The next essay for my MA is due in very soon. For this one, I'm investigating the use of Twitter at conferences, using this year's IATEFL conference in Glasgow (Mar 19 - 23) as the case study.
As part of the qualitative research into the topic, I have put a survey together for people that used Twitter for participating in the conference. If you used Twitter during #IATEFL, please help me out with a few responses below.
The survey should take about six or seven tweets worth of your time to complete, and will be open for responses for the next two days.
Thanks!
UPDATE: This survey is now closed for submissions. Many thanks to those that responded.
It was my first real participation at an international conference, both as delegate and speaker. It meant 'taking my professional game more seriously and to another level'. It was a chance to formalise and build on my emerging Personal Learning Network (PLN). It was making a group of new friends, having a good time with them, and introducing them to my home town. It was picking up new principles and practices I could apply in the classroom, plus sharing new ideas and reaffirming existing ways of doing what I do. It was many different things to many different people, and a sprawling beast of an event it was.
For the unfamiliar, IATEFL is the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language – a British-based organisation founded in 1967. Brighton 2011 was the 45th annual conference – how lucky to have had my first one occur on my doorstep!
This review started as a blow-by-blow account of each worthy moment I encountered, but it would have taken far too long to get that written up. Instead, I'll use this review to launch a new feature on 'Postings From An Edge, which I'll call '10 Things…'. It'll still end up a sprawling piece of text, but it will act as a good opportunity to pick out the highlights before they end up getting lost to the sifting sands of time.
Without further ado then, here are 10 things about IATEFL 2011.
1) My first time as a delegate at an international conference
Going to and presenting at an international conference are often seen as a sign that things are on the up career-wise. For me, it was an indication that I recognised teaching as being what I do professionally (having spent such a significant part of my career so far teaching whilst trying to be doing something else), and something that I take seriously enough to develop further in it. Furthermore, it was an opportunity to spend time in the company of other people who had already perhaps long since made that same decision.
Teaching is not an easy job. It can drain your energy, be poorly paid or even terrifying (for those that can't face the prospect of standing up in front of others day after day). However, it can also be highly rewarding in a multitude of ways – most importantly in its role of facilitating other peoples' learning. For some folks, the realisation that they make a good teacher (or at least are good at helping other people learn) comes long before they have finished their own schooling. For others, it comes later on, once they have settled into the job and found their feet. There are, of course, those that never wear these shoes comfortably even though they walk in them every day. Although I was not one of those of those that got it early, I'm delighted that the shoes now fit.
I began proceedings with a session from ex-IATEFL president Susan Barduhn on 'How to…get the most out of the conference'. She started by asking the audience where they were from. Answers came back…'Iraq', 'Singapore', 'Palestine', 'China', 'Algeria', 'Egypt'. After a hand holding through the vastness of the conference programme, she mentioned that it was important to consider what our goals were in attending the conference. I could think of many, but the main one was really to get a 'first big conference' under my belt.
With a goal like that, it didn't really matter what happened, so long as something did. And over the two full days and other grabbed moments at the conference, plenty happened.
2) Other delegates and the general vibe
I have organised a conference myself before, been to a stack of others, and spent a lot of time in teacher training events. None really compared to the convivial atmosphere at IATEFL. With a diverse range of people from over 100 countries in attendance, there was a real friendliness in the air, even with strangers that I had no prior technologically-mediated relationship with.
I attended the welcome reception at the Brighton Centre on the evening before the official opening. Grabbing a complimentary glass of wine or two, I ambled around the room in the hope of finding a friendly face. At first, I made out some of the 'big names' in ELT - those whose faces I'd seen online or on the back of books. Nicky Hockly and Gavin Dudeney looked organisational. Ken Wilson held court, looking as in his element as Brian Jones at Monterey Pop. Nik Peachey seemed unassuming, despite the number of people that were clearly gravitating towards him. Peachey’s outlook appears to be that 'the internet's happening anyway, so we might as well learn how to use it and to use it well rather than run away from it', a school of thought I’m certainly a subscriber to.
After a while, I got the weird sensation of familiar features beginning to emerge from the sea of unfamiliar faces as Twitter avatars started coming to life and I began recognising people I'd had fleeting (tweeting?) snatches of conversation with online. Despite having previously met almost no-one face to face, I ended up with plenty more snatches of conversation, just like on Twitter. Happily, this led to ending up in an Italian restaurant with a bunch of new friends, getting through pizza while chatting about lexis, the conference, meta-tagging and the joys of blogging.
