Final Report Reference:
good practice & innovation
OPEN-i: A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE FOR THE PHOTOJOURNALISM INDUSTRY 2010 June 30
Author(s):
Paul Lowe, Margo Blythman, Marcia Chandra
Main Contact:
Paul Lowe p.lowe@lcc.arts.ac.uk
Department:
London College of Communication, University of the Arts London
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Final Report Reference:
Project Title:
good practice & innovation
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Final Report Reference:
Project Title:
good practice & innovation
Contents CONTENTS .............................................................................................. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................ 4 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................ 4 BACKGROUND......................................................................................... 5 AIMS & OBJECTIVES ............................................................................... 6 METHODOLOGY ...................................................................................... 7 IMPLEMENTATION .................................................................................. 8 OUTPUTS .............................................................................................. 13 SUSTAINABILITY ......................................................................................14 OUTCOMES ........................................................................................... 14 LESSONS LEARNED ............................................................................... 16 CONCLUSIONS ...................................................................................... 20 IMPLICATIONS ..................................................................................... 20 RECOMMENDATIONS .............................. ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. REFERENCES......................................................................................... 23 APPENDIXES ........................................................................................ 23 DISSEMINATION SUMMARY ..........................................................................24
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Acknowledgements The ‘OPEN-i’ trial project was funded by JISC under the ‘Facilitating Collaboration’1 stream of the BCE programme2 as part of the ‘Trialling Collaborative Online Tools for BCE’ project3. JISC infoNet4 led the delivery of outputs with support from other JISC Advance Services5. The trial project team would like to thank the following for their hard work and contribution to this trial project as well as the wider BCE agenda:
Executive Summary
Introduction
This report outlines the strengths and issues of the JISC funded BCE collaborative tools project, Open-i. The aims of the project were: •
To create a collaborative online community of practice (COP) linking masters level students, aspiring entrants to the profession, established practitioners and key industry institutions
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To trial and develop a toolkit of web 2.0 approaches, in particular live webinars, to enhance collaborative engagement online
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To evaluate the success or otherwise of the project and to draw out conclusions for other similar projects
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To disseminate the results of the trial in relevant channels e.g. conference papers, academic articles, staff development etc within a suitable timeframe
The primary activity was to run a series of webinars to help build this community of practice. These webinars are the focus of this report, although other activities and platforms that were used will be briefly outlined. 1
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/bce/stream2.aspx http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/bce.aspx 3 http://collaborativetools4bce.jiscinvolve.org/ 4 http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk 5 http://www.jiscadvance.ac.uk 2
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Project description OPEN-i is a global virtual community of practice linking photographers, agencies, publications and educational institutions, currently involving almost 900 practitioners from the majority world as well as from the West in an online network with the aim of engendering a debate and discussion about the future of the medium in the world of web 2.0. OPEN-i is supported by the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and the World Press Photo Foundation and is funded by JISC. Initial partners included Getty Images, VII, Noor, Panos, foto8, Tisch NYU, Drik, University of Bolton, University of Westminster, and the University of Berkeley.
OPEN-i runs a regular series of live webinars and discussion sessions presented by leading industry professionals to an invited audience of peers, academics involved in the critical debate around images, aspiring photojournalists from the majority world, and masters level students of photography. This is supported by a social networking group with discussion forums, homepages etc. Debates take place bi-weekly and seek to ask challenging questions about the future development of the industry. All the presentations are archived and available for later viewing online.
Background: Industry Context The exponential rise of social media has created a new landscape of interaction and collaboration where the boundaries between professional practice, citizen journalism, the subject and the audience are blurring. The practice of professional news photography and photojournalism has been transformed in the last decade by a combination of technological changes, economic developments and ethical challenges, creating an overwhelming need for the industry as a whole to debate, discuss and open dialogue both within itself but also with interested parties who engage with visual news media, a process that is difficult to undertake conventionally because of the distributed nature of the profession,
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spread out geographically and economically with a large number of freelance practitioners. An engagement between the industry and the academic world is essential to both for critical reflection on the issues facing the media but also to involve those entering photography in debates about its future role in society.
