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What Can We Learn From Amplified Events?

What Can We Learn From Amplified Events?

Brian Kelly gave a seminar on "What Can We Learn From Amplified Events?" at the University of Girona. The seminar was held from 12.30-14.00 local time (11.30-13.00 BST) on Friday 3rd September 2010 in the Library, University of Girona, Girona, Catalonia, Spain.

Note that a live video stream of the talk was available.

A blog post about the seminar is available. A blog post written in Catalan about this seminar is also available. A Google Translate version is also available.

In addition a video summary of the talk is available on Vimeo and YouTube.

Note that the Twitter hashtag for the seminar was #udgamp10.

 

Abstract

Brian Kelly was the co-chair of UKOLN's annual Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2010 which was held at the University of Sheffield in the UK on 12-14th July 2010. In addition to the 170+ participants at the event a remote audience viewed the live streaming video of the plenary talks, browsed the speakers' slides which were hosted on Slideshare and participated in the 'back channel' discussions on Twitter and Coveritlive. There was event an online barcamp which was held alongside the event barcamps which provided an opportunity for informal ad hoc presentations and discussions to be arranged.

Such event amplification, to use the term coined by Lorcan Dempsey and described in a Wikipedia article on Amplified conferences, exploits the potential of WiFi networks, which are widely available across many University campuses, and the popularity of mobile devices, such as smartphones, PDAs and other devices with WiFi capabilities. Amplified event also appear to be particularly appropriate at a time when institutions and individuals are concerned about the environmental impact associated with travel to events and when financial cuts in the public sector are resulting in difficulties in obtaining funding to travel to events.

But can amplified events really provide a useful and scaleable solution to such concerns? How should organisations address the risks of, effectively, outsourcing the event amplification infrastructure to Social Web services with whom there are no formal contractual agreements? Is it appropriate to make use of Social Web services, with their emphasis of the individual, to support institutional objectives? And what of the user who may feel that use of devices at an event is distracting and perhaps also rude?

This seminar will explore these issues and provide advice for those wishing to host amplified events.

Biographical Details

Image of Brian Kelly Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus at UKOLN, a post funded by the JISC to advise the UK's higher and further education communities on best practices in use of the Web. Brian is an experienced speaker on a variety of topics related to use of Web 2.0 and the Social Web. Brian is also a pro-active use of various Social Web services to support his professional activities. He has published over 750 posts on his UK Web Focus blog since its launch in 2006 and also contributes to a number of other blogs. He was also an early adopter of Twitter which complements his mainstream blogging activities.

Brian established the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) series of events in 1997. This 3-day workshop, aimed at members of institutional Web management teams across the UK has been held annually even since and the most recent event, held at the University of Sheffield on 12-14 July 2010, aimed to treat the remote audience as 'first class citizens'.

Brian has also published a variety of peer-reviewed papers including recent papers on "Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web" and "Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends". He has presented at various international conferences and has given invited keynote talks at conferences held in Sweden, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia.

Brian was the Information World Review's Information Professional of the Year in 2007-8 and has been awarded prizes for the Best Communications Paper at the W4A 2010 conference and Best Research Paper at the ALT-C 2006 conference.

Brian works at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management, which is based at the University of Bath in the UK.

Slides

What Can We Learn From Amplified Events?
[MS PowerPoint 97/2000 format] - [HTML format]

The slides are available on Authorstream and embedded below.

What Can We Learn From Amplified Events...

 

The slides are also available on Slideshare and embedded below. Note that as Slideshare does not support animation and builds use of Authorstream is recommended.

 

Accompanying Resources

For a list of related resources please see the del.icio.us social bookmarking Web site using the tag 'udgamp10'.

 

Twitter Archive

An archive of Tweets with the "#udgamp10" hashtag was kept on the Twapper Keeper service. A local copy (in MS Excel format) is available.