The following evening, Macmillan held a party to celebrate the tenth birthday of OneStopEnglish. The party was down at the Honey Club on the seafront, which took me back a little to my student days. The publishers had thrown in a buffet, free wine and even an Elvis impersonator (who looked far too young to have even heard of Elvis, but had a voice befitting of his role). It was a great chance to consolidate some new friendships.
These were just two incidents of the great vibe that was in the air most of the time, which can make or break a conference.
3) Building a PLN
This is a kind of extension of the last point.
Kate Klingensmith describes a PLN as 'the entire collection of people with whom you engage and exchange information, usually online.' Pooky Hesmondhalgh suggests that a PLN offers the chance to do the following:
Talk to like-minded, real people
Share and exchange a range of ideas
Inject creativity into everyday practice
Enjoy a constant flow of ideas
Encourage innovation
Discuss and consider controversial thoughts
Develop enthusiasm and passion
All of these would make a PLN a pretty useful beast. These are the kind of things that, for a teacher, tend to come from time spent in the staffroom. In my current role, I do that very little, generally dividing my work time between darkened IT labs and a strip-lit windowless office nearby. Although I am connected to colleagues through various social networks, the daily shared ideas that help us do our jobs mostly tend to come more in snatched conversations in the cafeteria than online (with one exception).
So, step forward a new PLN. A big thanks you to all of you for the quality time spent in your company at the conference and beyond. My very humblest of apologies to anyone I regretfully left out here (it's only a Twitter list, so I've only got people who are on Twitter in it at the moment). I look forward to many more engagements to come.
Despite having recently gained a postgrad qualification in English teaching and being a delegate at the country's biggest conference for English teachers, I am no longer a teacher of English language. These days I teach IT, but to students whose first language is predominantly not English. The approach of teaching them a subject in a second language rather than teaching them that language is often termed Content and Language Integrated Learning (or CLIL).
Although my main thing at the conference was tech stuff, I was on a CLIL tip too, and the first session I attended ('CLIL Projects for Younger Learners') was on that. Given by Hanna Kryszewska, an editor of 'Humanising Language Teaching', she spoke to a full house and gave some useful pointers for keeping a subject engaging when it's being taught in a language that is not your mother tongue. Some of these were:
Teachers can learn the subject along with the students (most useful if their background is more in language teaching). This is particularly important as teachers need to get the facts right.
Teachers need to give clear explanations, but make sure to make appropriate use of the relevant professional terminology.
Clear grammar structures are still needed despite the focus not being on grammar itself. This can help to reinforce language structures.
Careful consideration should be given to the use of coursebooks, which need to have relevance and context.
Fictional stories and the use of fine arts can be helpful teaching aids.
Stella Kong from Hong Kong also gave some useful tips in a different session on teaching CLIL, this time from a secondary perspective. As with the other speaker, she spoke to a full house and in a much bigger room too - this was clearly a methodology that a lot of people were hungry to learn more about. The examples she gave were from teaching Chemistry and Geography, and were the results of a study that was done with subject teachers who lacked specific language training. Key points here included:
Teachers should plan from the content (rather than from the language). The content provides a context and a purpose for recycling some of the same language that students will be learning elsewhere.
Teachers should teach the language of the content explicitly, which can be done through a range of means including subject specific vocabulary, use of nominalisation and complex noun phrases, and the language of definition. This can better facilitate noticing in the students, an activity which helps them to better acquire features of the language (according to Schmidt's 'noticing hypothesis').
Content and language should be well integrated.The use of complex content should lead to more complex language use.
Listening to these talks was a good reminder that if students can't understand the language, they can't understand the content. They also reinforced the idea that I need to pay further attention to planning key lexical items prior to delivering the lessons.
5) Technology and the ELTJ debate
One of the real highlights of the conference and a clear indicator of the ever-widening divide between those that integrate tech wholeheartedly into their teaching and those that shirk it at every opportunity was the ELTJ/IATEFL Debate 'Tweeting is for the birds, not for language learning'.
Proposing this motion was Alan Waters of the University of Lancaster. Opposing it was Nicky Hockly of The Consultants-E. It was made clear that the debate was not just about Twitter itself but rather the debate around the role of technology in language teaching in general. From the programme:
The role of technology in language teaching has been debated since the first use of the tape recorder and the language laboratory, but never so keenly as today. The universal availability of the internet and social media, the development of interactive whiteboards for the classroom, and the proliferation of online and blended courses means that more technology is available to language teachers and learners than ever before. But does it work? Or are we seduced into using technology because it's fun and it's there?
