Category Archives: 2008

Conveners for the 2008 K-12 Online Conference met this evening following our pre-conference fireside chat, and among other things discussed and reconsidered the previously announced request that K12Online conference presentations NOT be mirrored/file-shadowed on other servers.

Considering the points raised by several other K12Online participants as well as presenters, conference conveners have decided to change this request. Instead of restricting access to conference presentation files after they are published “live” during the conference, we say: Let the content be free! (Per the terms of the conference and presenters’ CC license, of course.)

We want to emphasize our continued to commitment to publish presentation files on the William and Mary server as well as our appreciation to William and Mary for providing this file hosting for the conference for FREE. Our metrics for measuring file downloads and gauging conference participation will be significantly weakened by this decision to encourage file mirroring/shadowing, but on balance we deem this is a good decision in line with the core values of the K-12 Online Conference. The archiving/curating of conference presentations on the William and Mary server remains important not only from an accessibility standpoint, but also from a content preservation standpoint. As conveners we want presentation materials to remain available and accessible online for a global audience forever, and our agreement with William and Mary meets this objective of continued archival and access.

We will continue to require our presenters to NOT “publish early” before their presentations are scheduled to go “live” on the conference blog during the conference, because we want to maintain the excitement of releasing/publishing presentations each day during the regular two weeks of the conference. After a presentation is published, however, anyone is free to mirror/file shadow the main presentation in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license under which they are shared by the presenters and the K-12 Online Conference.

Starting next week, we will (as in past years) be publishing all conference content to the William and Mary server to provide broad accessibility to these files from school networks which block many media file sharing sites. In addition, however, we will publish all files for the conference on our pro Blip.tv account as well as on dotSUB where presentation videos can be translated into a wide variety of languages by community volunteers. Given the dedication of the 2008 K-12 Online Conference to Lee Baber, who was a committed activist for digital accessibility, this seems particularly fitting.

There are multiple reasons for this decision, and you may be able to suggest others not included yet on this list. These include:

1. The K-12 Online Conference is all about the sharing of great ideas related to digital learning. As conveners and as a conference, we want to encourage educators around the world to share and talk about the great ideas of our presenters, and encouraging broader dissemination and sharing of presentation files and ideas (per our CC license) supports these goals.
2. Accessibility is a VERY important issue. By providing links to conference presentation content on many servers IN ADDITION to William and Mary, the cause of providing greater access and accessibility will be advanced.
3. Embedding media content (including video and audio files) on other websites is a VERY important and powerful characteristic of many web 2.0 sites and technologies. Cross-posting K-12 Online Conference content to different websites which support embedding (including Blip and dotSUB) will again support our goals of idea dissemination and accessibility, since presentation content will be made available to a greater number of people via a greater number of venues and modalities.
4. Permitting cross-posting supports creativity and innovation within and outside our present K-12 Online Conference community. We are a creative group, and members are constantly “playing with boundaries” (not coincidentally the theme of our 2007 conference.) Formally endorsing and supporting file shadowing should encourage further creative sharing and discussion around the ideas of the conference.
5. Supporting file shadowing of presentation files is in line with the spirit and language of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license under which they are shared. To discourage file shadowing which complies with the terms of this license would be contradictory. As a conference we want to model best-practices for blended learning, professional development, and respect for intellectual property rights. These ends are also served by supporting file shadowing.

Please keep in mind that as K-12 Online Conference presentation files are posted and shared elsewhere, those video and/or audio files should be posted in a way which complies with our Creative Commons license. As a specific example, Mike Temple’s posting of Dr. Heppell’s pre-conference keynote to VodPod included the conference title and session title, but did not include Dr. Heppell’s full name. That information was helpfully added as a comment on that Vodpod post by Bob Sprankle, but it should be added to the original post.

We are all learning a great deal through and around the events of the 2008 K-12 Online Conference, and as always we value the input, ideas and suggestions of members of our community. We seek to be a responsive and forward-looking community, and thanks to the input of multiple individuals we feel this decision to support presentation mirroring / file shadowing in line with our CC license is a good one.

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The date and time for our first fireside chat with Dr. Stephen Heppell in the 2008 K-12 Online Conference has been finalized. The fireside chat will take place at 11:00 PM Thursday, October 16 GMT. Use the previous link to determine the start time in your local time zone.

To join the fireside chat, use the following link to enter our Elluminate Live room: http://snurl.com/3xbc0

Details and links for our other two fireside chats are available on our conference wiki. The Elluminate link for each fireside chat will remain the same. Dates and times our week1 and week2 fireside chats are:

3:00 PM Saturday, October 25 GMT
Fireside Chat With Week One Keynoter and Presenters
The direct link to the time converter for this event:
TO JOIN THE SESSION
http://snurl.com/3xbc0 [sas_elluminate_com]

1:00 AM Tuesday, October 31 GMT
Fireside Chat With Week Two Keynoters and Presenters
TO JOIN THE SESSION
http://snurl.com/3xbc0 [sas_elluminate_com]

Also remember our 24 hour culminating event, “When Night Falls,” begins at 12:00 AM Saturday, November 1st GMT. Learn more on the “When Night Falls 2008” wiki and sign up to be a session moderator.

