Chris’s Scorm work

Chris’s OpenLearn files he had to convert into being Schorm compliantOriginally uploaded by openlearn2007

Chris is up – was worried he didn’t have any ppt … but he just plugged on the projector – he said that was a relief that was working – it is a relief for me as well – its so much easier to blog when there are slides.

He is warning that some aspects of the presentation might get too technical – so he is giving is a public health warning.

ALPE project (http://adenu.ia.uned.es/alpe/) is a European project based in Spain dealing with accessibility … its project aims to offer an accessible VLE system and to spread the word about inclusion in e-learning.

ALPE services:
1) Accessible learning
2) Content enhancement
3) Content evaluation (evaluate content by using a checklist and the best practices)
4) Consultancy and training (connects to their business partners – I think this might be Indra)

.lrn (http://dotlrn.org/) is the VLE being used in this Spanish university which is similar to Moodle.

SCORM means Sharable Content Object Reference Model and from my searching on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORM) – “is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based e-learning.”

Questions that the consortium are asking:
1) How can we test our accessible VLE? – the answer to do this is that we need some learning materials to test this.
2) Where can we get some accessible SCORM compliant learning material from? – he wasn’t certain
3) But redid the question to say “Where can he get some learning material” – and this he thought he could do through OpenLearn
4) How do we convert OpenLearn content to SCORM? – he had no idea but decided to try something out and develop a process

His OpenLearn content had to be placed into XML (which he says he hates because of all the brackets). He had to modify the style sheets for look and feel and also add the missing descriptions for images. Then modify how the pages are generated (something to do with XSLT – extensible stylesheet language transformations) and then generate new pages (guess with the style sheets you can do this?) and then he needed to grab the descriptions, tags etc through extracting the metadata.

He is now showing a slide of the learning space of a course TL180 (I think) – he was worried about worms and Trojans … this course was quite short and allowed to project the explore what it needs. The OpenLearn content is just in the end a bunch of files. His key to figuring how to do this is through the “How to” tips from a pdf file.

He was pleasantly surprised how the openlearn content was structured. After making modifications and using the tips, a bunch of html files were able to be created. SCORM has its own page navigation and the page numbers had to be stripped off since it has its own navigation system.

He had to combine all these html files, and he had to use a tool call reload (?) to help him combine the content. To make the navigational structure he had to drag in each page by hand. So, he had to mess about with the process (tinkering anyone?) ….

The interesting part … here comes the results from the ALPE project … he is showing us a slide what the packaged SCORM materials looked like after using the OpenLearn content. It’s ready to start trials to look to see what problems the users would have (oh I thought he already did the trials the results are just the finished combined materials – which is a lot of hard work dealing with XML etc. – but it’s a lot more fun to see the end-users take on it).

Accessibility enhancements he did:
1) strengthened use of semantic mark-up – e.g. the bold tag is a visual thing and it becomes tag as emphasized and thus can be understood by the end-users (is he talking about visually impaired people in this context?)
2) Added small number of diagram descriptions – e.g. describing what the diagrams are and what they look like – he said this is hard work
3) Ensured description pop ups were formatted correctly
4) Adjusted some of the Javascript actions

Challenges he had to overcome whilst making these materials SCORM compliant
1) Understanding the structure of the material (e.g. the XML)
2) Understanding conversion process
3) Editing of XSLT transforms
4) Fiddly to generate pages
5) Editing of existing material
6) Restructuring or repurposing the materials

His further work in this would be:
1) Structured evaluation of the environment (I would like to see the results of this and actually how he plan to go about doing this)
2) Internal evaluating of a selected materials
3) Ideally: everything should be automated (the conversion I think he is talking about)
4) Resulting HTML could be simpler
5) Material can be used … oops missed it
Question time:

Daisy is asking about dynamic content … and Chris is saying it has primarily been restricted to static content …

I asked how he intended to evaluate it and he said they were going to look at navigation and the ability for students to post in other webpages etc. – I was hoping to get some information on the experimental design etc. and think-aloud strategies – but that is my quantitative empirical background coming into play here.

Some guy: How long it took to convert the materials

Chris said it took him 2 weeks to actually the answer the process and he has a batch file programme and he could convert an OpenLearn course in about 2 hrs … and he hesitantly says he might be willing to share this programme.

