over Steve’s title slide (you can watch the entire session in Elluminate) and brought along the discussion.

After his failed session, Steve wrote a blog post entitled “Can anybody hear me?” about is intended presentation and his frustration of attempting the humanly possible to get online.

That was the first time that I was in an online session and a presentation could not take place due to the fact that the presenter could not be heard / get back into the system despite previous checks. During CCK08 we had a problem once when slides could not be uploaded to Elluminate, but that was solved quickly by viewing the slides on Slideshare and giving the occassional reference in the chat window to the current slide for late comers.

This debacle led me to think about the question “What is the plan B for online sessions?” When we teach or present at conferences, we usually have a “Plan B”, an alternative, in case the technology we want to use is not available or does not work. I used to have a set of overhead transparencies for presentations and important training material in my luggage. I abandonded that because rooms are now generally well-equipped and sometimes do not have an overhead projector anymore. I still make screenshots of web pages in case the internet does not work and I want to point out something on a live site. Backup copies of the material I need are always stored on a USB stick, sent to my email account and / or uploaded somewhere online. I could even do without the visual support if needed as long as I do not loose my voice.

However, as I have never presented online, I had not thought about what to do when problems occur in the virtual space. Problems like the one we had in CCK08 are manageable when the slides are available online for viewing / downloading. But what can be done when the presenter cannot be heard? A presentation cannot be typed into a chat window. All possible scenarios I came up with always require the internet and another system that allows for synchronous audio discussions. Of course, that requires that the presenter as well as the audience have access to it. That requires a lot from the tech support for online sessions, and I dare say that it is not doable as there are so many factors that are in the dark. Would one have to test two or even three systems in advance to make sure that at least one works?

Less favorable alternatives are the re-scheduling of the session after the tech problem has been solved satisfactorily, a write-up of the presentation as Steve did, or the actual presentation as a post-recording done by the presenter alone at home. Although the latter two are better than not doing the presentation at all, they certainly lack the interactivity with the audience.

So, the question still remains: What’s plan B?

100 out of 365

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Today is April 10 which means that the year 2009 is 100 days old. Today also signifies the 100th photo that I took for each day being inspired by the flickr group 2009/365. I had heard about its predecessor 2008/366 from D’Arcy Norman, Alan Levine and Alec Couros. As I did not find out about this photo project until well into 2008, I did not start last year.

This year I wanted to see if I can accomplish to take and post a picture every day. Thus far, it worked out, but I still have 265 days to go. However, now that I have finished 100, I may post to the photo pool…

There are many “a photo a day” groups on flickr and some have more or less strict themes. I liked the openness of this group as it gives me the freedom to decide on the subjects.

This is a slideshow of my first 100 photos for 2009. I did take more since January and also posted a number of them, but there is only one for each day.

Visual effects and meeting strangers with Alec Couros

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Alec Couros presented “Knock Down the Walls: Toward a Model of Open Teaching” at the MoodleMoot Canada 2009 today. Thanks to the organizers, his presentation was streamed live via Elluminate so that we, unfortunate to not have found our way to Edmonton, were still able to participate and see Alec in action.

As usual, his presentation was inspiring and filled with great examples of open education. However, Elluminate also provided a good deal of discussion in the backchannel for us who participated via it because it seemed that all of us had some issues with the application sharing. It slowed down Alec’s visuals considerably. On the upside, it thus provided for interesting effects:

Slow application sharing

Slow application sharing

Alec could not leave out Omegle, the “chat with a stranger” service that had made the news recently as I remarked a couple of days ago. He was brave to start a chat session at the conference live! And was lucky to have a good sport in his chat room. We will never know who that person was whose chat had been broadcast to all the presentation attendees in Edmonton and around the world.

Live chat in Omegle with 300 people watching

Live chat in Omegle with 300 people watching

You: how are you?
Stranger: fine
Stranger: how are you
You: where are you?
Stranger: belgium
You: how are things in belgium?
Stranger: As boring as usual
Stranger: where do you live
You: we are in edmonton, there are about 300 of us watching this… is that ok?
Stranger: sure
You: sorry, we better go.
You: thanks for the discussion
You: bye for now, take care.

But it did not stop there. Alec took brief glimpses at the change of mindset of teachers and students who participate in open teaching and learning scenarios as well as presented their advantages. When the discussion started and no presentation was needed anymore, all who were in Elluminate experienced a strange moment when we saw our Elluminate environment reflected back to us in Alec’s application sharing window.

Elluminated

Elluminated

It was a great way to ease out late Friday afternoon. Thanks again to everybody involved in making this stream possible.

Update: Alec shares relevant links in connection to his keynote in his blog post “Open/Networked Teaching Keynote at MoodleMoot”.

Chatting to strangers randomly

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I have had a tab with Omegle open in my browser for a couple of days now (and thus forgot from where I got the link :-( ) until I got my nerves together to try the service. Leif K-Brooks, its founder describes it as following:

Omegle is a brand-new service for meeting new friends. When you use Omegle, we pick another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each other. Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like.

In our age of social media, profile pages, nick names, and avatars, in short: our digital identity, Omegle is a clever chat client that is not bothered with these at all. I write “clever” because the absence of these familiar things as well as the fact that the person with whom you chat is chosen randomly, make it novel and intriguing.

Before I clicked on the big “Start a chat” button, I raided my brain of how I could wittily start a conversation though Leif provides a good pointer: “Say Hi”. What would I write next? How would I react to the stranger. What topic would I choose? Would I chicken out at the last minute and abort the chat? Questions over questions. The only strategy that I could think of was: Just dive in and see what happens.

My first attempt to talk to a stranger among the 2600 something users online about an hour ago was rather ill-fated as my stranger who was chosen randomly got cold feet and left the chat just after my – admittedly rather ordinary – conversation opening.

Aborted conversation

Aborted conversation

@injenuity had more luck and created poetry with her stranger (the link to the Twitter status update does not work anymore).

Reading these conversations, I am reminded of the early days of the internet when people said one could talk to strangers not knowing anything about them and everybody could pretend to be anybody. Still, back then one always had a nickname / handle in IRC chats etc. that one was recognized by. Also today we have our usernames, we fill in more or less extensive online profile pages, and even provide avatars. These things help in conversations. We build up our digital identities and hopefully trust with them so that we are regocnized the next time we log on and converse with others.

Omegle leaves out all these conversation cues and connects total strangers without anything that may help to pinpoint their whereabouts, their (established) identity, and any chance of knowing if re-connected with them is possible there.

I wonder what the average time spent in the chat is, what other strangers talk about. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see a stream of these conversations (and analyze them if the heart desires)?