Presumably if people use the provided embed code to place the presentation material onto their own blogs, wikis or Moodles, the usage stats will still be tracked at the Blip end?

Can you just confirm this for me?

And what’s the policy on embedding? Is it encouraged to spread the word? Or discouraged to centralise things.

Chris

It may be that it would make sense to change the content control model at some point for the conference. If we did, however, I’m thinking that would take place after the initial presentation “goes live,” since part of the conference buzz is having (during the regular conference) 4 new presentations publish each day.

It might be valuable to outline and consider benefits versus drawbacks of a decentralized content sharing model. There may be ways to assess participation metrics other than file accesses. And, the value participation metrics may be outweighed by the benefit of a decentralized content sharing model. I think this is an excellent conversation to have.

I hope that there will be possibilities in the future to talk about some of these issues in more detail.

We are confident providing our files via W&M and temporarily via Blip will provide sufficient bandwidth for downloads. At some point we may look at other options (I’ve considered suggeesting Akamai) but at this point for the participation levels we have, our publishing options appear to be sufficient to meet bandwidth demands.

Your feedback and that of others on these and other issues will, of course, be valued and helpful as we look at these issues now and down the road.

There is tension between having boundaries and limits for the conference and wanting things to be open, creative and dynamic. We do want to be able to tell the story of the conference, and part of that involves participation. We estimate 50,000 people participated in 2006 and 100,000 in 2007. Will 200,000 participate in 2008? I don’t know. I hope the growth pattern continues. If we don’t compile server stats, however, we can’t make those types of estimates as reliably.

Success for the conference certainly goes way behind total numbers of participants, however. For me, seeing and hearing about the personal connections which happen as a result of the conference and the classroom projects which impact student learning are the most exciting. We don’t have elaborate metrics to capture and assess all the things happening in and around the conference, but we do want to have some documentation. I think this helps communicate the value and reach of the conference, which can be important when discussing things like participation value and professional development credit.

Can anyone else chime in with reasons why it’s a good idea to try and compile participation statistics for the conference?

“Content in presentations for the 2008 conference is explicitly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. For the reason just mentioned, however, file mirroring is discouraged during and following the conference.”

I understand what you are asking, but I find the latter restriction contradictory to a CC/ATT/NC license, especially following the conference.

One of your sentences has me curious – “Because of our need and desire to compile server access statistics” … I understand the desire, but why the need? I could see the need if this conference was tied to funding, but I didn’t think it was.