Aims & Objectives of the project The focus of OPEN-i is on trying to re-imagine the profession in the age of web 2.0. Our sector is undergoing radical change and transformation from the old paid for legacy media model of magazines and newspapers that was its original core area, to a new one of more participatory media, more access to audiences etc through the web, but much less money from editorial clients, so we are trying to figure out what new business models might work in the future to produce work that is socially relevant, ethically founded, and has impact on the audience and benefit to the subjects. The debate is focused more on the practice of being a photojournalist than on the aesthetics, we talk more about how to produce and disseminate the work we do than the work itself. In fact we even decided not to allow members to post their photographic work to the site unless it raised questions relevant to these questions, i.e. the site is not a 'portfolio' site to show your work to other people; other spaces exist for that already.
The intention for this community is to try to break some new ground, come up with some new insights or models for the future. One way we hope to do this is by bringing together different types of actors e.g. academics, practitioners, academic/practitioners, photo agencies, photo editors, photo educators, new members of the profession and students so that in their interaction there should be some transformational energy generated. Also it is a way to 'test the water' and get a sense of what is happening in our industry from a variety of perspectives. This has had the very valuable outcome of ‘feeding the curriculum’ of our Masters in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (MAPJD) at LCC, providing the course with a high level of currency and relevancy to the needs and demands of contemporary industry.
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Methodology The project director, Paul Lowe, had previously developed a teaching methodology of creating a collaborative virtual learning environment based on using live web conferencing with Wimba supported by a Ning site to enhance social learning as part of the delivery of an entirely online Masters in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (MAPJD) at the LCC. The BCE project was designed to take advantage of this development both in the software license obtained by the university but also more importantly in terms of the experience gained in moderating and running online webinars. The OPEN-i project therefore leveraged an existing investment in teaching and learning at UAL and took that out into industry. The decisions on which software platforms to use etc was thus effectively predetermined based on the tools developed for the online MAPJD, which included Wimba for web conferencing, Ning as a social hub, Twitter for information sharing, and You tube and Vimeo for hosting archives and other videos. This had the benefit of meaning that the project did not have to spend a lot of its initial energy on determining the best software platforms to deploy, instead we focused on the meta level questions of how to establish and build a community. Many of our conclusions are also ‘platform agnostic’ as well in the sense that most web conferencing and social networking platforms are essentially similar, with the decision to use one over another often determined by forces outside of the control of an individual project (e.g. institutional adoption); we have therefore again chosen to focus on findings that deal more with the concept of using webinars to build a community or BCE process rather than evaluation of the specific software we used. The development of the network was informed by the work of Etienne Wenger and his various collaborators, in particular the two publications Cultivating Communities of Practice (2002) and Digital Habitats (2009), which provide an excellent foundation for developing and nurturing a virtual community. Wenger characterises a Digital Habitat as not just a configuration of technologies, but a dynamic, mutually defining 7 of 24
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relationship that depends on the learning of the community. It reflects the practices that the members have developed to take advantage of the technology available and thus experience this technology as a ‘place’ for community. A digital habitat is first and foremost an experience of place enabled by technology. (2009, p 39) In the generational encounter of bringing together established practitioners with aspiring entrants to the profession a process of what Wenger identifies as ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1999) can occur, in which experiences and information are exchanged between participants, allowing new entrants to the profession to negotiate the rules of the game and help define their emerging professional identity. Of particular importance to the webinar format is the power of narrating experiences, as Wenger confirms Sharing tacit knowledge requires interaction and informal learning processes such as storytelling, conversation, coaching and apprenticeship of the kind that communities of practice provide. (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002)
Implementation We thought a lot about how to establish and nurture the OPEN-i community, as we were very concerned that the whole project didn’t come across to the practice community or to the students as a cheap way of the universities getting guest lectures from established professionals. Our initial ‘core membership’ was therefore all either established figures or academic/practitioners; we waited until the membership hit around 50 professionals before we invited any ‘students’ to join (although most of the ‘students’ are professionals anyway, as we were drawing them mostly from masters level courses etc where many of them are already well established as professionals who want to enhance their practice). Additionally, we didn’t brand the community with any University/JISC logos etc.