Waters started, with the assertion that he is broadly supportive of the use of tech in language teaching and that he tends to be an 'early adopter' of much technology himself. However, continuing with a paraphrase of a famous expression – 'All power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely' (I'd agree that there are many people who utterly abuse this tool, and not just in teaching) – he went on to list his reasons for the motion. These included the tendency of the use of IWBs in making classes much more teacher-centred (only if the teacher lets it), and the idea that hyperlinked reading leads to a more shallow absorption of content. I have some sympathy for this view as I spend less time on longform reading these days and am more easily distracted than I feel I once was. However, I also feel that individuals should train themselves to get through an online text in whole or choose to surf it as part of developing contemporary media engagement skills.
Hockly followed Waters, beginning by describing herself as a former technophobe turned technophile. I stopped taking notes during her speech as Tweetdeck was displayed behind her allowing those of us in the audience that were tweeting during the debate to interact more closely with it by appearing on the projected stream. This made the debate much more engaging, but also opened up the divide between the digerati and non-digerati in the room, which was made more evident by the questions that came from the crowd at the end.
Not surprisingly though, the motion was ultimately opposed. An incorrect embed code has prevented me from showing it in full here, but you can watch it at this link.
6) The ELT Blogosphere Symposium
The symposia were good choices for spending a full afternoon of exploring a specialist area in depth, in the company of kindred spirits. I went for a symposium on the blogosphere, being something I often use in class and do myself when I’m not teaching.
There were four sets of speakers – Karenne Sylvester, Tara Benwell, Peter Ryley and Jennifer Wain, and Berni Wall. Convenor Karenne kicked off with the statement ‘Blogging changed my life’. She proceeded to give a short history of blogging itself and describe her story, making it clear that it is not easy to get a successful blog up and running, but it can be highly worthwhile if you get there. She also mentioned that blogging works once there is a community around it – something that in five years I have not managed to successfully achieve with this one (although admittedly I’ve not been trying too actively either).
Tara described some of the features of her space at myEnglishClub.com and how having this online space seems to have made a real difference in her learners’ lives (who are mostly blogging from somewhere where they are fairly isolated as learners). She described blogs as useful places to introduce and model online tools such as Wordle and Audioboo, and invited contributions to the blog describing it as a sandbox for teachers to try out their ideas.
Peter and Jennifer, whom I’d already seen present on their topic at the Study Group conference, described a blogging project for lower level language learners that not only gave their students a space for practicing their language but also for engaging with the culture around them. A useful pointer from them was how a blog moves the centre of gravity from the classroom to a wholly different space.
The final speaker was someone who is very busy online, as moderator of #ELTchat on Twitter amongst many other things. She started with an excellent activity that demonstrated how a PLN works, showed how to organise via Tweetdeck and extolled Twitter’s virtues as a portal to plenty of other things online. During the talk, she mentioned that an awful lot of collaboration had emerged from Twitter chats and finished by boldly stating that using technology in teaching is no longer a choice, it’s a must.
The symposium ended with a great Q&A, where people described the impacts that blogging had had for them, the challenges they’d faced in getting ‘non-believers’ on board, and how effective the Twitterverse and blogosphere were in acting as a global staffrom. Overall, it was a great session that spanned inspiring testimonies, exciting discoveries and a host of new friends. Must work harder at building community round my own online spaces rather than keeping up with them as broadcast mechanisms…
An honorable mention here must also go to Burçu Akyol, who gave an inspirational talk on blogging at a different sesion, and reminded us why blogs are like sharks (who must keep moving forward or they die). Kudos to her for having even got Turkish kindergarten students blogging in English.
7) Pecha Kucha
At the risk of namedropping, I have a personal connection to Pecha Kucha that has tended to pique my interest in it. Back in 2006, I launched a charity CD that I had co-produced, at a club called Super-Deluxe in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. That same club was the place where architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein launched the first Pecha Kucha night three years earlier.
Pecha Kucha is form of public presentation where each presenter has a total of 20 slides, each of which is shown for 20 seconds. This gives every presenter – whoever they are – 6 minutes and 40 seconds to get their message across or explain their ideas before the next one steps up to the fray.
Done well, it can be both inspiring and hugely entertaining. Done badly, it can look like a bit of a shambles, but only if the presenter themselves is not up to the task. Pecha Kucha Nights are now a global phenomenon and I'd seen one in Brighton before - part fascinating, part rubbish. However, Pecha Kucha at IATEFL has its own quality reputation and it turned out to be rightfully so. Kind of how it should be at a conference full of language teachers, who ought to be better than most at communicating with a large room full of strangers.
