Event Amplifying With Adobe Connect

#iwmw11 At this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop we live streamed all the plenary talks using Adobe Connect. We were supported with our efforts by Collaborate who support enterprise wide implementations of collaboration solutions. Although I’d had a look at Adobe Connect set up before this was very much a case of learning on the job. In this post I’d like to share what we did and the lessons learnt.

Running Adobe Connect from behind the scenes

Before the Big Day

In advance of the day we set up an Adobe Connect room for the event. We decided to have one room, with one set up and to use this for all the plenaries. This meant that we would only need to pass on one url to remote attendees and they could spend all day in this virtual room. In the room there were two layouts:

• a start layout for when attendees arrived with a clock, a timetable, a chat facility suggesting people say where they were from, a screen showing a running video on how to use Adobe Connect and an IWMW slide saying “back soon”
• a main layout for talks with a video feed of the speaker, the speakers slides, a twitter stream and a chat facility.

Using preparatory mode a moderator can flick between these layouts and alter them without attendees seeing. The start layout was used until the beginning of the first plenary and then again during breaks.

We also set up a video streaming page with details on how remote attendees could enter the IWMW room. All delegates had to enter as guests and would have no microphone privileges.

On the preceding day we tested all the AV equipment and the video feed. Everything looked fine, though there was a slight issue with using a guest account on the Reading University network. It was agreed that all moderators would need a wired connection. We also made sure that responsibilities were clearly assigned and moderators were given in log ins. Rich Pitkin, one of our event amplifiers, would be responsible for the video feed. Pauline Foley from Collaborate would be responsible for recording sessions and monitoring any attendee audio or visual problems. I would be responsible for all other aspects of the set up including uploading and replicating slide movement (all slides need to be progressed manually as it is too complicated to feed in from the speaker’s PC/laptop), monitoring remote attendees chat, monitoring the layouts etc. The moderators have a private area that allows them to see all the attendees and chat amongst themselves – this was really useful when there were AV problems.

On the Big Day

On the first morning I had responsibilities for opening the event, introducing the speakers and chairing. I wanted to get as much done in advance so made every effort to get hold of speaker slides in advance. Adobe Connect allows you to open up documents in advance, it then caches them, which saves time later on. PPTs and PDF seem to work best, we didn’t have a lot of luck with key note.

Moderator view of Adobe Connect

Just before the start I changed the layout screen to the main layout. During the talks I replicated the slide movement and kept my eye on how things were looking.

Some Tips

• Have a laptop next to you that shows what the remote attendees can see. This is invaluable for checking that what you are doing is being shown correctly.
• Write a methodical list of what you need to do before the start of each session – for example each of our plenaries had a different hash tag (e.g. #p1). This needed to be changed in the Twitter search box, occasionally I forgot to do it right at the start.
• I should have hidden the chat after each talk, this would have made each session recording stand alone.
• During one of the plenaries we had a few audio issues – we should have made more effort to test the set up in each break.
• Some slides were slightly messed up during the conversion to an Adobe Connect friendly format. I probably should have checked each set before using them. Possibly converting a PPT to a PDF would have retained the formatting better.
• I had to continually refresh the Twitter search – I am still unsure if there is a way to have this done manually.
• A couple of the plenaries included live demos. Although there are ways to share your screen the moderator needs to be prepared for this so they can replicate the link clicking. If possible ask your speakers what they are planning. In the final session we actually gave up replicating what the speakers were doing and ended up removing the document box and just using the video stream.

Conclusions

We peaked at around 30 remote attendees and had over 20 at all the sessions. Aside of a few technical difficulties at the start of day 2 we managed to provide good quality streaming throughout the event. Pauline did a great job of turning around the recordings and we were able to offer these on the same day as the talks were given (see individual talks for the recordings). Overall I would thoroughly recommend Adobe Connect for any event amplification, it was slick, fully customisable and easy to use. Thumbs up all round!

The Economical way to Amplify Your Event

Last week at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011 I facilitated a session entitled The Economical way to Amplify Your Event with Brian Kelly.

In the session we compared two approaches. Firstly we tried out amplifying using a decent camera and delivering it through a net vibe page. The live stream recording is also available.

We also streamed the session using a phone and Bambuser.

In the session we highlighted the work carried out by the Greening Events II Project funded by JISC Greening ICT Programme. The first stage of work, carried out by ILRT based at the University of Bristol, produced the Green Event Guidelines document and the Rethinking Events report. The second stage of work has brought UKOLN in and has us creating a toolkit for event organisers.

The rest of the session built on some work I’ve already done in this area looking at tools, approaches and concerns. The slides are available from my Slideshare account and are embedded below.