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The initial invitations came personally from the project director, Paul Lowe, (see appendix for sample invitation letter) as he has a level of respect in the industry, but as the community grew we allowed members to invite others themselves. The membership currently stands at almost 900, about a third of whom were invited by the project team; the rest came via third party invitations. This has had the effect of significantly multiplying the reach of the network, as many of the members are not known to the original project team. Each member so far has been individually welcomed to the community by either the project director or the project administrator. The community manifests its value in a sense of both producing something in common, and in engaging in interesting conversations, but the idea was that the interesting conversations should have some form of structure/goal, and that the community itself should produce the agenda for the conversations. We therefore started out with a small 'editorial board' of thought leaders in the industry, with a mix of genders, backgrounds and global locations. They were interviewed by the project director to get their views on the major issues facing the industry, and then we had a series of group meetings both F2F and via web conferencing. From this process of brainstorming the issues we came up with a survey of the landscape of the terrain of the industry, and generated a series of key topics to get the community going. These have formed the basis for the first series of live webinars. The main issues focused on new business models emerging from the process of digitisation of the media, the development of multimedia, ethical issues around the coverage of crisis events and conflicts, the relationship between NGOs and the media, and the need for a more global perspective on the industry. The overall goal for the first year was to work through this series of topics, returning to each of them periodically and in more depth, and then summarising the discussions to try and formulate a sense of where our practice is today and where it might be going in the future, and what might be done to try to effect positive change in that. We have run webinars approximately every two weeks during the project, with a variety of times and days of the week to allow different participants from different global locations too more easily participate (note that this has not had a clearly noticeable effect on attendance at the webinars). Each webinar last typically for 90-120 minutes, and most participants remain online for the whole session. Attendance has varied from 15 to 70, with an average of around 25-30
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at each session; the demographic has been a good mixture of photographers, students and other professionals, and included the senior director of a software company in the US; a photo editor and professor from Slovenia; the managing director of a photo agency in the US; a magazine editor from London; a university professor from the USA, a staff reporter from Bangladesh and a picture editor from Malta. All the presentations are archived and available for later viewing online. The ability to generate mp4 files from Wimba classroom has greatly enhanced this feature, allowing OPEN-i to make its sessions easily available by presenting them directly within the Ning interface instead of having to view them through the Wimba archive itself. The sessions are all archived and hosted on Vimeo and to date we have had 2045 views of these, with highs of 481 and 253 views and a weighted average of 60 views per session. They can be seen on our Vimeo channel at http://vimeo.com/user2416391/videos; using Vimeo has made it easy to embed them in other websites to increase cross traffic. What has emerged from this process is the need to have a variety of different kinds of webinars to debate different kinds of issues, so we developed several types of webinars:
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Themed panel presentations where an invited/volunteer group of 3-4 'thought leaders' in the community (or from outside of it) each present on the same theme/concept, then a q&a with the audience. This is how we plan to initiate each major conversation we want to deal with
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A follow up session where a smaller group meet to discuss that topic of the panel presentation in much more detail - a kind of workshop session to actually try and come up with some new ideas/insights
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More ‘portfolio like’ presentations about geographic or organisational themes e.g. one about what is happening in photojournalism in Asia, or an individual photographer presenting their work
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Presentations linked to events, exhibitions and festivals of photography or real world conferences where we put together a panel to engage in a series of questions in a round table discussion. Most notably we organised
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a one day conference on the relationship between NGO’s and visual media, and webcast the event live through OPEN-i.