It was such a rush that I was barely even able to tweet during the presentations. Instead of taking my word for it though, try the video of the event above and see for yourself. A highly memorable evening and a speaking platform to aspire to.
The speakers, in order of appearance, were:
Jeremy Harmer (host)
Petra Pointer
Ying Zheng
Nick Billborough
Bethany Cagnol
J J Wilson
Valeria Franca
Antonia Clare
Alan Pulverness and Sarah Mount
8) My talk
I first considered speaking at IATEFL whilst doing the DELTA, so my talk had been pending for a long time. When it finally came around, it was scheduled in the last period of sessions before the final plenary that signalled the closing of the conference. Although there was a part of me that was cool with whatever time I ended up being on as I was just glad to have the opportunity to present at such an event, another part of me – knowing that plenty of people would have gone home by then – was rather worried that I’d not get anyone turn up to listen. Furthermore, I was concerned that I’d picked a potentially most unsexy topic to present on.
My talk was about using Creative Commons in the classroom, and there are few ways to mention Creative Commons without also mentioning copyright. And generally, unless you’re a creator, a IP lawyer, a manager that needs to get CLA licences or generally geeky about copyright and the internet (as I am), most teachers and learners pay little mind to the topic. In picking this subject, I’d looked through previous Conference Selections publications and conference programmes, and spotted a gap of something that no-one else was talking about. It seemed like an opening, but was also a risk.
I’d had to go back to work on the Monday and Tuesday morning too, so wasn’t able to max out on networking in order to recruit a crowd. I’m not really the type anyway. Despite all this, I ended up with a reasonable audience for the subject and a comfortable enough size for my first time. Having trialled the talk once at the company conference and then twice at a couple of additional in-house workshops in the week before, the slideshow was slick and I was ready to go by the time I was due on.
The talk went well, with hopefully the right balance between audience interaction with each other and having stuff to listen to or watch. I’d been recommended to kick off with a gag, so had one up my sleeve that I dutifully trotted out at the beginning. This lightened things up, although according to one of the participants after the event, I still looked deadly serious. Must try and lighten things up a little if I end up doing one of these things again.
Anyway, I was pleased that my talk managed to kick off some good discussions and sorry that we ran out of time to carry them on any further. I was also grateful that a couple of new faces I’d got to know over the weekend came along to listen or give me a little support. All in all, it was a very satisfying experience and I hope it’ll have been a beginning for international conferencing rather than a one-off. I’m certainly looking forward to whatever the next one is. Still, although I’ll happily talk about Creative Commons to whoever wants to hear about it, I might try and pick a topic that will pique a little more interest next time around!
9) The things I missed out on
With over 500 talks, workshops, debates, symposia, discussions groups and pre-conference events on offer, some great stuff was inevitably going to be missed. Choices have to be made from a sumptuous programme of treats. Some of them could probably be caught later online (if they were captured at the time), but once the momentum has gone, so has the moment.
For the symposia on distance language learning or ELT in Africa, the Interactive Language Fair (sounded intriguing), other talks on CLIL, plagiarism, using a class wiki, or promoting critical thinking, I just had to let them go. You can't win 'em all.
I will squeeze in a shout out to three other speakers here, whose talks I attended – Anne Fox, who raised some interesting questions about managing online reputations; my colleague Mary Henderson, who reported on a fascinating experiment she’d performed with getting her students to create multimedia projects; and Raymond Sangabau from the University of Kinshasa, who spoke on the challenges of teaching EAP to classes of around 350 students at a time.
10) Other people's reflections
(Disclaimer: I make an appearance in the above video)
These were my reflections on IATEFL. Why not take a look at what some of the other delegates had to say?
This pretty amazing collection of pictures comes from the Flickr 'quakebook' pool, and includes publically sourced photos associated with the 2:46 Quakebook project. I think that sometimes still photos can convey the emotion of the current situation in many parts of Japan even better than news footage.
The book itself, which started with a tweet and has all proceeds going to the Japanese Red Cross, collates stories from people on the ground in Japan when the earthquake hit and those directly affected yet further afield.
As the sender of the first tweet that launched the book project said today:
...alone we are useless, together we can create something amazing, selfless, to benefit others, and by so doing, improve ourselves.
Mmm, the power of the internet...crowdsourcing...it's got me thinkin' too...