Supporting Researcher Engagement With Social Tools

Today I signed in to the Netskills “Supporting Researcher Engagement With Social Tools” online talk presented by Alan Cann, University of Leicester. Alan wrote a guest blog post on Go Forth and Amplify! for us last year.

It was a really interesting talk and presented very effectively in Elluminate.

More Tips for Elluminate

Everytime I attend an Elluminate session, either as a presenter, moderator or participant there seem to be more tips to add to the list. Here are a couple from today’s session:

• Tick list – I liked the ‘tick list’ slide at the beginning of the session. The moderator asked all participants to give him a green tick in response to the questions: Can you hear me? Can you see slides,? Can you see the Web cam?
• Clarity about chat – Clarity over questions and discussion is always important. Steve Boneham explained that the rules were: general chit chat in chat box, formal questions by hand raising in the discussion time.
• Discussion time – The session was nicely split up in to brief (10 minutes or so) sections with a 5 minute break for discussion time. This worked really well.
• Video – The Netskills team explained that the Elluminate session would be available for watching later on and that the video would also be available by itself for sharing. They use blip.tv for this.

The Talk Itself

Alan used the RIN paper If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0 and his response to it (Cann, A., Dimitriou, K. & Hooley, T. (2011) Social Media: A Guide for Researchers. London: Research Information Network.) as the basis for the talk. He used a couple of case studies and quotations from researchers about social media to raise a number of different issues. For example he introduced the Visitors and Residents principle – Residents are much more comfortable with social media and live out a portion of their identity online whereas Visitors see social networking as tools that you use (and leave). There’s a good introduction to it by Dave White from the University of Oxford. [Dave gave the previous Netskills online talk on The Rhetoric of Openness.]

Alan also talked about some other interesting ideas: A holistic view of social media – it’s all an incremental process including the QA of knowledge, information overload being more filter failure (ignore or read or park or discard!), filter bubbles, bad networks, web personalisation and more.

A lot to follow up and some good book recommendations too! I’ll share the recorded session links with you as soon as I have them.

I’ve also just spotted Emma Cragg’s notes on the session – these are great – page 1 and page 2.

Video Conferencing: the Green Choice

Over the last few years more people have started to advocate the green benefits of video conferencing, however we continue to tread with caution. Projects like the How Green is my Videoconference? and the JISC Greening Events Project have looked in more detail at both the real benefits and the possible negative aspects of such practices. Systematic responses like the rebound effect can sometimes offset the beneficial effects of new video conferencing technologies. However video conferences remain a much greener alternative to long-distance travel and the technologies used are improving all the time.

Rashed Khan is an advocate of video conferencing. He graduated from the University of Bradford with an Msc in Software Engineering where his dissertation involved a large amount of research on video conferencing as well as RSS. Rashed is now working part time as a web developer and is also involved in marketing on behalf of Video Conferencing and Telepresence experts Lifesize. He has written a guest blog post for us on why video conferencing is the green choice.

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Video conferencing not only saves money by eliminating travel costs; it also reduces the harmful emissions and fossil fuel use that are necessary for business conference travel. By using the power of the Internet for clear, sharp video and voice transmission, video conferencing allows people from across the country or even across the world to meet and conduct real-time, face-to-face discussions from the convenience of their own offices at a mutually agreed upon time. Often, that time is convenient for all participants in the discussion no matter their own time zones.

This means that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars in travel and lodging costs are saved, as the price of a video conferencing session often amounts to less than that of even an automobile trip from a neighbouring American state. Moreover, video conferencing uses only small amounts of electricity, as relatively little power is needed to maintain an Internet connection and a computer during the video conference. This contrasts remarkably with the huge amount of fossil fuel that is expended when participants in a traditional conference have to travel to a central location by car, train or airplane.

In addition, Internet communications, including Video Conferencing, do not emit any significant levels of greenhouse gases or other pollutants into the air. Needless to say, this is not the case with any form of travel in any vehicle that is powered by fossil fuel. Therefore, relying upon video conferencing for business discussions, or even for family reunions, minimizes harm to the environment.

Video conferencing also eliminates the need for arranging lodging for conference participants. The budget for lodging associated with a traditional conference can easily equal twenty or thirty times the cost of a video conference.

Since everything which is discussed in a video conference is saved and downloaded, there is no need for the huge amounts of paper that are often given out at traditional conferences. This saves printing costs and also is beneficial to the environment. Less paper means less waste in our landfills, and relying on Video Conferencing servers for saving the proceeding of the conference also eliminates the need for disks and other non-biodegradable materials that are often distributed at traditional conferences. In addition to this, the video can be saved using the H.264 video format which drastically reduces the file size of any content that was recorded since H.264 is capable of compressing files up to 50% more than some of the older file formats.