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Seminars based on specific groups within the community e.g. non profits/NGOs where they would meet to discuss issues specific to them
The webinars were delivered using Wimba live classroom 6.0, supported by a social networking group on the Ning platform with discussion forums, homepages etc. Also, as the webinar software is available 24/7, rooms can be easily made available online at short notice for any other debates, discussions or working groups that emerge organically from the network. One notable feature of the sessions is the ease of explaining how the platform works to both presenters and attendees, and the almost instinctive way that the text box has been used as a ‘backchannel’ to amplify and comment on the presentations by the audiences. There have been some technical issues, largely with sound quality, but these are no worse than with other web conferencing platforms and normally relate to bandwidth issues or not having good quality microphones for participants. Ning was particularly useful as a mailing list for people to be updated and invited to webinars and to create an identity for each member as they each had their own homepage. We have the impression from talking to some people and seeing people online that although it wasn’t used much for discussion it may have been used as a contact database for more private conversations. It can be seen at ……One area that we expected to form a larger part of the community was the discussion forums on the Ning site; we put significant effort initially into ‘seeding’ these with questions and debates, but they were relatively little used by the community. Our instinct is that this is because the rise of blogging and the existence of other, longer established forums for the broader photojournalism and photographic community that serves this function. We came to realise that what we were providing that was unique was the live real time interaction and the archives of this, so we focused our energies to this goal and withdrew from promoting the asynchronous discussions. We approached several ‘partner’ organisations to collaborate on webinars, and this proved very successful; we held several sessions where we essentially provided the platform and the technical support, and another party organised 11 of 24
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the debate, speakers and promotion on their channels. This again allowed the project to reach out to new areas and members. In particular, an alliance with a well known online and print magazine for the industry, foto8, has been very successful; we held 2 webinars to coincide with the publication of the new issues of the magazine, the archives of which were cross posted onto the foto 8 website where they obtained a high number of views on with over 700 in total. They found this archive very useful as it generated a resource that they can now use in the future. Another successful alliance was with the Magnum Photo Agency, who made use of OPEN-i to organise and run a series of professional practice workshops in locations in Europe and the USA; this was one exception to the use of the discussion forums as these were very active for the participants on the workshops. Initially we felt that we should not promote the webinars widely and make them accessible to non-members of OPEN-I, as we wanted to keep the discussions focused and professional; however as we continue with the project we think that we will begin to market the sessions more widely as the number of participants at the sessions is not excessive. We will therefore begin to explore using a facebook page and promoting the sessions on other partner sites more. We would also like to try to generate more coverage of OPEN-i in industry blogs etc so will target this as a priority for the future, as this kind of visibility could be seen as a marker of the success of the program. A spin-off of the initial project idea that was a direct result of a demonstration by the JISC team at the initial BCE project workshop was the use of a flip video camera to capture short interviews with industry figures. We call these ‘flipbites’, and they consist of 1-2 minute ‘talking head’ clips where the speaker talks about one issue or question. We have recorded these at conferences, exhibitions and other industry events, and they have proven to be very popular with the community, with over 7000 views so far of the 24 clips posted to date. This demonstrates that projects need to be agile enough to introduce new innovations quickly when they emerge as useful possibilities. These can be seen at our Youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/OPENiPhotojournalism Apart from the use of Wimba, which is paid for by the university, the project has used either free, open source or other platforms that were not specifically intended for academic use. Our email system was gmail, and we used Twitter, 12 of 24
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Ning, You tube and Vimeo for communications and video hosting. Essentially we looked out at industry to see what it was using to distribute and share work, and used those ‘industry strength’ platforms. This had the additional benefit of meaning that we didn’t have to deal with any internal IT issues over licenses, approval etc, which meant that the whole project was agile and could adapt to any changes rapidly and effectively. Additionally, we ran OPEN-i as a special project through the CLTAD, the University of the Arts’ Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design, with the Associate Dean of CLTAD as the project sponsor; this meant that we operated as an independent project and could react to decisions quickly. The decision to continuously evaluate the project and to have a project evaluator as part of the team was a vital one, as it enabled the process of development to be much more iterative and founded on evidence from the community itself. The evaluation included a web based survey and focus groups, as well as the evaluator attending most of the sessions as an observer. Finally, note should be made of the successful use of a project wiki to manage the project; this meant that the dispersed project team could easily access key documents and that an ‘action diary’ noting what was going on and who had done what was available to everyone.