An OER Research Agenda: reflections on an International Community of Interest

Presented on behalf of Susan D’Antoni by

Reflections on Conference Blogging

I’m nearing the second day of blogging the OpenLearn conference, posting my blog towards the end of each session I attend and I started to reflect a bit on the experience. I always blog conference – it’s how I make and keep my own notes. But I’ve never been an “official” conference blogger before, nor really part of a blogging team. Posting to a shared blog is an interesting and quite a pleasant experience. As I do so, I can see what my friends and fellow bloggers have written about their sessions. It sometimes makes me smile and is always interesting. It feels like a sort of network of eyes and ears linked through blog entries.  Intense but run.  It certainly enhances the experience for me.

Rose, Tina, Giselle and Teresa,

Rose, Tina, Giselle and Teresa,Originally uploaded by openlearn2007 Teresa Connolly, Giselle Ferreira, Rose Webb & Tina Wilson

Repurposing for an open education repository: quantity, quality and processes

I’ve moved to G29/G30 sustainability strand. Anesa was finding it frustrating that her tablet PC wouldn’t connect to the wifi in this room. The room chair is Matthey Steven Carlos and he appears to be using an Ipod Touch to hold his notes for his introductory speech. Or he could just be holding it in his hand to show it off. If I had one, I’d be showing it off!

Theresa starts with an organizational plan of the people who work on the openlearn project to explain who they, the speakers, are. But there are no names, just titles like Strategic planning and partnership Academic Director…Operational planning and management Programme Manager etc. It might be quite fun to get the names of the people on the project and try to map them onto the organizational plan. A bit like pinning the tail on the donkey.

The OpenLearn site, by April next year, will represent only 5% of the Open University’s catalogue. Gosh, the overall repository must be HUGE. Labspace is the associated sense-making site where people can experiment with material. That’s interesting. I think the distinction between the Learnspace and Labspace in OpenLearn can sometimes be a bit opaque for new users.

Giselle is now talking about books, CDs and DVDs. She is describing the content of a normal OU distance courseand saying that all this material is put together by a team in the OU along with websites and other associated course assets. Now she’s displayed a slide listing all the course materials provided with a course and is saying that they then assess how best to adapt these materials to present through OpenLearn.

Then she talks about the additional assets that OpenLearn offers to complement these materials. Interactive quizzes, Flashmeeting – lots of others but we’ve gone past that slide already. She’s showing a web page which I think is an adaptation of the course book she is holding and explaining how they adapt the material for presentation.

Rose Webb is now presenting. She is talking about some of the constraints – rights, technical, resources needed,  moodle-related – on converting and publishing material. So making content available through OpenLearn is nowhere near as straightforward as one might think. She is going through a lot of the steps and considerations that they went through when making content available.

Teresa is now speaking again and has put up the most complex slide of steps and processes involved in making content available. It’s entitled Production Flow chart and has three stages. I’m not even going to attempt to take a picture of it as the presentation will be available on the web. Nevertheless, I think I may go look at it as it looks really interesting.
However Teresa is describing each step they go through in a certain amount of detail which is not quite so interesting. She is emphasising that she has simplified the steps – but they still look pretty complex so I’m glad she’s simplified it. I think that this information is relevant to anybody considering making content freely available online. I expect that they’re going to write up the process that they’ve developed and publish it in some way.

She’s now showing the same information as a compendium map. That’s nice and really relevant to the talk I went to earlier today about compendium. I’m beginning to think that it’s much more versatile than I had previously imagined.

Giselle is now summing up with three questions:

Efficacy: how can we make it work?
Efficiency: how can we make it work well?
Context: community engagement?

She’s mentioning how people remain linked to the content they have produced even though the copyright is with the OU – I guess this can cause problems if OpenLearn want to revise the content?

Question: How much have they spend on converting the content how long do they have the rights for? and what are the implications of creating a course based entirely on OpenLearn content.

Answer: Rights held for 4 years. Will negotiate further at that point.

Questionner So some materials will disappear after 4 years.

Giselle – Quality of OU materials linked to peer review so final materials is the result of a lot of discussion not only with academics but programmers etc so that is one aspect of quality. Model of OU is toward the support of open learning so the format of these materials is thought through very carefully before they are released.

Questionner asked why we don’t create all OU content with a view to it being open content rather than go tothe expense of converting it.

Giselle: There is a lot of intersection between OU material and reusable material, but this is not consistent across disciplines.

