For those not familiar with what the VSS Overlay was, read the second half of the entry on New Initiatives at the Virtual School Symposium.
In terms of usage, let me discuss each of the parts of the Overlay.
VSS Wiki
By far the most used aspect of the VSS Overlay. The wiki was made available to presenters on 21 October and made public via this blog and the Virtual School Symposium website on 23 October. To give you a sense of the amount of use, here are the edits made since that day:
- 20081021 – 829
- 20081022 – 51
- 20081023 – 446
- 20081024 – 281
- 20081025 – 120
- 20081026 – 1281
- 20081027 – 2854
- 20081028 – 2826
- 20081029 – 1694
- 20081030 – 948
- 20081031 – 426
- 20081101 – 0
- 20081102 – 4
- 20081103 – 8
And here are the number of hits (and individual users) to the wiki during the same period:
- 20081021 – 829 (6)
- 20081022 – 51 (8)
- 20081023 – 446 (70)
- 20081024 – 281 (45)
- 20081025 – 120 (33)
- 20081026 – 1281 (67)
- 20081027 – 2854 (154)
- 20081028 – 2826 (138)
- 20081029 – 1694 (120)
- 20081030 – 948 (103)
- 20081031 – 426 (60)
- 20081101 – 285 (47)
- 20081102 – 248 (29)
By far, this was the most used aspect of the VSS Overlay. Both presenters and attendees seemed to use it. Presenters posted PPT slides and other resources. Attendees used to to add their own notes for the session. There were even six discussion messages posted to various parts of the wiki.
And it wasn’t just a folks in Phoenix thing using this resources. If you look at the country codes where the ISPs were registered, you would see:
- United States – 81.2618%
- Canada – 17.9328%
- Unknown – 0.3649%
- Netherlands – 0.1468%
- New Zealand – 0.1091%
- Saudi Arabia – 0.0629%
- Mexico – 0.021%
- United Kingdom – 0.021%
- Australia – 0.021%
- Qatar – 0.0168%
- Philippines – 0.0168%
- Turkey – 0.0126%
- Singapore – 0.0084%
- Republic of Korea – 0.0042%
Given that everyone using the wiki during the conference would have showed up under a US-based ISP, the international usage indicates either presenters and attendees using the wiki before their went to VSS or after they returned home, or people who never actually came to Phoenix for VSS and accessed it from home.
Live Presentations
This was a mixed bag in terms of success (and maybe how you actually measure success). According to the Live Presentations Online there were eleven sessions that were broadcast using Elluminate by Elluminate, Inc. and one session broadcast via Elluminate by Rob Darrow. Personally, I logged into three or four of the Elluminate ones provided by Elluminate (all ones broadcast from the main ballroom) and while there were usually four or five people there not in Phoenix and another three or four there from Phoenix, these sessions were typically not well received. There were complaints about the audio quality and even more complaints about the PPT slides (as several of the presenters had multiple layers and animation in their slides that get condensed into a single – often unreadable – image in the Elluminate rooms). In at least two of the sessions I was in, people left quite early in the presentations because of this frustration.
The Live Presentations Online page also listed eight presentations that were going to be broadcast via UStream. I know that one of those eight wasn’t broadcast for sure, but those presenters did broadcast a later presentation that simply wasn’t linked into the page. Of the remaining seven listed on the page, I know that five were definitely broadcast as the recordings are available. The other two may have also been broadcast, but recordings were not made so I can’t say for sure. I know this is a lot of textual information, so here is what I can report in point form:
- 8 Ustream presentations listed – 7 went ahead, 1 didn’t, 1 presentation not listed was Ustreamed
- of these 8 presentation that were UStreamed , 6 were recorded
Personally, I was responsible for three of the eight presentations listed. I was able to monitor two of those three (as for the K-12 Online Learning in Canada presentation I was the only presenter so I wasn’t able to check the chat room to see if there were attendees – so if you watched the broadcast via UStream please let me know). In the two that I monitored, one had a single participate from Northern Ontario that wasn’t able to join us in Phoenix and the other one did not have anyone watching. Although I note that the recordings for all three have been viewed – as have the recordings for the other three presentations that were broadcast and recorded.