Outputs The OPEN-i community membership currently stands at just under 900, with a demographic mixture of academics, students, professional practitioners and industry professionals. The project has delivered to date 15 webinars and webcasted a full one-day conference, with a total attendance of several hundred participants and 2045 views on the archives. It has also filmed 24 ‘flipbites’ with a total of 6906 views. These sessions have engaged with serious and timely issues, and have provided a forum for the industry to debate that does not exist elsewhere. Additionally, the project team in collaboration with the JISC/BCE team ran a very successful one-day event at LCC entitled ‘Mediating Boundaries’ which included a keynote and workshop led by Etienne Wenger. (See appendix for more details) 13 of 24
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Sustainability The project has developed a systematic process for setting up webinars, and promoting them, and a set of guidelines for participants and presenters (see appendix). A webinar now takes typically around a day in total spread out over several weeks to organise and produce, in addition to moderating the session itself. The Ning site has now been set up as well to require as little maintenance as possible. The running costs of the project are low; the Ning site costs around £150 per annum and the other software platforms are either free or paid for by the University. Because the community provides such a rich vein of professionally and academically relevant material to the MAPJD course at LCC, the project team believe that the time invested in maintaining OPEN-i is justified in the amount that it feeds back into the curriculum of the course, particularly in maintaining the currency of the staff and students alike. We therefore believe that even without additional support, the OPEN-I community can continue to hold regular webinars for the foreseeable future. However, funding is being sought internally to support the project, and we are also negotiating with an external industry partner to collaborate with on a more long-term basis. Additionally, the various external partners we have worked with have expressed the desire to continue to provide content for the webinars, and we plan to begin to open up the webinars more to the community itself, giving a space for peer-to-peer feedback on photographic projects. Whilst we feel that the work done so far has been very valuable, we fully intend to continue with the project for the future.
Outcomes OPEN-i as been effective because it has engendered a community of practice that links industry stakeholders who normally operate in the same sphere but do not necessarily communicate effectively with each other. Input from the academic world has secured a high level of debate and discussion within the network, acting as a knowledge transfer process both from academia to industry and, just as importantly, from industry into the academic context. It
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has fed directly into curriculum and course development in the LCC photography programme, giving the students fantastic opportunities to engage with the profession at the highest levels. Stephen Mayes, director of one of the most significant photojournalism agencies, VII, and a regular contributor to the network, feels that OPEN-i ‘offers a unique platform to share information, expertise and experience with other practitioners around the world’. It provides a ‘completely new opportunity’ that has introduced him to ‘new people with different perspectives and information that has allowed me to expand my thinking. OPEN-i is a terrific resource‘. Professor Fred Ritchin of the Department of Photography & Imaging, New York University, notes that this project is a ‘major step forward in creating a virtual community based upon learning and sharing experiences’. He notes that Paul Lowe’s ‘energy and thoughtfulness as both moderator and director of the enterprise gives it much more credibility and complexity than it otherwise would have’, and that ‘OPEN-i is as transparent, open-sourced and serious as any network I have seen’. The membership of OPEN-i is substantial, and we have hosted numerous webinars on a wide range of topics, many of which have attracted attendances of over 50. The session archives are a fantastic resource for students and for the industry. Ken Kobre, Professor of Photo and Videojournalism at San Francisco State University, sees OPEN-i as ‘changing the face of photojournalism and photojournalism education’, with the webinars providing ‘a refreshing way for a diverse group of photojournalists and students to communicate with one another, providing an important forum that helps give direction to the field’. He concludes ‘While no one can tell how the journalism business will evolve in the future. The discussions taking place on OPEN-i .. will prove to be an important forum that helps give direction to the field’. Professor David Campbell of Durham University has found the community to be an important resource in his academic research, in which he has: sought to learn from practitioners about the complexities of the current visual economy. OPEN-i has been invaluable in making that aspiration real. It brings together a community around shared concerns and breaks down the barriers between theory and practice. Being able to participate in webinars, access material online and benefit from the network's support for our investigations, has helped advance my work.