A tweet from Tokyo appeared in my stream a few days ago which made me think, and reminded me a little of something that Michael Franti said after a visit he paid to war-ravaged Iraq.
He'd been writing a lot of angry protest songs following the US-led invasion. For his documentary film 'I Know I'm Not Alone' he visited Baghdad and did a walkabout with a guitar and some of these songs. I don't have the original quote but remember a comment of his that the local people had asked him why he wasn't singing happier stuff. An interesting difference in perspective there - Franti might have been writing for a home audience but when he went to play for the Iraqis, they just wanted their moods lighted from all the war stuff going on around them rather than being reminded of how bad everything was. The power of music...
I'm sure that many Japanese (those not actually in the disaster zones of Sendai or Fukushima) having been feeling similar feelings over the last week - a need to be cheered up but something lighter than all the dark, dark news that has been spreading all over their country.
While skimming through Soundcloud two days ago, I came across this delightful little number. Clearly someone else wanted to show some support and lighten the mood. So here it is...'Japanese Green Tea' by Languid.
A final post to end what has been rather a long day. After a morning and afternoon spent at BELTE (the inaugural Brighton English Language Training Event), where I picked up all sorts of tips, tricks and connections that should be able to help with my teaching, I ambled down from the train station to the seafront, only to be confronted by the glorious vision of the sunset over the West Pier pictured above
Renowned net evangelist and author Cory Doctorow (who is exactly one month older than me, according to his Wikipedia entry) was in town for a panel discussion at The Brighton Salon, with Nico MacDonald and Michael Bull. The event was eagerly awaited by certain sections of the Brighton geekerati and I'd been looking forward to it for a while.
Macdonald, Bull, Robert Clowes (Salon chairman) and Doctorow at the Thistle Hotel
Doctorow spoke first to kick off the panel, describing how the internet was not just the world's greatest copy machine, but also its best collaboration machine, and the importance of keeping the copyright industries from 'wiretapping us'. He delivers at quite a pace - fast enough that some in the audience less up on the terminology of our networked times struggled with and which I wasn't able to take notes fast enough either - but the assembled crowd lapped it up.
Bull went on to talk about the challenges of communicating with people that aren't sitting next to you and the contradictions of increasing connectivity leading to greater isolation. Macdonald wrapped up with waxing lyrical about 'the profundity of open source' and how we create and deliver the work that we do better than ever (summed up as 'I share, therefore I am'), but opined that open source culture doesn't tend to create new forms and a concern that the 'hive mind' could reduce innovation. Panel discussions and questions from the audience followed.
Doctorow checks the event's tweet stream
Naturally, things got heated at some points, with firm rebuttals of a few of the issues raised. Doctorow denied that open source culture has reduced innovation, stating also that we are living 'in a period of permanent revolution'. Macdonald claimed that we are not living in as revolutionary times as the move from the land to the cities, rebutted by Doctorow with 'Change today is radically faster than agrarian to industrial change.' A rather intriguing feature of the discussion was that both speakers were monitoring the tweet streams of the event (hashtag: #bssharing) and responding to tweets from the audience in addition to their panel contributions. Some serious multitasking.
There were a few other choice quotes from the night that I tweeted from the audience, including 'We can combine the talents of humanity for the first time' and 'The future's going to be weirder than we can now predict.'
All in all, plenty of thought-provoking material (even if there were no ideas that were particularly new to me) and a most engaging evening. One thing's pretty much for sure - whatever the future's going to look like, we can be pretty damned certain that it's going to look very very different from how we might imagine or predict it now, and weirdness as the order of the day would be most likely!
Call it going viral, call it protocol migration, call it global memes or whatever you will. Nowadays, it's not just corporations that spread across the planet at dizzying rates. There are also an increasingly large number of ideas, events and happenings that start somewhere and through a combination of 'being a good idea' + 'the existence of the Internet', spread across the world rapidly. This trend is becoming more and more interesting as it develops, both in terms of the emergence of a globalised yet decentralised world culture and with the blurring or even disappearance of barriers between the online and offline worlds.
One example is Pecha Kucha, which I wrote here about the last Brighton event. Another is TEDx, a larger scale and more formalised format of presentation event that blends sharing knowledge with franchising to grow the TED community and the reach of 'ideas worth spreading'. Yet another is BarCamp, the latest Brighton version of which I spent most of this weekend at.
an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event.
Wikipedia describes it as 'an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.' This also works to define an unconference, where participants all contribute to the agenda which is set at the beginning of the day and often changed during the course of the event.
