Monday 24 June 2013

Social Media at #celt13

Earlier this month we had our annual Galway Symposium on Higher Education, entitled "Thinking Differently" - New Curricula, New Skills in Higher Education.

Although the conference theme itself is not technology-focused, we did make use of technology to support and enhance the conference experience.

Twitter

Back in March, we agreed the twitter hashtag for the conference and I used Martin Hawksey's excellent Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet to start archiving all tweets using the hashtag.

About 2 weeks before the conference itself, I enlisted the help of a twitter team, targeting people that I knew would be at the conference and giving them advice on how to keep the backchannel going. This meant that we had an active twitter stream before, during and after the conference, with about 850 tweets currently in the archive.

The Archive Tool produces a complete archive and TagsExplorer, which lets you explore the connections between the people who are tweeting. 

From this we can see that Helen Crump (@crumphelen) wins the award for Top Conversationalist.

The award for Top Tweeter, however, goes to Iain Mac Labhrainn (@iainmacl)



Streaming and Recording of Keynotes 

During the conference, we had some excellent speakers, including: Prof. Marijk van der Wende, Amsterdam University College; Dr. Camille Kandiko, King's College London; Dr. Vicky Gunn, University of Glasgow; Dr. Alastair Robertson, Abertay University; and Prof. Derek Raine, University of Leicester. Their presentations were all streamed, the link being broadcast regularly on Twitter. Recordings of the keynotes are all available, via the Kaltura platform, on the conference website.

Conference Photos

Finally, I'd like to mention the excellent work done by Blaneth and Margaret on taking images from the conference and putting them into this very nice little animation using animoto:



All of these technologies facilitate us to archive the conference in different ways, allowing the conversations to continue. Hopefully this blogpost will further support the discussion.


 

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