Another audience member who has produced lots of materials for OpenLearn points out that the OpenLearn moodle is not the same as the course team moodle and so it is difficult to produce materials that are ready for OpenLearn. It should get easier as time goes by as they are producing more compatible materials in the faculties.

Impact of OER in the Netherlands

John van der Baaren, Open Universiteit Nederland
Project targeted at people who have not already successfully attended higher education but they have finished some form of secondary education or a vocational training.
The project is designed to be flexible, open, time-independent and easily accessible. It is in Dutch. Students only have to invest time and effort, but they can choose to pay to be formally tested (so far few people have taken this opportunity). There are currently 16 courses online.
The research team is investigating the effects of this initiative. There was a general survey on the site and course-related surveys aimed either at people who had only looked at the introduction or at those who had studied most of the material. Around 800 forms have been submitted, around a fifth of them by people who have studied most of the material.
The site has attracted around 425,000 unique users, and the number of returning visitors is growing. Four out of five visited because they were interested in taking a free course. A third wanted to test their ability to take a university course.

Learning in Wikiversity

Cormac Lawler, University of Manchester
More information
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page
http://cormaggio.org
Wikiversity is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, so it is a sister project of Wikipedia and other projects such as Wikibooks. It was launched in August last year after three years development.
‘Wikiversity is a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It is a multidimensional social organisation dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service.’ It includes a repository element. There is space for people to store their documents. These are then editable and can be discussed and used by others. There is also a learning space in which people can learn in a ‘wiki way’.
The intentions of the project are to create and host a repository of free-content learning resources, to co-construct a wiki model for learning and to engage participants in the definition of their own learning.
Usage
Wikiversity is a multilingual project, currently in 5 languages (Wikipedia is now in around 200 languages). It is also for all learner levels – it is not just aimed at university level students. It is growing at the rate of around 34 new accounts every day, so now has over 15,000 user accounts. However, only 375 people have edited the wiki more than ten times – which is not a huge level of participation, and there are only five to ten users who could be classified as ‘very active’.
Issues
If anyone can upload any research, does that give it some validity which it does not necessarily merit? Is peer review necessary?
Research
Cormac is currently asking:
• What is a viable model for learning in Wikiversity?
• How are the provision and practice of education mediated by the wiki environment?
• How is the Wikiversity community providing for learning?

Richard’s publc health OER talk

Richard’s publc health website

Originally uploaded by openlearn2007

Trying to develop an education context around OER. His area of interest is public health – not sure which of the authors here is presenting … I think it might be Richard (only because he has a Western accent – sounds a bit British but not quite sure – ahh he also lived in Australia so that might be the strange mix in the accent).

He is saying they’re at a much earlier stage than TESSA.

He is saying that UK universities charge higher overseas students fees (agreed ) which limits their ability to contribute to capacity building in low-middle income families in their own homes.

The traditional university system is struggling to keep up with the developments in the OER system.

The inspirations comes from free and open source software (FOSS), the OER (supposedly there is strong support from UNESCO – always good to know) and personal experience.

Public health problems in the developing countries are a problem as the capacity is limited. So, now he is looking at the public health OER including from the OU, John Hopkins, Tufts and ASPJ and also, MERLOT, Health Sciences Online, Public Health Learning.com etc.

What they need: Education materials, delivery mechanism ICT) accreditation.

People who would do the teaching: UK/US universities who will donate their courses and volunteers such as retired academic (the programme run by UNDP might be useful in this thing for retired senior volunteers).

Right, they want to do this through a Moodle set-up for now – so back to a VLE system for disseminating their information – wonder what Stuart would say about that he was talking about this yesterday – and he is sitting right next to me – I’ll see if he raises a question (oops – just realised it is the wrong Stuart – people really should have more unique names – of course nothing is ever my fault ).

He’s now unto the quality of the materials, process required as well as adapted the web 2.0 policy etc. Hhmmm … whose his is audience – he said developing countries – but what kind? Hopefully, not the ones with unreliable internet!! Unless there are being trained in a particular place which has internet then that might work but where it is on-site that might be a bit more difficult.

He is saying must take account of local resources and competencies as well. (My fingers are hurting – must be pre-mature arthritis setting in … or is this a new health risk … bloggeritis) …

He is saying whilst there is a large number of OER resources, little of them are being embedded into educational content (I guess he means in a course? – but what makes a course an educational content material – isn’t the OER itself an educational resource – I think he is only thinking of the formal learner rather the informal learner).

