I am going to be facilitating a conference blog for the upcoming New York State Association of Independent Schools Conference for IT Managers (thanks to Alex volunteering me). Should be a great conference. Will Richardson, Alan Nobember, Dave Cormier, Nancy White and others will all be there. It is all about web 2.0 and the classroom.
There is a Blogger blog setup for the conference right now, but I am trying to think of a way to get a more collaborative blogging space going. In the past, we had a blog post for each workshop, and then people could log in and comment. Do you have a better idea?
I am thinking of creating a community on Education Bridges where all the conference people go to post. Or, creating a Drupal site similar to KairosNews where anyone who registers can post to their own blog, and it gets copied to the front page. What do you think? I am looking for a way to use the web to collaborate with each other over a short, 3 day conference.
Keywords: Alan November, blog, Blogger, collaborate, conference, Dave Cormier, KairosNews, Mohonk, Nancy White, software, web 2.0, Will Richardson
Posted by arvind s grover |
Comments
Hello, Arvind,
I'd recommend avoiding Blogger -- as you point out, it doesn't give you much in the way of a collaborative environment for a group of people.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I'd recommend a Drupal site -- you could use this in four ways:
1. set up individual accounts for workshop leaders (or, even use the organic groups module to create groups for each workshop) -- this would give you your workshop specific blogs;
2. set up individual users with accounts on the site -- they could blog the conference from within the site;
3. set up an agreed upon tag for the conference -- people could use this tag for delicious and flickr (for people posting links they learned about at the conference, and photos they took at the conference), and in their own personal blogs (perhaps a technorati search on the tag, which in turn generates an rss feed). These feeds could allbe aggregated/linked on the site.
4. A place where conferees could submit the feeds of their own blog for inclusion -- these blogs could then be aggregated on the site.
This would give you a conference web site that would allow for collaboration during the conference, as well as after.
Cheers,
Bill
Bill, lots of great ideas here. During this weeks 21st Century Learning webcast, Alex and I are going to discuss what it takes to make a website for a Conference 2.0.
One of the biggest challenges will be getting enough people to participate in the conference blogging site. I am not sure how much "work" attendees want to do or would be willing to do. I guess I need to figure out how to sell them on it.
Hello, Arvind,
RE: "One of the biggest challenges will be getting enough people to participate in the conference blogging site. I am not sure how much "work" attendees want to do or would be willing to do."
Agreed -- a few assumptions that will be safe to make about the people going --
1. Some (a perhaps sizeable minority) participants will already be using web 2.0 tools like blogs, delicious and flickr -- these folks might not want to create YAA (Yet Another Account) for the conference web site, but they would not be averse to tagging their posts with a distinct, conference specific tag --
2. Some users will be curious about web 2.0 tools, but will not have used them yet -- these folks might enjoy using the conference web site.
3. To make the site work in any form, some folks will need to spend some time creating some good content. People will need a reason to show up, and then, hopefully, the interactive possibilities will entice them to stay and participate.
It will also help if you recruit other conference organizers to actively participate in the site (by blogging on the site, by posting photos that get aggregated onto the site, etc) -- often, when people see what can be done, they are more likely to participate themselves. It wouldn't hurt to have some presenters reference the site in their talks, and to collect as much info from presentations as possible on the site.
Cheers,
Bill