The introduction of HD Video conferencing has enabled video to be viewed in crystal clear High Definition and many organisations now offer full 1080P video conferencing which results in an amazingly life like experience. Sceptics would often refute the use of HD video conferencing by claiming that a high amount of bandwidth is required in order to be able to transmit a High Definition signal which would prove too costly but this is no longer the case since the H.264 video format allows a HD signal to be transmitted by using only 768kbps of data. This is relatively small compared to what today’s broadband internet connections are capable of.

Video conferencing is arguably the most effective way to gather large amounts of people and allow them to have a face to face conversation without the need to travel many miles. As technology becomes more advanced, video conferencing solutions are becoming cheaper than ever which is bringing video conferencing to the masses and more people are realising the financial and environmental benefits of video conferencing as a tool to communicate to people all over the World in the comfort of their own home or office.

A Fool and Her Password are Easily Parted

I’ve just spent a couple of days away at the JISC conference in Liverpool. The event was really useful (I particularly enjoyed the session by JISC Digital Media and co on Using digital media to improve teaching and learning) and there were plenty of oppurtunities to network (with colleagues I already knew (physically and virtually) and people I hadn’t met before). Our session on Amplified events went well and Chris Sexton has written a nice post that sums up the main discussion points. Brian Kelly has also produced a Storify story about the session.

However I know that in years to come it’s not the conference or the talks that will stick in my mind but my journey home. Liverpool to Chippenham isn’t a straight route and there is quite a lot of changing trains, finding seats, lugging bags about. By the time I got off the train in Bristol I was feeling pretty tired and looking forward to getting home and climbing into my bed. It was then that I realised that I’d left one of my bags on the train.

I went up to Liverpool on the Sunday and so had taken a couple of days clothing and essentials, my various bits of ‘on the road’ technology (such as laptop, chargers, headphones and the like) and my usual handbag stuff – keys, money, phone etc. – all this equated to 3 bags of stuff. I realised I’d left my laptop bag on the train. The thing was this wasn’t just a laptop bag containing a laptop (which would have been bad enough) but it was a laptop bag containing my laptop, my note pad and my other work papers. As I realised my mistake and I started mentally going through the contents of my bag I suddenly realised that there was something in there that I wanted to lose even less than my laptop and what was on the laptop…

I don’t have that great a memory, there is quite a lot going on in my life and I resolve this by being methodical in the way I approach things. My way to stay organised is to be very systematic and write particular things down in particular places. I also back many of these things up just in case (experience has taught me to do this) e.g I now back up contacts by 1) writing them down in an address book 2) having them on my phone 3) synching them with Yahoo. I am also methodical in the way I remember passwords. I write them all down and have a copy of them that I store in a particular place at home. Unfortunately having a back up wasn’t really the issue here. The fact was that my laptop along with a written out list of about 250 user names and their corresponding passwords was now in an abandoned bag heading to Cardiff. There were passwords for all sorts of services from Twitter to Facebook, Paypal to Ebay, Skype to O2 – and many of these accounts had credit card details attached. I was doomed! Anyone who found the list could hack into my identity and quite possibly spend a lot of money on my behalf. Cancelling my credit cards might stop this but someone could still make my life very miserable by ‘being me’ and using my accounts.

Needless to say I was pretty upset and feeling mighty cross at my stupidity.

After a lot of running around like a headless chicken, a lot of lamenting down the phone to my team leader and a fair amount of pleading with the Bristol station to see if they could get in touch with the train I eventually resigned myself to the fact that there was nothing I could do there and then and I got on a train home. By the time I arrived home I’d already constructed a plan of my next steps – cancelling my cards, running through my ‘at home’ password list and changing the passwords on the most sensitive accounts, banging my head against the wall! However I was saved the effort, luck was on my side and as I walked in the door my husband told me that a train manager had found my bag and was taking it back to Bristol. My husband very kindly drove over to Bristol to get it for me.

So the end result is a big gold star for south Western Trains and their staff, a big gold star for my husband and a big black mark for me, my bag handling and my unacceptable way of storing passwords.

Needless to say I realise I’ve had a lucky escape, I’ve been saved the cost of a laptop and goodness knows what else. I can now clearly see the error of my ways and am on a mission to come up with a better solution for dealing with my ever growing number of logins and passwords.

