Back from Lithuania where we held the final meeting of the VITAE project. We had planned to run the VITAE online mini-conference on one of the meeting days but really it was a shame to be stuck indoors while the weather was so sunny and spring-like.
The project has been about developing a train the trainers course enabling teachers in vocational education to both upskill their ICT proficiency while at the same time mentoring colleagues to upskill theirs too. Therefore the mini online conference was designed to use tools which individual teachers could try out without expense and technical knowledge. This is why we used Dimdim rather than say Elluminate. The live experience of Dimdim is more suited to a one way speech than conversational dialogue but conversation is less stilted in Dimdim than it is in WiZiQ where only one person can speak at a time. In Dimdim four people can have the microphone at the same time (not recommended that they are all open at the same time since this can create terrible echo). I still don’t like the recordings made by Dimdim which give you the screen and the chat area in two separate files. Two of our speakers used different ways of engaging the audience by using the chat area so that means that a viewer gets a very disjunct view of the event by only viewing the audio recording and slides.
Other Web 2.0 tools we used as part of the event included Ning as the event coordination space and Google Forms for the evaluation. These are all tools which could be implemented at an individual level and at very short notice assuming reasonable Internet access.
The conference itself started with Helen Keegan demonstrating a virtual websearch. Participants were asked to search for links relating to mentoring and then added them to a Wetpaint wiki to form an instant source list of places to explore.
In the second session, Nicky Hockly of The Consultants-e, had us all trying out a range of Interent sites such as Wordle and thinking about how these could be used with language learners.
In the third session, Niels Damgaard in Oslo went through some of the effective approaches he has used to train school librarians in the use of Web 2.0 tools in learning. Participants especially liked his use of the aggregator tool Suprglu.
The fourth session took place outside of Dimdim on the national Lithuanian recording system and summarised the English sessions and added a Lithuanian context. The fifth session was a round table discussion by the project partners but this had to be abandoned after encountering severe audio problems twice during the allocated 45 minutes. A pity because we had some interesting issues to ponder.
So this was a chance to take some experimental approaches rather than having a traditional talk in which one person speaks while the audience listens sitting on their hands.
Meanwhile the weather in Lithuania continued to be sunny and Vilnius was looking particularly attractive, having been spruced up as European Capital of Culture for 2009.