The pros and cons of wifi/laptop-friendly conferences:
Pros: the backchannel
Cons: a room-full of people staring at screens
Pros: being able to tune out and check email
Cons: it's hard to ignore email and focus on the interesting stuff
Pros: being able to go off and bookmark / research interesting issues
Cons: the perpetual clickety-click of a room full of keyboards.
The first session is on blogging at Warwick. The chat in IRC is about which universities support blogging or have a policy on blogging. Apparently there are no blogs at Kent or City; Oxford have no central facilities, but are running a student blogging project based on PDAs; no policy at Bath, Birmingham don't allow them at all; nothing at Bristol other than a bit of web space.
I was wondering why it seemed that Warwick had built a blogging tool themselves. Turns out they are aiming to scale to 10,000 blogs. Ouch. (I wonder how many TypePad support?) Interestingly, their website reports 3433 already, so they are well on the way.
Warwick did an advertising campaign for their blogging service - with fridge magnets! Nice.
An excellent sequence of video clips, interviews with the students about why they blogged, what they blogged, etc. Not sure which is most interesting - the views of the students interviewed, or that Warwick took the experiment so far in terms of interviewing them. Does this mean blogging is a mainstream corporate tool for pacifying customers, students etc?
Final thought: I wonder if Warwick will share their blogging tool code with other universities?
Posted by savs at July 6, 2005 2:27 PM