He is saying the organisation structure is that of volunteer-sourcing (must mean that it based only on volunteers?).

He is saying on their website they have two draft course modules on maternal mortality.

Stuart: Do you have any funding for this? (well this Stuart still asked a question but not about the VLE!)
Richard: No – as sustainability is a major issue and needs to build this bottom up.

Q: How long have you started and what is the timeline for success

Been in operation (or rather a domain name) for about a year and in the process of applying to the charity commission to be a charity. They’re running a pilot this year and hoping by Oct next year they would have run more pilots … he doesn’t think it will ever be over – he will like to over a course module next year.

The guy who asked the question continues think it is better to have some clear plan and since he is thinking about something that is digital he should have a very clear point when he wants to launch this, as this can be a business model in which he can bid for funding as piloting is not the way to gain funding.

UNICEF guy: Have you been talking to all the other UN agents (UNDP, UNICEF etc) or World Vision as they’re huge in this area and there would be less concern for accreditation that level just staff development.

He hasn’t contacted those as yet but has contacted UNICEF to help through with one model.

Vijay: He’s thinking about this along the work he is doing in India … he wants to clarify his thinking on whether it is a platform from which people can use information?

Richard: The course modules are being used for learning about improving mortality care and also to develop a communities of practice.

Vijay: Saying that the approach can also generalise to another domain and that might be of more interest – that is the general model would be of great interest.

Ahh … I thought his thing was quite formal … he just says he is running it from the point of view of a university masters course – thought it sounded very structured and university like …. Anyway, I think we should have lunch – oh great no more questions! Got to go upload these.

Bob and Freda’s TESSA presentation

Bob’s TESSA presentation

Originally uploaded by openlearn2007

The TESSA OER experience: building sustainable models of production and user implementation

Bob has started the session off … he is telling a bit of TESSA which looks at teachers in sub-Saharan Africa.

He is showing us a picture of teachers and the classes they take and the number of students in it. Most of them are over 200 students, where the room is less than half the size of the room in which we are now in (room is an alright size bigger than CMR15).

He is talking about a Nigerian teacher who has 90 students, which has no books, no pens and no desks and no paper.

There are over 40M children not in school in Africa (or the world?) as there are no schools for then – the world is trying to do something for them through the Millennium goals. There is a growing number of para-professional teachers as there is not enough training for the teachers.

The numbers in school was not a good indicator of the kind of education that students were getting (based on reports from UNESCO and Commission for Africa). About 50% of the primary students don’t finish school. He thinks this is the biggest problem … he is also drawing into the health problems such as malaria and TB which he says is looked at with more focus rather than the educational aspects.

TESSA involves 18 countries across the sub-Saharan Africa. These projects are done at <500 people although it should be with larger numbers, and these projects should be capable of replication rather than just one-off projects.

The only pedagogic tool that teachers have is what they have in their heads and the blackboard.

Just showed us a picture in Sudan a few decades (?) ago in which they have a blackboard – and is saying things haven’t changed that much.

The OER system the issues of need to take up particularly for the teacher audience is very important. The logistics of this means that most teacher training must occur in schools not in teacher training institutions – because that is the reality. And because it is school-based training it must have some kind of support or structure and it doesn’t automatically mean a system that is distance-education in the traditional system but it is something we go to think about. The OER is thus allowing people to create programmes which they can dip into and reshape to their own needs. He is also talking about value-adding to these resources in which they are able to link and adapt for their purposes.

There are 9 countries in the TESSA programme, involving West, East and Southern Africa. Half-million teachers in 2008 would be using the resources in one shape or the other.

Ok, so far very interesting stuff … but now it is Freda to talk.

She is talking about framing factors that will be what shaped the project. Two framing factors: the structure and design of the TESSA portal and the second is the access and take up.

First challenge, to develop materials that can easily contextualise across all countries and regions. The solution they came up with is a very structured writing/ authoring template such as activities they undertake, the case studies, a linking narrative, learning outcomes, and also there is a resource box (e.g. children’s work, web-links). They defined generic things in the authoring templates – such as the learning outcomes are constant across all materials. The supporting resources are more contextualised such as different images.

