Tag Archives: presentation

Presentation on the e-portfolio use in the BScE

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The 3rd eLearning Charter Conference was held at the University of Luxembourg on 30 October 2009. We had decided to videotape the four presentations to allow the other members of the Charter Universities who could not be present to see them and also other interested parties. A result of this meeting was also that we set up a site to gather further discussions and resources.

I delivered the contribution of the University of Luxembourg with Charles Max and Bob Reuter as co-authors. Our presentation was entitled “Integrating Mahara as e-portfolio system and social network in the BScE”. The BScE is the Bachelor en Sciences de l’Education (Bachelor in Educational Sciences), a 4-year study program at the University of Luxembourg. A recording is available (may not show up in feed readers).

Streaming a stream

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Alec Couros and Dean Shareski dueled today at #tatc09. Each of them presented their favorite web tools in the Cool Tools Duel which was broadcast live on Ustream. The audience – in the room as well as online could even vote for their favorite presenter. Both Alec and Dean presented great tools and the audience loved their duel.

Alec presented Ustream and thus he was streaming a stream and everybody could watch the stream in the stream streamed in the stream. ;-)

Streaming a Stream

Streaming a Stream

It was tough to decide whom to give my vote. In the end, Alec got it,but the irony is that I used two tools that Dean talked about to take the above picture. ;-) I took the screenshot with Skitch, a tool that I truely love to have on my Mac, and added the frame and the text with Picnik.

Thanx for sharing this presentation.

Walls Optional: Livestream, live chat, live fun

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On May 1, 2009, the mini conference Walls Optional took place at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia. Alec Couros was invited to give the keynote, A Tweet and a Poke, How Educators Can Harness the Power of Social Networks, at this one-day event. Luckily for everybody who could not make it to Canada, the keynote was streamed live. Unfortunately for me, I could not watch it because the stream would not want to come through without huge buffering problems.

Thus, I looked forward to the recording, but that also had problems. The only hope I had left was to contact tech support. Clint Lalonde, Distributed Education Web Specialist at the college, was incredibly kind and quickly replied that they worked on a solution to make the stream available somewhere else. Within a few days after the keynote, I received the link to the recording on blip.tv and could watch Alec’s presentation which was great. I had already downloaded the presentation file, read the notes, and knew what I was getting myself into watching the recording.

However, seeing the tour de force on video was something else. Time flew by quickly with the many examples of social networking and how we can benefit from it that Alec showed. He also dared to do a live presentation of Omegle, the chat-with-a-stranger, with which you never know what the stranger on the other end may say. The stranger Alec and the 120 people in the room chatted with was a good sport and actually wanted to get to know all the participants. ;-) He received the link to the stream, but it was never found out whether he watched it or not.

Alec made his point clear that building up a personal learning network is important and also very beneficial for learning and in particular for professional development.

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?

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”.