Looking for Conference Live Blogging Models for NECC09
In the Classroom 2.0 Elluminate discussion about EduBloggerCon on Saturday, April 11th, participants discussed the ways content will be shared “live” from the NECC 2009 conference this year. The wikis NECC “Live” and NECC “Unplugged” are being combined on the NECC Unplugged site this year to showcase those events. Certainly lots of attendees will be posting content to blogs during and following the conference, but what about “live blogging?” One of our Elluminate session participants asked about ISTE’s policy on live-blogging, and if there was going to be a coordinated effort to promote and advertise the availability of live-blogged NECC sessions. I didn’t have answers to these questions, so I’m writing this post to “think aloud” and solicit input on these questions.
CoverItLive is a free tool available for live blogging, providing opportunities for multiple folks to participate in the live blog discussions whether they are attending an event in-person or virtually. CoverItLive allows live-bloggers to insert Ustream or Mogulus webcast streams as well. I have recently used CoverItLive to live blog our state dropout summit, a TechLearning webinar on Web 2.0 in schools, and our most recent school board meeting in my community. Sarah Perez provided a good overview of the functionalities available in with CoverItLive in her January 2008 post, “Live Blogging 2.0.”
I first participated remotely in an educational conference keynote covered via CoverItLive in the most recent Computer Using Educators (CUE) conference in California. I think it would be great if multiple attendees at NECC 2009 would use CoverItLive to provide live-blog coverage of as many sessions at the conference as possible. I’m not suggesting that this type of volunteer, organic live-blogging efforts should be centrally managed or controlled, but I am wondering how live blogging can be best supported and facilitated? It would be great to provide links to live-bogged sessions on a site like NECC Unplugged, as well as posting tweets with the NECC09 hashtag, #necc09. Do you think a common account on CoverItLive should be created and made available to attendees to use when live-blogging NECC sessions, or would it be better for everyone to use their own CoverItLive accounts? Have you participated in or seen a coordinated live-blogging effort at any conferences in the past year, which involved multiple people providing blog coverage via CoverItLive? I’d love to hear and read about others’ experiences with live-blogging at conferences, to get ideas about how live-blogging could be best supported and facilitated at NECC this year.
3 Comments
Peter Corbett
Monday, 20th April 2009 at 1:44 pm
For Government 2.0 Camp – an un-conference we co-created recently, we used our blog http://www.government20club.org as a place where any attendee could register to live blog a session. Session leaders were asked to assign a live blogger prior to the presentation so that content was captured accurately.
It worked really well!
Angela Powell
Thursday, 23rd April 2009 at 7:57 pm
I live-blogged the 2009 ASCD conference in March using Cover It Live. The experience was POWERFUL! You can read more about it here:
http://inpractice.edublogs.org/tag/ascd2009/
Alice Mercer
Friday, 24th April 2009 at 11:12 am
Sorry, it’s taken me a while to get to this, here are my thoughts. Many of them are things I’ve already shared with you and in other places, so a lot of this will be familiar, without further ado…
I have live blogged conferences I’ve attended, and used Cover It Live extensively when I blogged last year’s NECC in San Antonio, and ILC in San Jose. My blogging was not ever coordinated with the conference organizers (although I was asked by ILC to come and cover the conference).
Recently my group blog, In Practice (http://inpractice.edublogs.org), was asked to do live blogging at ASCD (http://ascd.org) in Orlando. While I couldn’t go, another blogger, Angela Powell, was able to cover it using Cover It Live there as well. In addition to announcing her live blogs to her twitter network, the organizers featured her blogging online.
Peter describes the next step, which is making sure that almost all the sessions have someone covering them, and giving the presenter some control over who covers them.
As a live blogger, I think it would be good if ISTE/NECC shared who was live blogging. I’m trying to think what benefits would result from a single CIL account, but I’m not seeing the difference. What is nice about CIL is that you can embed the live window in multiple sites, and it will go in any site/blog/page that supports iframes. So I could live blog and have the window on my blog, In Practice, and NECC could embed it on their blog or ning.
What I think is needed.
* Cover It Live as the platform; Elluminate if they want to stream and desktop share.
* Get a wiki or other list of folks willing to live blog. Make sure that at least one seat is saved for a blogger (either presenter choice, or random draw would be good), especially for BYOL sessions! Most of those folk want to be live blogged and streamed (although, I conceed that may not be the case for all of them). It would be good if they could pick out a blogger in advance, and share their links in advance so they can be dropped in a timely manner, allowing folks outside to participate in the session activities.
* There should a be a central spot on the NECC site to share what will be live-blogged.
In general, I prefer to pick sessions, then change my mind as my mood, new info, or my experience in the session dictate. Angela did this at ASCD, moving from session to session. I can see that ISTE/NECC would prefer something more set, schedule-wise. My advice would be they tape the keynote, and spotlight stuff themselves, and let the live-blogging happen spontaneously, let the other sessiosn get covered, but concentrate on one area, my suggestion, surprise, is the BYOL, which by their nature lend themselves to more robust live-blogging. Lectures, and speeches, really don’t have to be “you are there as they happen” events (unless something goes horribly wrong, or the presenter is Hall Davidson, who is the master of the artful pratfall — or making them appear that way). Those can be live blogged, and most of the utility of CIL there will be for back chat (although that is a really high bandwidth for that use). The moderation will also let the blogger keep the comments from going to far afield.
This could be powerful. Angela had up to 100 viewers of her live blogs at ASCD. Think about what a difference that could make in BYOL sessions.
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