I attended my first unconference in London last year, but never quite managed to get round to blogging about it (find the full public released book for the 'One Media Unconference' here). The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California in 2005 - organised in less than a week, from concept to event, with 200 attendees. Since then, BarCamps have been held in over 350 cities around the world and six continents (anyone up for BarCamp Antarctica?).
BarCamp Brighton is now on its fourth event. While previous ones were held out on campus at the University Of Sussex (where the birth pangs of the modern internet were first unveiled by its midwives, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn), this year's event was switched to the Old Music Library in the centre of town.
The venue was very appropriately Brighton, looking like a squatted art gallery, with dusty floors, chunks of plasterboard missing from walls and ceilings, and crammed with exciting, esoteric or exotic street art and sculptures. Given that this town always tends to make effective use of abandoned space, particularly in times of recession, it was a most suitable place for a geek meetup. It also enhanced the informal nature of the event, rather than putting the happenings into a more sterilised environment.
The Beast tries to escape through the Old Music Library window
Given that from Monday to Friday these days, I deck myself out in a suit to go to work, it was good to don my geekware and slip into the crowd for a while, who were a motley crew of techies, creatives, Brighton geeks, amateurs, professionals and the self-taught, leftovers from the dConstruct conference and visiting BarCampers from out of town.
What is BarCamp Brighton? - a few words from a couple of the organisers
As with most conferences, the common complaint was that there was too much going on of interest to be able to take it all in. There was certainly plenty to take in. Given that it was my first BarCamp, I wanted to get a feel for the thing before diving in and playing a more active role. The first sessions that I sat in on were outside ones, while the sun was still shining. Steve Purkiss hosted a session on developing the building into a more permanent hub for Digital Media in Brighton (Google Group here), while Richard Vahrman took a nostalgia trip through analogue computing and his part in its downfall.
Heading back into the building, I caught a little of a talk from Melinda Seckington, who blogs as missgeeky and was offering up tips and tricks. I picked up a few interesting snippets, such as inviting guest posters being a good way to grow a blog, and the point that a large number of blogs serve particular niches but as readers tend to have a wide range of interests, it's not a bad idea to reflect that in the content provided. There was also a free wine-tasting event going on as part of the Brighton Food and Drink Festival, so I ducked out of the place for a while to join my wife in tasting samples. Sometimes, one is really spoiled for choice in what to do in Brighton!
Lunchtime sandwich breakout
A difference with the London One Media event was that hosts seemed a little more surprised when participants left their talk to wander off into another one. One Media was notable for participants behaving just like they would in online chatrooms, by dropping in and out of conversations, contributing nothing, something or plenty to a discussion. In Brighton, it seemed that there was a bit more of the feeling that it was not so much 'the done thing' to disappear when someone else had got going on their presentation. There must be all manner of other varieties of social behaviour at other BarCamps that reflect the local area more.
The afternoon included a session on Web Typography from digitalblonde, Visualising Home Energy Use with Laurence and a tour of The Skiff, one of several coworking spaces in Brighton and Hove. The first session went through a brief history of type families from the fifteenth century to today and covered general rules on font usage, which was rather handy.
The second one had plenty of useful information on how much energy is used in the home and different ways to monitor it. Items like air conditioning, fridge freezers and plasma screen TVs consume a lot of power, and desktop computers suck up more than laptops. There are, however, items such as smart meters that can be used to monitor one's home energy use directly, meaning that it's a lot easier to see when you're using too much or have left something on that doesn't need to be.
Costing around £50, they can be clamped on to existing mains supplies to monitor the data, which is then fed into a PC and then some sort of visualisation software. This means that surges are easier to spot and users can get to know how much energy they use (rather than just waiting for a utility bill that will likely charge them for using energy that they have to waste). Useful resources to find out more include Google PowerMeter and Current Cost for monitoring, and Pachube or Sensorpedia for visualising.
In The Skiff's basement, with extra large cushions
The Skiff was very near to the main venue, so the tour was a short trot away. Described as 'like BarCamp every day', it is modelled on San Francisco's Citizen Space, one of the many initiatives that bubble out of the US East Coast's prime location for the blending of the tech/creative worlds. Taking the best elements of a coffee shop and of a workplace, these are combined to provide a sociable, productive and affordable space for independent workers to do their thing without having to stay at home stuck in front of a screen all day. They also have a webcam that shows live whether a desk is available or not. People drop by to network, participate in activities like robot building or join in with some of the events the space has been able to host.