The third form of live presentation that we listed at the Live Presentations Online page was the CoverItLive blogging. Only two presenters signed up to do this and neither followed through and actually did it. The page originally listed a total of nine sessions that were going to be covered – as I enlisted the help of a colleague of mine here in Michigan, Jay Bennett, to do six and I did three of my own. I note on the page now there was a tenth one added by Brett Hinton. In addition, I have since discovered that Tim Holt used CoverItLive to blog about a total of nine sessions, none of which are included in the Live Presentations Online page. I don’t know if Brett or Tim had any participants in their sessions. I know in the three that I completed I had one person monitoring one of my CoverItLive sessions – although they didn’t say anything so I’m not sure if they were actually there or not. I can say that at least 18 of these 19 CoverItLive transcripts have been posted to the individual’s respective blogs (see the next entry for a list of people’s blog and VSS 2008 entries).
Blogging
This is another one that I’m struggling with, in terms of how it went. The VSS Overlay instructions asked:
However, Technorati isn’t the most reliable of services. I know personally I have set-up my blog to communication with Technorati and use tags in every single one of my posts. I have an account with Technorati, I have claimed this blog and regularly login to Technorati to make sure it is pinging this blog. Unfortunately, not a single one of my entries since I migrated from Blogger has shown up in Technorati. And a current search of Technorati on NACOL and VSS 2008 reveals no entries.
Having said that, based upon bloggers I personally follow or found during VSS this year, I know that there were at least seven different bloggers active during the VSS conference. Those seven bloggers posted a total of nineteen different entries (see the next entry for a list of people’s blog and VSS 2008 entries). There may have been more, but I have no way of knowing.
Microblogging
The final aspect of the VSS Overlay was microblogging, where attendees were asked:
- real-time feedback using Twitter – please use the hashtag #vss2008 in each of your tweets
There was a problem with this and the problem was with my instructions (due to my lack of knowledge at the time of hashtags). Apparently, in order for hashtags to be indexed a Twitter user has to be following the hashtags bot – essentially a computer program that indexes Twitter entries that used #sometexthere. I didn’t know this until after the conference, so I didn’t tell people about it until after the conference, and the seven people using Twitter at the conference (five of whom were using the hastag #vss2008) obviously didn’t know either because there is no #vss2008 listed at http://hashtags.org/alltags/V/.
Having said that, I know that I did add eleven new people that I began following while I was in Phoenix attending the Virtual School Symposium. Three of those eleven were using the hashtag and were people I have never met or connected with online before. I can also say that there were at least three people in my network that weren’t in Phoenix that interacted with things I was posting about various sessions on my Twitter account. So, in a very limited way it didn’t extend the conference beyond Phoenix for those individuals.
Overall Assessment
In the end, the item that I spent the most time working on to set-up (i.e., the wiki) was by far the most used and most commented on portion of the VSS Overlay. While the live presentations feature did not really get much use during the actual conference, they have provided a useful recordings (both text-based via CoverItLive and video ones from UStream) for people to be able to access the content of the sessions after the fact. Unfortunately Technorati is not a reliable way to integrate bloggers (and even more unfortunate is the fact that there simply isn’t anything else out there worth using to replace it). Finally, with more Twitter users and accurate instructions for hashtag use, this could be quite useful for both interaction and connections within individual’s own networks.
For the of you who were in Phoenix and made use of any of these tools, if you have anything you’d like to add from the user side of things I’d welcome your thoughts.
For those of you who were not in Phoenix and made use of any of these tools, if you have anything you’d like to add to feel free to post it as a comment to this entry.
Finally, for those who didn’t use these tools (regardless if you were in Phoenix or not), I’d welcome your feedback as well.