When I get some time I’m going to take a look at some passwords managers. So far I’ve come accross:

• KeePass Password Safe
• Efficient Password Manager
• RoboForm

Any recommendations much appreciated. I’d also be interested in any other methods people use to store their passwords.

I realise that I’ve been a fool but hopefully telling my tale may inspire others to be less foolish. Hey I’m here to help!

Amplified events, seminars, conferences What? Why? How?

Tomorrow I will be facilitating a workshop along with Brian Kelly (UKOLN) entitled Amplified events, seminars, conferences What? Why? How? at the JISC Conference 2011. The JISC conference is being held at the BT Convention Centre, Kings Dock, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool from 14-15th March 2011.

The workshop will review a variety of approaches which have been taken at a number of national, international and regional events. It will look at the reasons for such approaches, address possible concerns and outline various business models, policies and emerging technologies which can be used to maximise the benefits of amplified events.

I will be concentrating on the How? aspect and talking about some events at which amplification has been carried out. My slides are available from Slideshare and are embedded below.

Other resources from the workshop are available from the UKOLN Web site including a Scribd poster.

View this document on Scribd

Paul Shabajee from ILRT was also meant to be facilitating the workshop with us but unfortunately can’t due to a family bereavement. Paul is now working on the second stage of the Greening Events project.

Amplifying Events in Ariadne

I’ve just had an article published in the latest Ariadne Web Magazine on 10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event.

The article is a write up of the presentation I gave at a UKOLN seminar back in December.

Next month at the JISC Conference 2011 I will be facilitating a workshop with colleagues Brian Kelly and Paul Shabajee entitled Amplified events, seminars, conference. I’ll be using the workshop as an opportunity to expand on some of the case studies mentioned in the Ariadne article.

Elluminating

This morning as part of the UKOLN staff development series UKOLN staff (and others) were treated to an an introductory session on Elluminate entitled Running an Online Event using Elluminate Live! Usage Cases and Best Practices. Brian Kelly has written a blog post on the background to these sessions which we are opening up to external attendees when possible.

Elluminate Session

The session took place at a number of venues. It was presented by Julian Prior (E-Learning Development Officer) and Marie Salter (e-Developments Manager) from the University of Bath, from their office, using Elluminate. It was shown to a number of physical attendees in the UKOLN meeting room from where Brian Kelly moderated the session and assisted remote attendees. There were also a number of remote attendees attending from off site locations.

Elluminate itself is increasingly being used by JISC for meetings and for giving information about new calls so the presentation was very timely.

Julian kicked off with some interactive slides that gave everyone a feel for the software. For example he got remote participants to drag their names on to their location on a map and used the question facility to ask remote workers about the experiences they have had in the past with Elluminate. Julian then published the answers up for all to see.

Elluminate Questions

After we’d all warmed up Julian facilitated some discussion of best practices for moderators and users which included testing audio, encourage lots of interaction (icebreakers, polls, quizzes), checking accessibility, using V room as a practice suite, and more. Elluminate offer some very useful user guides and JISC has recently released some guidance on Elluminate use.

Key Features of Ellluminate

At Bath University Elluminate is currently running as pilot project untill July 2011 at which point they will decide if a full licence should be purchased. Julian explained that they have had a primarlily positive expereice so far so hopefully they will be able to carry the work on. He then gave some examples of how the software has been used at Bath during the pilot. Some of the most successful instances include running an online Q&A/open day session for the clinical psychology departement when a course was over subscribed, chemistry postgrads giving remote seminars and using Elluminate used for job interviews and interviews of foreign students.

Staff watching the Elluminate session at UKOLN

Elluminate has recently been bought out by Blackboard (along with Wimba) which has ruffled a few feathers as there may be changes on the cards. Alternatives out there include Instantpresenter, DimDim, Gotomeeting and Megameeting. There is also BigBlueButton (which I have blogged about in the past), which is an open source alternative and endorsed by the academic community.

The session was really interesting but unfortunately came to an ubrupt end when the fire alarm went off in the main University building!! Luckily all us remote participants got to stay inside in the comfort of our own homes!

A recording of the session is available and the slides are available on Slideshare and embedded below.

10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify your Event

This morning I will be giving a staff development session entitled 10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify your Event along with my colleague Brian Kelly.

The slides from the session are available from Slideshare and embedded below.

We are hoping it will be a very informal session which will allow us to share our experiences and hear from others about theirs.

The session is framed round the 10 ways we feel you can amplify and the (primarily) free tools that are out there. We also touch on some equipment that is available from our internal pool.