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Finally, the project has found support from Etienne Wenger, who feels that it is one of the ‘best examples he has seen of the ‘articulation of a masters course and development and support of professional community in a way that serves the needs of both’ that uses ‘similar technologies so takes advantage of the synergy between the two.’ He also notes that OPEN-i ‘seamlessly broadens the course into an open process of continuous professional development. I would very much like to see his approach recognized and emulated widely in higher education’. The project has also developed an institutional capacity and understanding of how to develop virtual communities of practice, and how to use the webinar format as a way to engage with industry as well as for teaching and learning that the institution hopes to develop further through the work of CLTAD
Lessons Learned Value of the Community and the Webinars
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The project brought a high level of debate to an international audience of photojournalists with a good mix of current students, former students and industry figures in a format of synchronous activity that had not previously been available. It makes the participants feel part of a professional network connected globally in what is a very dispersed community
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There was a good level of participation with the numbers varying between 20 and 70 with one exception, with almost all participants staying till the end of the webinars
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There is evidence of international and global involvement in both the topics discussed and the range of participants, both presenters and audience. This diversity has mean that participants have access to different perspectives on issues, including sensitive issues such as the Middle East
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Each webinar used multiple presenters which meant that for each presenter it was a reasonable time and work commitment; twenty
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minutes is much less of a demand that one and a half hours, and participants enjoyed the to and fro between multiple speakers •
The video clips on the Ning site have been very successful getting large numbers of hits
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Other stakeholders are beginning to buy in and take responsibility for individual sessions and a number of spin off events emerged from the main webinar programme including workshops and ‘real world’ events.
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The management of the project was unproblematic since it was sponsored by a key central university unit who controlled the budget and control UAL use of WIMBA. They were also represented on the steering committee by the associate Dean. This meant there were no bureaucratic or technical difficulties caused by the university.
Non technical issues with the webinars •
It is difficult to know what clock to use to indicate times of webinars. After some initial confusion we settled on GMT but UK participants found this confusing during British Summer Time. Additionally, those outside the UK and US were happier using the 24-hour clock.
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It was difficult to get the timing right. Some wanted the webinars during their working day; for others this made it difficult.
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Some would have liked smaller, more in-depth seminars
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Sometimes it felt as if the presenters were not very well prepared and were talking off the cuff. This meant that these presentations seemed to lack direction.
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Some thought it would be good to have an agenda or outline showing the structure and when it would be appropriate to ask questions
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Sessions without images, or where it had been impossible to get the images in synch with the talk, had not been so engaging
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One participant felt that the discussion became too academic at times. Others like this so there is a difficulty in pleasing a very diverse audience with different motives for participation.
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The perspective tended to be western even when talking about other parts of the world.
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Some people who offer to host webinars do not follow through
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It would be good to have more follow up activities through more active use of the Ning site
Top Tips for community building: things to think about • Realms: what kind of online spaces does your community need – asynchronous vs. synchronous, webinars, blogs, discussion forums etc. Think about creating a ‘virtual commons’ where interaction can take place across a range of temporalities • Rhythms: how often do you want to provide activities for the community? Too frequent and people will be overwhelmed and unable to commit time, too rare and people will lose interest and the initiative will be lost • Relationships: what kind of relationship are you trying to engender between the participants – colleagues, friends, contacts, collaborators? • Roles: who will do what in the community, and who will be paid and who will work for free? • Resources; how can you leverage existing investments, and what can you get for free and what needs to be paid for? • Respect: treat members fairly and don’t make them feel like they are being exploited – how can you ensure they feel valued? • Responsibility: who is responsible for what, but also what responsibility does the community have to itself to participate actively and sustain the debate? Technical side of the webinars Positives •
WIMBA was in general fit for purpose. The university already has a license so there was no extra cost in our using it.