Using the authoring templates they’ve made over 750 units and it has involved over 100 hrs with help from people in the partner organisations.

Also, important is the context in which the teachers would be working – such as not having electricity, internet or even computers. Had to think of an easy way to disseminate this easily across Africa. They have created a mechanism to convert these into different formats such as webpages, pdfs and word documents (allowing them to amend them).
Also, wanted to help people in developing new materials and developing dialogue in different institutions – also create something that is universal but also applicable to them and also country pages on TESSA tend to be in the language of the country.

Courses in which the TESSA materials are being used:
1. Diploma in Primary Education (Open University of Tanzania)
2. Recognition of Prior Learning course (University of Fort Hare, South Africa)
3. 3 year post secondary teacher training programme (National Teachers’ Institute of Nigeria)

They’re also thinking of looking at using games in the classroom with the OER materials – this is being investigated at the Nelson Mandela Institute.

TESSA material has been also adopted by the B.Ed and CPD course in University of South Africa and a university in Sudan.

Framing factors:
1. structure of the original OERS
2. ease of localisation of OERS
3. Quality assurance
4. access and take-up
5. portal design and organisation

Through discussion and debate, once the portal is launched that a new architecture for teacher development can be made.

Question time! (Internet still not working – so got to wait till I get to another room to upload this … sorry for all those people eagerly awaiting my post – now that is being egoistical ).

Freda is answering a question: The original material has become repurpose materials for the TESSA project – not sure where the original material is coming from … oh – she means the original material of the TESSA project whilst the repurpose materials are the ones which people tinker (another buzz word of the conference) with. People share their materials and this is where people repurpose them. The original materials generate a benchmark for the regenerating materials.

Mary: She’s talking about her experience in Uganda, she is saying that the teachers only use a chalkboard because that is the cheapest thing they could afford.

Bob: Is saying that the pedagogy can be adapted to involve more participation by the learners … he is saying the TESSA materials allows students to do all classroom activities … what they’ve discovered is that if they use OER materials in the institutions and they develop it for their own context, that some institutions were more amnbitious for each other, and therefore the local people have to make their own minds up on what they want to do.
UNICEF guy asking: Schools are places for social and emotional development of students beyond that just for academic and that the teachers are champions of these developments. His purpose here is to develop materials for community caregivers and they’re targeting teachers … particularly as schools is where there is a ‘safe’ environment for students to come to… Is there a way in which we could put these materials up for the teachers?

Freda – answered yes there is an area where they can put these materials as there is an ‘other educational’ links (Great!). TESSA also has the capacity to put up materials that can be contextualised for that country which are considered to be appropriate for teachers.

Some guy is saying it is very ambitious but there is a lot of technical problems when it comes to implementations particularly with respect to the cultural aspects and also with respect to acquiring email. He wants to know how reasonable it is to do this with 500,000 teachers and how they’re going to evaluate it and where it is failing and where it is succeeded.

Bob is saying that there are parts in which they’re not doing as well as they should do but not necessarily failing. He is saying he went to institutions instead who were willing to go on board with this rather than the government and they’re not setting any agenda for these institutions except the ones they set for themselves. He is saying the Open University of Tanzania are being very ambitious as they’ve replaced all their materials with TESSA materials. He personally has no agenda with the change process of any country, they’re just providing enabling mechanisms, the resources and systems to do this.

Question: Why are you shying away from video?

Bob: Is saying that the robustness of the TESSA system is being testing at all the time, and is saying there is no money for providing high-quality videos and also that the internet systems cannot manage this (I think that’s the gist of it – but not entirely sure).

Freda is talking about a teacher exchange programme between teachers from different countries (Rwanda and Kenya) and their experiences were being broadcasted on BBC Africa World service (I think).

Quite an interesting talk – enjoyed it immensely – these talks always remind me why I want to work in third world development . Don’t think the same extent of problems exist in Trinidad, probably somewhat in Guyana – but think this might be something good to probably extend to them as well (talking as someone from the Caribbean).

Peter Scott and Eli Tomadaki talking about Flashmeeting

Peter Scott talking about Flashmeeting

Originally uploaded by openlearn2007

Elia Tomadaki and Peter Scott on Videoconferencing in Open Learning

Peter starts by talking about the development history of Flashmeeting – how it started and evolved. Flashmeeting is now about 4 years old. What they wanted to do was see what the effect was of a conferencing tool that allowed people to collaborate and share what they’d done with the wider community.