Ambling back after the tour, I got down to a bit of networking and mingling, given that the main workshops seemed to be winding down by then. I had a very interesting chat with the organiser of a UK version of BarCamp Africa (and was surprised to later find out that there are several BarCamps all over the continent), before heading upstairs to find out what all the noise was about - discovered myself amidst a geek singalong of Foreigner's 'I Want To Know What Love Is' (see video here).
Pizza frenzy begins
By then, all that remained was to hang out and eat pizza, drink beer and wait for the musical entertainment to start. An intriguing feature at this stage was the way that information was delivered. Pizza, beer and band times got juggled around a little, and given the informality of the event, it wasn't necessary to go around making big announcements about time changes. As all participants were permanently clamped to some sort of mobile web-enabled device, all that was needed was to tweet the information using the '#bcb4' hashtag. That way, anyone could follow a live information stream about the event and contribute to it themselves by tagging their own tweets in the same way. Twitter Search became a powerful tool for real-time information dissemination.
Described by cminion as 'Brighton's geekiest band', an accolade later wistfully refuted to me by drummer toastkid, 100 Robots took the floor as house band when all work-related stuff was over. An electrorock trio reduced to a duo for this performance, they let go in the subterranean basement to the gathered crowd, who dug them very much. The material was fast-paced, it rocked and included songs about subjects like the recent financial meltdown, the election in Iran and a gene therapy cure for AIDS.
'Deep Underground' by 100 Robots, live at BarCamp Brighton 4
With the day clearly done I made my way home, not having the desire to sleep on a dusty floor in an abandoned building when I had a bed to go back to. The next day, I was due to pop my BarCamp cherry and hold my own session. After all, everyone's expected to make some sort of contribution at these things.
Day Two
The agenda for the day
The second day was shorter yet (for me) deeper, as I dared to get a little more hands-on. The first session I ended up in, almost by accident but actually being one of the most fun, was titled 'Using Agile to Build a BarCamp Theme Park' and was hosted by Jez Nicholson. Agile is something that I'd heard of before but didn't really know a great deal about. Essentially, it is a software development methodology (see original Manifesto for founding principles), but seems to be a way of working that is very suited to the connected post-Web world we are all building these days.
Working with physical tools (plasticine, pipe cleaners and string) to meet a client brief rather that virtual ones, it made it easy to follow the operating methodology. The team that I was part of were tasked with producing 'something to do with Google' as part of the 'theme park' and came up with the 'Google Search Bar', as seen below. Although the picture may not convey the entire project that fully, it was fun and an effective exercise in collaborative teamwork to a timescale.
As with the other participants, I got rather caught up in the exercise, to the extent that I almost missed my own session. Titled 'Shall I Give My Stuff Away For Free?...or The Creative Commons Dilemma', I decided that I wasn't going to use my slot to present my expertise in one area or another (my skills are widely but thinly spread), but instead try to crowdsource a solution to a quandry I've set myself (in other words, ask some other people what they would do in a similar situation).
Full slideshow of my pictures from BarCamp Brighton 4
I have almost 2,500 pictures hosted on my Flickr site. I tend to get a good amount of views most days and have occasionally had people ask me to use them in their blogs or websites. However, I'd like it if this resource were put to greater use and get a wider audience, perhaps with the possibility of even covering the costs of a Flickr Pro account or at least driving more traffic back to my other sites. Therefore, I've been debating with myself whether to issue them all under a Creative Commons licence.
'A Shared Culture - Saving the world from failed sharing'
What is Creative Commons? It's a form of licencing that offers an alternative to full copyright and which enables increases sharing and improved collaboration. Essentially, while a content creator retains the copyright to their work, they also allow other people to use, share or remix that work, thus giving a bigger audience for the original piece. It's all very well creating great work, but if no-one knows about it (increasingly more difficult with the vast volumes of material available on the Net) an artist doesn't get anywhere with their work. As Tim O'Reilly said:
Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
There are six kinds of licence. These are Attribution, Attribution Share Alike, Attribution No Derivatives, Attribution Non-Commercial, Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike, Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (further information about each licence can be viewed here). The discussion went well, with contributors giving me good advice based on their own experiences of using these licences. I was even thanked at the end for 'one of the more interesting sessions' at BarCamp, which I was pretty pleased with. After giving it much thought and throwing the debate open to the crowd, I decided to go ahead with freeing all my photos. One thing that I still have to decide is which licence to use, but that's an issue for another post!