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The platform enabled real time participation by the audience with very little time lag. It enabled participants to engage with an external audience in a relatively simple way, and it was clear who was speaking from the participants’ list. Participants liked being able to ask questions live, and the system of putting up one’s hand in order to speak in a way that everyone could see in order was perceived as encouraging an easy, fair and democratic form of discussion. The role of the moderator encouraged audience participation in a managed and accessible way
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Participants appreciated the capacity of WIMBA to show images while talking. In the context of photography this was a key feature as everyone can see the same images at the same time
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Participants appreciated the ease of access, flexibility, comfort and timesaving of being to log in from home or wherever they happened to be, and that Wimba is simple to access and login from anywhere. It did not require significant training.
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The text box was a good way for the moderator and others to give to refs to e.g. websites that arose in discussion and for encouraging interaction. Participants instinctively took to using the text box as a ‘backchannel’ to amplify and comment on the presentations, enabling a form of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991)
Negatives •
Audio was a significant problem although participants recognised that it was normal to have audio difficulties at this stage of technology development. However several pointed out that it interfered with their engagement with the webinar, and the quality of the audio was particularly important when participants include non-native speakers of English. The specific audio problems were the audio breaking up, feedback from multiple mics, background noise and speakers not aware when audio goes down.
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There were a number of system crashes, and some websites with Java protection made the system crash when they were loaded. This is now a known problem with Wimba and can be avoided in future. However, as a mark of the resilience of the participants, most managed to move to another room that we had available and continue the webinar after a group email was sent out.
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The system was only as good as local internet connections, and many participants experienced frequent dropping out and having to log in again
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Some participants found the text box a distraction and that following complex text streams and audio simultaneously was too hard
Top Ten tips for webinars – technical
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Have multiple back up arrangements for accessing the login url in case one route fails
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If the system goes down, keep chatting as everyone logs back in so that they can hear that they are re-connected
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Decide at the start what clock is being used for times if working internationally and give this a high profile ensuring all participants understand.
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The fifteen minutes before the official start time are important for welcoming participants and building a sense of community
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Have an intro and closing slide with presenters names, websites etc
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Ensure that the audio is as good as possible by avoiding multiple microphones in the same space and people speaking from noisy backgrounds.
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Provide an advice sheet for presenters
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Ensure audience know how to tell who is speaking and where there is multiple use of one microphone then ensure the moderator indicates who is talking
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Ensure that questions coming in through the text box are picked by the moderator if the main speaker does not spot them.
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Provide advice notes for participants covering: Exit button Talk button Putting up hand How to write in the text box What to do if you lose contact What to do if the whole system crashes
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Understand that the role of the moderator is crucial and that must involve chairing the session so that discussion flows well and that all forms of participation through text box as well as oral questions and picked up and dealt with.
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It is important to have back-up for the moderator in case the moderator loses contact through system failure or own local internet connection.