Peter gives a brief overview of how Flashmeeting works. He mentions issues about Flashmeeting relating to privacy. They did discuss making it open by default and decided against it. Some users do share their meetings but others are using it and just getting on with things. They don’t automatically publish meeting info such as where the delegates are from etc. Everything is recorded as a public set of data as XML which you can then suck into another engine and reuse it.

Flashmeeting is a tool to enable learners to meet, at scale, and to make what they produce available to the wider community. The talk is not so much about flashmeeting as an application, but more about the academic issues surrounding it’s use as a collaborative tool. He points out that Ale is doing a Flashmeeting right now, using the slides from the presentation. I can see her at the front with her web cam in her hand pointing it around the room at Daisy Mwanza-Simwame who is now asking a question about the type of internet access you need to run Flashmeeting. The answer is, definitely not satellite – too much lag introduced, but anything else should be OK.

Elia now stands up and starts to talk about how to book a Flashmeeting. Once you’ve had a meeting, the meeting you’ve booked is added to your portfolio as part of your personal record. You have a list of events that you can edit, annotate, make visible or invisible. In the OpenLearn website, you can have meetings related to a specific course or unit. Peter notes that they automatically tag the meetings with the context depending from where you launch it – so if you launch it from within a course that gets tagged. You can also add additional tags.

The Flashmeeting blog contains the flashmeeting booking page which looks pretty simple .You can elect to syndicate it. I wonder if syndicating it means making the meeting open to anybody. They are private but not secure so that anybody who knows the URL can come. But the URL is not obvious. You can also check the server load so that you can pre-plan your meetings. Only one person can speak at any one time. You need to click the green button to broadcast.

There have been 700 meetings and of these 500 have the word test in the title so they try to filter out these meetings. Flashmeeting has up until now been hidden away in the lapspace. For past month it has been made more available and is now seeing more use.

She goes on to describe the types of events and communities that have sprung up out of Flashmeeting. Peer-to-peer learning events, web conferences and presentations, social events such as video blogging and webcasts using Flashmeeting as a recording tool. Seems to be fairly successful.
There is now a screen up showing the sort of analysis you can do on a Flashmeeting recording. Interesting. Shows the “cueing” of putting hand up. Only happened once in this one which means that people were stopping talking and others were starting smoothly. There is also a record of the amount of text chat. Also shows use of interrupt button – some cultures use this more than others. Interesting. The first time we tried it, we thought you had to use the interrupt button to swap from one speaker to another and it felt really bad. It was much better once we realised that you could put your virtual hand up to take a turn.

The turn taking is also represented as a pie chart. I remember that when Rebecca, Anesa, Cling, Patrick and I all had a Flashmeeting, when we looked back over the recording, Patrick seemed to have spoken much more. This might lead you to think that he was just more verbose, however when you actually listened to the recording, Patrick was speaking more slowly than we were. I think this was partly because he was more familiar and comfortable with the medium. We were a little uncomfortable and I certainly found seeing my face in the big Flashmeeting window a bit disconcerting so I tended to stop as quickly as I could. I think it was also partly because Patrick was directing us as to what to do next because we were doing an OpenLearn study, so he wanted to make his instructions as clear as possible and speaking slowly can achieve this. Illustrates how important context is to analysis I guess.

They’ve now got an interesting slide showing eight different pie charts illustrating different sorts of event. So our event will be one with definite discussion leader who will show up as the person who spoke more often. If we were just engaging in peer learning, presumably the amounts of time speaking will be more evenly balanced.

Interesting thing is that with the broadcast only one person can speak at the time, but with the accompanying text chat, you can get lots of overlapping interactions. You can examine this through Flashmeeting but you can’t through a normal physical meeting.

Next stage is to track back through the users and find out what they think about these pictures (the pie charts).

Peter thinks that virtual meetings are significantly more demanding that physical meetings as reported by users. You can’t switch off during a physical meeting. I wonder if this is why live- blogging a meeting or presentation is so tiring. You have to concentrate quite hard on what is being said and on your reaction to it, and there is no respite. If you switch off, you lose the thread of what is going on.

Technical problems

Poor Cormac. Midway through his presentation, the system decided to run a virus check. One click, and that was gone. But then Vista decided to reboot entirely, so we had to break for an impromptu discussion of wikiversity.