The 10 ways are:

1. Video it
2. Stream it
3. Podcast it
4. Snap it
5. Slide it
6. Tweet it
7. Blog it
8. Webinar it
9. Collate it
10. Promote, Share and Archive It

All the urls are available from my Delicious page using the tag ukoln-ascd-10.

Go Forth and Amplify!

Alan Cann is a senior lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Leicester. In recent years he has worked on developing new approaches to learning materials involving Web 2.0 technologies and is particularly interested in the educational affordances of social objects and socially-constructed knowledge. He blogs at Science of the Invisible.

Last year he organised an amplified staff development session (Learning and Teaching in the Sciences Conference) at the Student Learning Centre at the University of Leicester. The event was a great success and Alan has agreed to share his top tips with us.

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An enormous amount of time, effort and money is poured into training sessions within institutions. In some cases, there may be good reasons why these events need to be closed and secretive, for example commercial sensitivity or patient confidentiality. In the vast majority of cases however, the hosting institution has more to gain by sharing the collected knowledge around such events rather than keeping them quiet. In the past, there would have been a considerable cost element involved in such an undertaking, but this is no longer true. What remains is a closed culture where many institutions lack transparency, which is self-harming rather than conferring any institutional advantage.

Amplified events utilize freely available online social networks to record and relay discussions from a physical event to a much larger online audience. Through the generation of an online thread, amplification also permits two-way discussions between local and remote participants. With the prevalence of wifi and 3G networks, and increasing ownership of internet-enabled mobile devices, amplifying training events is a fairly simple task which involves more cultural than technical challenges.

I was involved with organizing my first amplified event in 2009, although since then I have been involved with much bigger events such as the Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C). Almost irrespective of scale, a simple checklist will help to ensure the success of such a venture:

Start early
Effective amplification of an event requires momentum, so it is important to start early. This means talking publicly (and encouraging others to do the same) about the build up to the event; booking, directions, expectations, etc.

Agree a tag and/or hashtag
As explained in the background section above, tags are crucial to amplifying events as they enable the aggregation of what would otherwise be disparate information. For most web services, blogs (such as WordPress or Blogger) or photo sharing sites (such as Flickr) a simple alpha-numeric tag is sufficient. For Twitter, it is useful to prefix the tag with the hash character (#). The important thing is that the tag is both unique to the event (so that only items related to the event concerned are aggregated) and short (so it is easy to input).

Promote a unique tag and/or hashtag
Just having a tag or hashtag is not sufficient, participants (and potential participants) need to know about it, so advertise it as widely as possible as soon as possible.

Build a network
It might be that the event concerned has a number of people involved who are already part of an existing network, that is to say they already know each other, perhaps in-person, or perhaps through interacting online. This means it will be more likely that they will be comfortable with interacting with each other at the event and reduces inertia and generates momentum. To build a network, look out for who is using the tags or hashtags (set up alerts via RSS or FriendFeed) and start conversations.

Be inclusive
If a network is already up and running it can be a bit intimidating for newcomers if they are not used to interacting in this way. Inclusivity should be encouraged by simply being welcoming and friendly to newcomers (just as would be done in person).

Get permissions
Getting permissions from people applies largely to photographs. If you are going to be posting photos of people online (which will be discoverable by search because the event is so well amplified) make sure you get people’s permissions. The easiest way to do this is via booking form or sign in sheet with a check box for people to opt out and an instruction for them to make themselves known to the organisers at the beginning of the event so that it is clear who does not want to be photographed.

Display the amplification on screen
It is unlikely that everyone who is physically present at an event will be participating online too. Therefore, in order to help everyone see what is going on you can project onto a screen a site which provides an up to date summary of everyone’s contribution (we used http://twitterfall.com/ but other free sites provide similar functionality). To enhance the experience for those who are participating online but are not physically present, also consider streaming video of what is going on in the room (e.g. http://www.ustream.tv/).

Use an aggregating site
An aggregating site, such as a Friendfeed group (e.g. http://friendfeed.com/solondon) or a Facebook page (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/ALTConf) can be used to collect all tagged information into one stream; tweets, blog posts, photos, etc.
Collect and archive the data for analysis before it disappears
Information on Twitter is only retained for a finite period so it should be recorded before, during and after the event (e.g. TwapperKeeper) so that analysis of the data can be performed.

For an amplified event to be anything other than ephemeral, it is important that as much of the online data as possible is captured and written up in some form after the event to achieve permanency and lasting impact. For this reason, all participants need to be informed and made aware of the public nature of the online discussions and data collection via any hashtag. However, a Twitter hashtag provides a convenient means of allowing any participant who wants to attend the physical event and to have conversations online but not to have their data collated to opt out without isolation.

Go forth and amplify!