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UPDATE 16 OCTOBER 2008: PLEASE SEE THE POST “Let the content be free! (following CC terms)”

It’s late in the evening prior to opening day for the 2008 K-12 Online Conference. Thanks to many hours of work (not by me but by others working behind the scenes) the 2008 pre-conference keynote is scheduled to “go live” at 12 pm GMT tomorrow, October 13th, as originally announced.

Before the pre-con presentation goes live, however, as conveners we want to share some information about how we are changing our internal processes for transcoding and publishing conference presentation files this year. In addition, we want to address an issue which came up last year and may come up again: Cross-posting conference presentation files to other servers.

TRANSCODING AND PUBLISHING

As in the past, all conference presentations will be linked here from our conference blog and will be actually hosted by the College of William and Mary on their servers. There are two primary reasons for this: accessibility and archival. Many school organizations utilize content filters which block many video sharing websites. By providing all conference materials on our main k12onlineconference.org website as well as hosted files from the William and Mary server, school organizations should be able to “whitelist” (unblock) both the k12onlineconference.org domain and the wm.edu domain and provide access for educators and students to all conference content. The only exception to this is some of the wiki sites utilized to provide additional information for the conference are on other domains. (On Wikispaces.com) By archiving and curating all the primary presentation files of the conference, K-12 Online seeks to provide an ongoing and perpetual resource for educators worldwide interested in utilizing conference materials individually or with groups. If we were to NOT archive these presentation files in a single location, a strong possibility would exist that some files could be moved or server accounts could be de-activated, resulting in a lack of access to conference materials. As in past years, we hope to provide the greatest level of accessibility for conference materials while simultaneously ensuring presentations are archived for future generations.

This year, conveners are utilizing a pro Blip.tv account to upload and transcode presenter-submitted video files. Our Blip.tv account transcodes files into mp3 audio format as well as m4v iPod video format. We anticipate this will save a significant amount of convener time in compressing and prepping files for sharing, since files have been shared in a variety of formats as well as sizes in the past. Files uploaded and transcoded on Blip are hidden (made private) by the convener uploading them. After files are transcoded on Blip they are (as in the past) going to be uploaded individually to the W&M server, and those links (to mp3 and m4v formatted files) will be published on the conference blog when each presentation goes live.

In the past, a single convener (Lani Ritter Hall) formatted and created all 41 presentation posts for the conference blog. This was an INCREDIBLY large and time-consuming task. This year, individual strand conveners are composing and posting presentation posts for the 10 presentations in their respective strands. All presentation files, however (both mp3 and m4v) are being uploaded to the W&M server by a single convener, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. This situation is required because of server access permissions permitted by the university.

Because of travel and access constraints (Sheryl is in New Zealand and pays for bandwidth by the minute in her hotel) we are going to publish Dr. Stephen Heppell’s keynote tomorrow with links to our blip.tv website. His presentation files will be available for download from the W&M servers by the end of the week. We apologize in advance if your school organization does not permit access to the blip.tv website, and you are therefore not able to download and view the pre-conference keynote tomorrow from your school network. We do not anticipate having to initially publish other conference presentation links from our blip.tv site, however. Remaining presentation links should all be from W&M.

We are pleased, however, that publishing via blip.tv will permit us to not only provide links to a QuickTime (.mov) version and audio-only (.mp3) version, but also a Flash-video transcoded version which will play in a web browser. This version will play from the blip.tv domain, however, so if blip.tv is blocked on your school network it will not be accessible for you. Again, we plan to address these accessibility challenges as we have in the past by publishing all content to and linking from the W&M servers. The pre-conference keynote availability on the W&M server will be delayed, however, until later this week.

CROSS-POSTING CONFERENCE PRESENTATION FILES

Last year, particularly at the start of the conference, several people offered and asked for conference presentation files to be cross-posted to different servers for downloading. This process of “mirroring” files for download (or more accurately “file shadowing”) on different servers is common for many software downloads.

Because of our need and desire to compile server access statistics for our conference which are as accurate as possible, WE POLITELY DISCOURAGE participants and others from providing mirrored, alternative, or file shadowed copies of K-12 Online presentations on other servers other than W&M. 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.

We are looking forward to another outstanding year of creative idea sharing and collaboration with K-12 Online! Please remember to forward and share our conference marketing flyer with all the educators you know, so as many people as possible can join in the learning which is just STARTING here for the 2008 conference. 🙂

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As the K12 Online Conference is fast approaching, members of the Live Events committee are planning a number of interesting ways for you to become involved. As in the past, we will be hosting Elluminate and Skype chats during the keynote sessions and fireside chats, and we will once again welcome participation in When Night Falls. Check the conference schedule for dates and times of the events. (Note: If you are interested in serving as a moderator for When Night Falls, please check out the Moderator page!)

An exciting new addition this year is our Cup of Joe discussion groups.  Conversations around each presentation will be gathered and brought to life through the use of VoiceThread. Each presenter has identified three essential questions relating to their session and these will be posted on a correlating presentation VoiceThread. We encourage you and your colleagues to grab a cup of coffee, listen to a session or two, and then share your thoughts/reflections on the VoiceThreads. We hope these essential questions will help facilitate reflection for individuals as well as larger groups. And, as part of your reflection we ask that you let us know who you are, what you do, and where you grabbed your Cup of Joe!

Image: 55/365 One Big Cuppa’ Joe
http://flickr.com/photos/lingualx/407686041/