Consider blogs as a community of practice

I am heading off to ALT-C 2007 tomorrow, as those of you who read this blog will be aware of. Apart from going over my slides and what I will be saying at 5, I have also taken the time to read some of the information on the ALT-C conference amplifier feed.

I have to say that, there are only some people posting about ALT-C, the rest seems to be about what people already have on their blogs. Even though a lot of this information is out of date, some of it is interesting. I have found some one linking to an article about blogs and communities of practice, from 2004. I think that the conference amplification is a form of blogs becoming communities of practice even if for only a short time (ie the time frame for the conference). All we need to do now is to try and maintain that community of practice some where. Even though I like the fluidity of the conference amplification system.

It leads me back to how we can build and maintain a community of practice for WebPA and whether we can organise to get an amplification going for an event that the Subject Centres are hoping to hold. But what are the next steps to holding on to that community of practice...

I have to say that some of the best conference amplification I have seen has been for the @media conferences. You can see the effects at Flickr and on technorati. May be I will be able to find similar examples for ALT-C by tomorrow.

Please let me know if you do blog about WebPA or you intend to mention us somewhere as I will then try to set up a 'feed of feeds' or even a Yahoo! pipe. But again this may be transient, rather than sustained...we need to develop a sustained amplification for our project.

Getting ready for Alt-C

I have run over my presentation with a colleague this morning and I feel only a little more positive about it. In the past I have always written presentations on the fly, ie on my way to the meeting, so this is a real novelty to be really ready. But the test will be on Tuesday at 5 when my slot is.

I have spent some time as well looking at ALT-C 2007 website as well having never been to this conference before. I am struggling to work out what sessions to attend. I think that the first session that I will attend will be the speed workshop. Following that I may pick up on some of the sessions related to one of my biggest interests which is accessibility online. Further on I have no idea what sessions I will attend, but I do know that I will be at the ceilidh and the gala dinner. Any ideas of what to do while at ALT-C would be greatly received.

Writting presentations

Today I am having a real memory block. I am trying to write my presentation for the short paper that I submitted to ALT-C back in February, right at the start of the project. It seems an age ago and the usability research I did back then seems to have filtered out of my ears and been replaced with all the other information that I am collecting as the project progresses.

However, in having to revisit the project documents it has highlighted that this is a reusable model that I have created. As we get closer to having WebPA piloted at other institutions, it has highlighted that we need repeat the usability testing with our partner institution. Even though the model is geared up to using approximately 5 users I think it is worth doing with each institution, no matter the number of users available.

So here I am, writing my Blog and avoiding getting this presentation right. May be I will leave it till tomorrow and look at it with fresh eyes. But getting back to this presentation. I have only 15 mins to try and convey not only the research and reasons that back up this method, but also the method itself. I am also a great believer that the slide in a presentation should not be just solid text. Following HCI rules that are relevant to usability of either software or even presentations in this case 7 +/- 2 items seems to be a good guide. Another good guide is to take the number of minutes that you have to present in and divide by two. All of this means that I only have maybe 7 or 8 slides, of which there should be no more that 9 points. As you can see I have set myself the most unrealistic target to start with. But I still don't think I can get everything included in. So why I am writingwriting it this early! Especially as in two weeks or so I will have completely forgotten everything I have written today. Right back to the presentation before home.