The European Conference on Educational Research Amplified!
I’ve just read a neat article by John Popham on “How to amplify your event“. I actually didn’t realise what the word amplify meant in this context. But Pontydysgu is working with the European Education Research Association to ‘amplify’ the European Conference on Educational Research this year. The conference, as far as I know the largest Educational Conference in Europe with some 2200 delegates, in being held in Helsinki from 25 – 27 August. The theme of the conference is “Education and Cultural Change.”
One obvious question is what do we want to achieve? Basically we have three aims. One is to enhance the confernce experience for those attending. ECER is run by some 27 or so networks and with so many attending, it can be difficult to keep in touch with everything going on – or even to just find old friends. We hope the use of technology will help get people together, find old and new friends and allow discussion of ideas – before, during and after the conference. Secondly we hope to start to open the conference outwards – to involve those not able to attend face to face and to enhance connections with the wider communities of education research. And thirdly we are trying to build a small history of the conference – not just through papers – but through recording people’s reflections of their experiences and learning.
Now down to the technology – what are we doing?
Firstly we have agreed a hashtag – #ECER2010 and are encouraging delegates to use the hashtag.
We have set a twitter account – EERA_ECER – and are sending out regular tweets (followers very welcome). We have also added a plug in to the ECER web site to accumulate our tweets – http://www.eera-ecer.eu/ecer/ecer2010/twitter-news/?no_cache=1
We have also set up an ECER2010 group on Flickr and are asking delegates to add their photos to that group. Just go to http://www.flickr.com/groups/ecer2010/ and join the group.
We are planning to stream a number of the keynote sessions – more details soon.
We will be making short videos with twelve of the different network conveners as well as vox pops with conference delegates.
And finally, we will be broadcasting 3 special issues of the Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE internet radio programme from 1300 – 1330 Finnish time (12-12.30 Central European time) on 25, 26 and 27 August. Point your browser at http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u and this will open the LIVE radio stream in your MP3 player of choice. You can also send us your questions and comments by Twitter using the #ECER2010 hashtag. And to follow Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE events throughout the summer join the SoB Facebook group.
So this is our idea for the European Conference on Educational Research Amplified. But what have we left out? What else could we do? All ideas very welcome.
Hi Graham
Looks like you’ve got most angles covered to me.
Thanks for the kind words