Category: Liveblogging

Does Liveblogging Add Value?

I decided to offer to lead a session. I do not have a presentation to give, as I do not want to use the one Robin and I presented at Northern Voice. I am much more interested in discussing this with other people. My session is scheduled to begin in about five minutes, and nobody is here yet.

Perhaps liveblogging does not add value?

For the life of me, I cannot get the projector to work in presentation mode. I had the same problem at Northern Voice, and am starting to wonder if something happened to my plug. Mental note to self–call Lenovo tech support.

Ahh, some people attended, and we proceeded to discuss liveblogging, Twitter, and the value and usage of the two.

I am convinced there is more discussion and research to do on this topic.

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WordPress for CMS

Took some doing to get connected to the network, but it was as if somebody flicked the switch, and the group of us waiting for the WordPress session to start are able to get on.

It is now 12:10, and the WordPress session that ends at 12:30 still has not started. Ungood.

William Stratus (sp) is from Toronto and came down for the day, and stated that he stayed with a colleague in Harlem. He then said he did not get mugged there. I found the humor a bit caustic, especially for an outsider.

There is discussion about how people use WordPress for things beyond just blogging.

He was then speaking about people, and mentioned Garth Turner’s weblog in Canada. www.garth.ca 

There then was some discussion about how people change WordPress, especially about templates for content management so WP does not look like a blog. There is some work done with using WP templates, where the line between CMS and blogging is a tight line. There are a lot of wifi network issues, and people are starting to leave as the presenter keeps trying to get the network to work.

Unfortunately, the speaker was so focused on trying to get wireless, that he could not role with the technology limitations and ended up not speaking about or presenting or discussing much.

Half the people have left the session by now, and I will follow . . .

Welcome to BarCampNYC3!

There was a welcome by somebody who did not introduce himself. He did seem exciting though, and then asked who has NOT been to a BarCamp before? Most hands were raised. Interesting.

Carl Skelton (cskelton@poly.edu), director of Integrated Digital Media at Polytechnic, then spoke. He is hosting a number of the other events like this, and he invited us to consider using Polytechnic University for these sorts of events. I hope this will be the same once NYU buys Polytechnic. He had some interesting slides, and then spoke about the NYU and Polytechnic combination. There are a lot of relationships between the two institutions now. 

I wish I would have remembered my camera.

There was then the thanks and recognition for the sponsors of the event.

There was the discussion about filling in the schedule wall, which is something that is common for BarCamp unconferences. If we find ourselves in a room that is not for us, such as the subject matter is not right for me, then leave and go to another one. We are all participants, so we should try to fix any issues that come up.

Put a red dot on our nametags if we do not want to be tagged. We then crowdsourced and named the rooms.

Cider and muffins are next.

I asked about the tag, and Eric told us that the tag is BarCampNYC3. There is wifi all over, it seems like a friendly start of the day.

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Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform – Liveblogging nv08

Attending the session Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform by D’Arcy Norman and Jim Groom. So much information here with such humor, all in the joy of open source education content and assistance to edubloggers. They had so many links they showed, I hope they publish them on the wiki.

Increasing Internet connectivity issues here. Seems people who are live streaming the sessions are filling the network bandwidth.

There is so much information here, I wish this session were in the morning. Perhaps they will provide the links they showed on the wiki or their blogs?

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Facebook 101 – Liveblogging this session

Why Facebook 101? That is the question that Phillip Jeffrey started his session with. He said he spoke about Facebook last year at Moosecamp, though I somehow missed that. Interestingly, this is one of the first times I have heard people here at Northern Voice speak about Facebook.

I just don’t seem to “get” Facebook. I understand the concept, of course, but being somewhat shy I find it a strange concept to go look for people I don’t know and add these people as “friends.” How can I have friends I don’t know (whether F2F or electronically)? Another thing I really do not “get” about Facebook is that there are not RSS feeds. Why should I have to log on to Facebook to see if there is a new discussion in one of the groups of which I am a member?

Phillip is now showing his Facebook profile. Completely overwhelming how long the main page is and how many links and groups and favorites. I can’t imagine how many hours he must have spent setting that up in that way. 

He showed how there are lots of privacy settings, to be able to differentiate between fiends, acquaintances, and others. This almost seems to be the main point of this session — what do the different privacy settings mean.

I was hoping there would be more of the reasons to use Facebook that would convince me to use it. Perhaps this is something I need to accept will not work for me, and that Facebook is just an application I do not like? I certainly spend enough energy trying to “get” Facebook and trying to figure out why people spend hours there “friending” others, as if there is a popularity contest in having the most number of people who we do not know.

Perhaps one of the things about Facebook I do not like is that I do not own the items that are uploaded there. There is not a way to be able to export or output information out of Facebook. Once it is there, there is not a way to be able to get it.

I wonder if my feelings about Facebook are related to my interest in post-modernism? Perhaps I do not like the idea of a place where everybody else seems to go and follow almost without a reason that makes sense to me. Do I really have the interest and time to sit at Facebook and see who is going to what group and saying whatever? I already do this via Twitter. Perhaps that is enough.

Ultimately, Facebook is not worth the energy I spend trying to figure it out. I hardly use it anyway, so should probably remove the components from it I do not value. Perhaps I should think about Facebook as a value proposition–what value, if any, have I ever received from it? With all the applications and personalities out there, should I have to use anything I really do not want to?

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