The remaining sessions that I ended up in - all very enjoyable - were on haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry, fetishism (the emotional value we attach to our possessions rather than sexual preferences - thanks Ellen!) and differences between Western and Eastern styles of animation.
At session end
How was it for you?
General consensus garnered from conversations and the tweetstream seemed to be that it was a very enjoyable event, with a range of great sessions, an amazing venue and a lot of appreciation for the hard work put it by the organisers plus the back up support from the sponsors (Paypal, Yahoo! Developer Network, The Guardian Open Platform, Metranet, Madgex and Vodafone My Web) for enabling it to happen.
It was also fascinating to be a part of a localised version of a global movement, and will be most intriguing to see where this BarCamp thing goes in the future. I'll certainly be signing up for BarCamp Brighton 5. It goes to show that if you're in need of an answer, geek and ye shall find!
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Appendix
Obviously, at such an event it's impossible to see everything. I've put a small handful of some of the content from sessions I missed but which have since gone online below. If you have something that was presented at BarCamp Brighton 4 and would like it included here, please drop me a line through this blog and I'll update the post.
A mention here to other attendees that haven't been covered above. Again, if you were at the event and would like your name, Twitter page or blog link included here, drop me a line through this blog and I'll update the post. Likewise, if you are linked to on here and would like the link removed, get in touch. Apologies to anyone missed out - I think everyone appreciated everyone's contributions!
Comments on this post also highly appreciated...:)
In the above video, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams explains to a TED audience about how the service works, its phenomenal growth and how some of the truly inventive uses of the service have required the company to be led very much by its users. The film is also pretty useful as an explanation for non-users what the fuss is all about.
I've been using Twitter for a few months now and have found that once the potential and usage is understood, it is quite an astonishing communications tool. Already, I've made several very useful or interesting connections with people that I'd never have otherwise met through other forms of social media (such as MySpace, Facebook, etc).
TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design is a conference that began in 1984 to bring people from those different worlds together. Since then, TED's scope has become considerably broader and serves as a platform for some of the world's most fascinating thinkers and speakers who are challenged to give the speech of their lives within 18 minutes. Somewhat like Twitter, where users are encouraged to post what's on their minds in just 140 characters.
I came across TED through using Twitter and was both surprised I'd not come across it before and delighted to have done so. In their mission statement, TED state how they 'believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world.' The website thus serves as 'a clearing house that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.'
Admirably, the organisation further defines itself thus:
TED is...best thought of as a global community. It's a community welcoming people from every discipline and culture who have just two things in common: they seek a deeper understanding of the world, and they hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all.
The video, here embedded from my YouTube channel, is offered under a Creative Commons licence, allowing it to be freely shared and reposted. For the unfamiliar, Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.
They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. The below video, also available on Globalism Films, explains a little more about CC licencing.
Although competing demands currently take up more of my time at the moment, therefore not giving me a great deal of time to write much at length here, every now and then I stumble upon some great content that just has to be shared - as with the case of these two films.
Sometimes you come across something on the web that is hard to resist letting others know about. Being an ongoing Tokyophile, I was alerted to these images via a couple of feeds in my Tweetdeck (a tool that lets you keep track of what's going on in your Twitterverse).
If you count the surrounding prefectures (Yokohama, Chiba, Saitama, etc), the entire Tokyo region is made up of 34,000,000 people. That's a lot of folks condensed into what is effectively a very small space. Naturally, green spaces are pretty hard to come by and of great value when they do appear.
The Green Island Project have put a contemporary and ecological twist on a popular theme in Japanese creative culture of re-imagining of the city. In these pictures, the streets of Tokyo have been grassed over. For places that I'd come to know so well over the five years I lived there, it puts the city in a remarkably different light.
The picture at the top is of Shinjuku while the one below is of Shibuya. Click here to visit some of my own pictures of the city.
I'm now a fully-fledged member of the international twitterati! I kicked off just before Christmas, figuring that if the American President was using it, I couldn't have him being ahead of me on tech.
Seems that it's exploding now, as this article from Wired.com explains. Twitter was already cited as the main pusher of on-the-spot news in the Mumbai hotel attacks and is rapidly on the way to becoming the essential new communications technology for the world.
I'll write more about it soon, but in the meantime above is a short video explaining how it's being used to quickly organise a serious of decentralised but global events to raise money for charity. (named 'Twestival'). Goes to show that decentralisation of control doesn't just have to be used for bad ends.
Follow my tweets here (or on the side bar of this blog).
