Exploring Virtual Attendance at the Future of Technology in Education Conference (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, this is Chris Smith, better known as the avatar shambles guru, and I'm here in North Thailand in Chiang Mai about an hour's flight north of Bangkok. And more by chance than design, I came across a website today which told me of a conference that's taking place in London now in real time. It's 8.30 at night for me, but London's six hours behind. The details are on this splash sheet at the front here, this word page, so you can take those down. Future of Technology in Education. So I thought I'd investigate it and see how much I could attend virtually. So let me just share these experiences in less than five minutes. Let me go to the website. Here's a website of FOTE. I wonder if it's called FOTE. And it has the details there. And I did notice when I came here that over on this side, it says Second Life Learning and how to join in Second Life. So that gave me some encouragement. I'm not sure whether I could see a hashtag here, and maybe you can see it as I scroll down. But if I remember rightly, I couldn't see a hashtag, except the giveaway was they have a Twitter feed here, and the hashtag is there, hash FOTE10. Easy enough to remember. The program was on the website. Nicely displayed, easily displayed. And bear in mind that I'm adding six hours to these times to fit in with me. And in fact, I've just listened to the iPad is the Future of Reading session with James Clay. And what's on now is this panel session. So let's have a look and see what it looks like in real life. In real life, in virtual life, right? Second Life. And here we are. Let me turn the sound up a bit, see if you can hear the panel session.

Speaker 2: which is our open learning repository. We'd already tackled all of those questions. And there's a number of ways you can license that content. And basically, I would just say, check that out. It gets a bit tediously boring. It's a conference that so far has been so inspiring, I think, by the speakers.

Speaker 1: Well, you won't be able to hear that very well. But the sound is there. And this is Second Life. This is Shambles. Hopefully, some of you recognize him already. Wearing a samurai sword because he is, of course, at the cutting edge of education and new teaching and learning. I heard you groan. Don't groan. They have two screens up here, which is interesting. So these are other avatars around the world. And I think from talking to them earlier, most of them are actually in the UK. And the panel is up here. And it's interesting. It's being streamed in two ways. This is an old type panel. For those who know Second Life well, this is an old type panel. And it's streaming in with QuickTime. And this is a new type of panel that you can only view with the viewer two. And I can zoom into that. You see, we get a certain amount of pixelation. And the nice thing about this is when you're attending in this way is that you can have chat going. And here's my chat window with the participants that are in Second Life. OK, let me show you some other parts of it. So that was encouraging. I could attend that. There is a Twitter tag. Oh, there was a speaker that I just looked at. This is annoying. The conference is also streamed through a website called LiveStream. And you could view it there. But the Thai government has blocked it. So I can't demonstrate it here. Here's the Twitter feed. And this is the Twitter feed that my preferred client tweet chat because every five seconds it renews this feed. Come on, don't let me down. Here we go. And you can see the feed there. Apparently up to now, halfway through the day, 1600 tweets. What I did learn is this brilliant Twitter feed. I can't wait to use this when I'm going to my next conference or workshops. You can see this particular site called VisibleTweets.com creates this wonderful large type view of the Twitter stream. And it's using the tag, the hashtag. And I think that's brilliant. So that's it. Just a few observations of how to be able to attend a real life event from 5,000 miles away. Have fun.