Reflections on MQUNCON09

As has become both tradition and compulsion, in the wake of the session I facilitated/presented at yesterdays Technology in Learning and Teaching Unconference I wanted to spend some time unpacking how things went.

Before I get to that though, I wanted to express my appreciation for the eventitself, because it was absolutely fantastic. The organisers of the event really went all-out. There were support staff available for all manner of questions and technical inquiry; pre-event coffee, tea and nibblies; and a fantastic lunch. Truly it was far bigger than I’d expected, which helped to make the event an even greater experience.

Likewise, the mood of the event was equally inspiring, with its informal, unconference ethos shining through the whole time. Sessions were planned, altered and adapted as-needed, creating a sense of flexibility that really helped alleviate some of the technical issues that popped up from time to time.

Importantly, Dean Groom did a fantastic job of setting the scene first thing in the morning, explaining the notion of what an unconference is, its participant-driven nature, and the idea that the event will only be as successful as we all make it.

This served to do two things I think. First, it set the expectations for the people who’d really rather just observe – they knew that it was NOT going to be your typical symposium or conference – and I think helped open them up to rolling with the changes that arose.

Second, it encouraged the curious, yet shy people to jump into things. The use of Twitter as a back channel, for example, helped provide an avenue for discussion and participation on a more anonymous, less exposed level. As a result we saw some pretty dynamic exchanges of ideas, opinions and experiences.

My hope is this back channel will help sew the seeds of a network whereby people can continue to explore and discuss the ideas that emerged across the course of the day.

My Presentation

Now, as far as my portion of the day went there were some positive aspects and some not-so positive aspects.

The issues that emerged during the course of my session were really two-fold – a combination of issues with the wireless internet access, and the fact I (as expected) had tried to cram WAY too much subject matter into the session.

I must say though that, by and large, the wireless connection held up pretty well during the day. Dean indicated the degree of available bandwidth in the room was comparable to what you’d have on your home network. So considering how many people were on their laptops and portable devices, using fairly data intensive sites like SecondLife and Quest Atlantis, the connection held up amazingly well overall.

However it did seem like my session saw the majority of the dropped connections. As you might expect, in a session that covered a number of different web-based environments and technologies, there was a high demand/need to demonstrate what the environments looked like, and how they worked. Unfortunately over half the time I was either unable to bring up the site, or the wireless connection dropped out completely.

I think I managed to improvise fairly well all things considered, however the hiccups definitely caused things to become a bit disjointed, and without the ability to actually show the sites I was talking about, I think the implications and impact were fairly diluted. This was exacerbated by my realisation that I had too much to cover and onoccasionbegan to rush a bit.

More time for RSS

In hindsight what I really should have focused on was blogs, RSS, and syndication. There was a fair amount of interest in blogs – which was fantastic – and we happily spent some time discussing the similarities and differences between individual blogs, group blogs and wikis.

For example one question in particular was what is the difference between a group blog and a wiki. This lead into a discussion on how group blogs retain a sense of the individual, and their views, experiences, and opinions, while wikis are a synthesis of the contributions of many people and as such provide an overall view of the consensus, not the views of each individual.

There was also interest in the nature of RSS, syndication and tagging, and how you can pull feeds from individual tags as well as entire blogs. Using my blog as an example, I discussed how you can use tags and categories to distinguish between subject matter. Having done this, we then explored how each tag and category has its own RSS feed, meaning students could provide instructors with their work on a specific course – via a unique tag feed.

The result is that instructors can create portals for their courses that aggregate and syndicate the relevant work of a cohort of students, while enabling the students to work in their own spaces and retain their own efforts in a comprehensive way which will enable review and reflection over time.

In effect, RSS lets you create both distributed AND centralised spaces without impacting upon the abilities of either hub.

If I could do it over…

Above and beyond what I’ve just said, I think I would have asked for an hour instead of 30 minutes. Not only does setting the scene and helping establish the opportunities in this framework take time to do, it also takes time for people to come to grips with it. Add in questions that emerge when people start making connections with how it relates to or could benefit their own context, and we have a topic that needs a fair amount of space and time for exploration.

Though having said that, we packed a great deal in to the day, so an extra 30 minutes probably wouldn’t have been possible – but if I present a similar session in the future, I’ll definitely aim for an hour.

I have more to add here, but it’s Saturday morning and the natives are getting restless. So I’ll have to return to this train of thought later…