Conclusions, Implications and recommendations 20 of 24
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Although in some areas of academic activity such at e-learning and pedagogy, the webinar format has become relatively common, it is still a new experience for most outside of these ‘e-pockets’ and as such still has the potential to engage and excite an audience. Despite technical issues, mostly with sound and internet access, the overwhelming feedback from the project to date has been very positive, people are willing to accept a certain degree of imperfection in the delivery if the content is relevant, engaging, contemporary and challenging. The value to the course team of the MAPJD has been immense, giving the students and academics unparalled access to the heart of the professional industry, and directly enhancing the development and currency of the curriculum. The OPEN-i community has established itself as a significant platform for debate, dialogue and discussion within the photojournalism industry, and has generated a reputation as a space where high level, intense, challenging and fruitful exchanges can take place between actors who would otherwise find it hard if not impossible to communicate in such a way. Maintaining the activity of the community is sustainable, especially if the focus becomes more clearly on the live webinars and their associated archives rather than other activities. The webinars provide an excellent resource for teaching and learning, not just at our own institution but at others as well, keeping our program current and directly related to the needs of industry. We suggest that there are several ways in which the webinar format could be used to enhance BCE activity. •
Develop a CoP along the lines of OPEN-i that uses a regular program of webinars on issues relevant to the academic and industry/community contexts to build the community. This needs significant commitment in terms of budget, with at the very least a paid part-time community coordinator on 1-2 days a week.
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Run a shorter, more focused series of webinars aimed at a specific issue or interest group that allows the academic community to act as a ’critical friend’ or that is aimed at enhancing student understanding of the realities of the external workplace. This could potentially be incorporated into a course or departmental curriculum, or run as part of an enterprise office outreach program
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Run a specific project aimed at mapping employers expectations for example, where external stakeholders are invited in to a ‘talking shop’
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Run a one-day event via webinars, similar to a conference, but aimed more specifically at a particular issue relevant to the BCE agenda.
We believe that our project has been successful in enhancing BCE in what one might call a ‘stealth mode’ of operation, for many participants in the webinars the fact that this was a university based project was either irrelevant or invisible, and in fact might even have been a negative factor if they had been more aware of it in the sense that it might have been perceived as a ‘student space’ rather than a professional one. However, by initiating a serious and engaged debate around complex issues facing our industry, we are confident that the project has enhanced the potential of BCE for 5 vital stakeholders •
Practitioners have benefited from the ability to debate and discuss with each other on key topics
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Academics have been able to directly engage with the professional community and act as ‘critical friends’
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Students have been able to enhance their practice through ‘legitimate peripheral participation’
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The MAPJD course at LCC has benefited from direct access to contemporary practice enabling it to remain current and at the leading edge of professional practice education
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UAL as an institution has built up valuable experience and capacity in how to use this approach to enhance BCE by leveraging existing investments
In conclusion, we feel that this model of using webinars to engage with an external industry community from an academic one is an excellent one to pursue for other institutions. Whether in the form of a major initiative like a community of practice, or a smaller, more focused intervention to engage with key industry or community figures, the webinar format is an excellent one to reach over the walls between institutions and the outside world and to connect students, academics and practitioners together. It offers a potential solution to the oftquoted problem that universities do not understand the needs of business and vice versa; by bringing people together in dialogue these barriers can be broken 22 of 24
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down.
References Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: a guide to managing knowledge. Wenger, E, (2009), Digital Habitats, stewarding technology for communities, CPSquare, Portland OR
Appendixes 1: Project team Project Director: Paul Lowe – responsible for overall direction of project, selecting online platforms, initial interviewing of editorial board and recruitment of membership, planning and moderating most of the webinars, writing project reports, disseminating project Project administrator: Marcia Chandra – responsible for maintaining the Ning site, welcoming members, downloading and editing archives and uploading them to Vimeo, arranging webinars, technical support during most of the webinars Project evaluator: Margo Blythman – responsible for ongoing evaluation of the project, writing project evaluation and reports. 2: Relevant URLS Ning site You tube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/OPENiPhotojournalism Vimeo channel http://vimeo.com/user2416391/videos 3: Evaluation report see attached 4:Presenter guidelines see attached 5:Sample invitation letter see attached
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Dissemination Summary The course team have presented papers on the OPEN-i project at Wimba Connect 2010 in the USA, Wimbaday in the UK, the e-learning guild online seminar series on social networking, and the Solstice e-learning conference at Edge Hill University, and will present at ALT-C and Designs on e-learning in the USA both in September 2010.
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