Adobe Connect is based on Adobe Flash technology but an app is also available that will still let you watch the streaming. It is marketed as a “complete enterprise webinar solution to increase attendance, boost response rates, and generate more interest through rich and engaging, highly-interactive and impactful online events“. Collaborate, who deliver live webcasting and web conferencing, have sponsored our use of the software.

iPhone app for Adobe Connect - swf pods will not work but streaming will

The live link will be available from this page before the start of the event.

Note that the session will be recorded, including all chat comments, so think about what you say!

If you have any questions about the service please contact:
Pauline Foley
Sales Manager
Tel: +44 (0)1483 685008
Mobile: +44 (0)7787 269643

IWMW events have sought to provide an opportunity to evaluate new technologies which may help enrich events. This year we will be evaluating the potential of the Shhmooze app.

As described in a post on the UK Web Focus blog this app was tested last week at a UKOLN workshop on on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use & Impact”.

Shhmooze is an app available on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch mobile devices developed by a company based in Belfast. The Shhmooze Web site describes how:

Research by Shhmooze shows that 75% of conference delegates find networking to be hard work or ‘a nightmare’!

That’s because it’s really hard to find the right person to talk to within a crowd of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people. And, for many people, it’s even harder to strike a conversation out of nowhere with a complete stranger.

In our initial experiment we discovered one potentially valuable use for the application.  After receiving a post which stated:

Help! Four of us stuck downstairs – Jenni Lee building.

I realised that the app could be used as a communications channel between participants and event organisers for event-specific communications such as this. In this example the four people who couldn’t gain entrance to the building would not want to have published such information on a more open channel such as Twitter – and the event organisers would not want to divulge their mobile phone number to all participants.

Following the post about the evaluation about this app concern was raised that an Apple-specific app was not desirable for a tool which was meant to encourage networking at events. Mehdi, the co-founder of company which developed the Shhmooze app responded with the comment:

I see you and Christopher both want to see Shhmooze on more platforms. We completely agree with you – it’s always been our plan to support every platform. We’re releasing our Android app soon (it’s in the works already) and more platforms will follow.

I’ll leave the final comment to Dan Wiggle who responded to this discussion with support for use of this app:

I’d be keen to see Shhmooze at IWMW and think it would be a useful addition.
This will be my fourth IWMW and while I’ve managed to break into a few of the social circles now, it was tough going the first couple of times around. I rather like the idea of an app that could make that process easier and help me ‘find useful, interesting people’, however cheesy it might sound

If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad feel free to install this app on your device.  The IWMW organisers will try and check posts on a regular basis so if you do find yourself locked out we should be able to respond promptly!

Also note that following the initial evaluation of the app we suggest that you upload a photograph of yourself if you would like to make it easier for others to meet you and that you provide a summary about yourself and your interests to help make it easier for people to spot others with similar interests.

Since the Institutional Web Management Workshop series was launched back in 1997 we have always ensured that the slides used by the plenary speakers were made publicly available – so you can still see the slides from IWMW 1997 and even see the profiles of the 90 participants  who attended that launch event which was included in the opening presentation on 16 July 1997.

The Popularity of Slides Used at IWMW Events

In the past we haven’t sought to make the slides available from the many parallel sessions which have been held over the 14 years the event has been held, primarily because of the time it would take in getting hold of any processing the slides.  However it is now possibly for the speakers themselves to upload their slides and make them available in a shared area.

We became aware of the potential interest in providing access to slides from the parallel sessions when we recently analysed the numbers of views of the slides hosted on Slideshare.  In addition to the popularity of the slides used by plenary speakers we also discovered that a number of slides used in parallel session were also very popular including Mind Mapping for Effective Content Management at IWMW 2008 by Gareth Saunders, St Andrews; Know Me Knowing YouTube at IWMW 2007 by Adrian Stevenson, then based at the University of Manchester; Create a better seach engine than Google at IWMW 2009 by Michael Nolan, Edge Hill University and WordPress: Beyond Blogging at IWMW 2010 by Joss Winn, University of Lincoln. These slides have been viewed by 18,617, 10,146, 3,054 and 1,691 times respectively. When you consider that the parallel sessions normally attract between 10 and 30 people, we can see that these resources do appear to be having a significant impact beyond their initial audience.

Lanyrd as a Hosting Service

According to TechCrunch the Lanyrd service was launched in August 2010. It was therefore not available for use at IWMW 2010 which was held in July 2010. However we quickly recognised the potential for this service for which it was suggested that it “could potentially be the Wikipedia of web conferences“. After IWMW 2010 was over we provided details of the plenary sessions on the IWMW 2010 Lanyrd page and also embedded the slides and accompanying videos on the service.

This year we would like to build on our initial approaches with the IWMW 2011 Lanyrd site. However rather than attempting to process all of the resources used at the event ourselves (which is not a scalable solution) we will invite the workshop facilitators to provide links to their slides rom the Lanyrd pages we have created (which can be embedded in the pages from slides hosted on Slideshare), possibly after the event has been held.

We feel that this will help to ensure that the ideas presented in the workshop sessions are made available to a much wider audience and can help to raise the visbility and profile of the facilitators.

Note that the event organisers (myself and Marieke) will also be facilitating two workshop sessions ourselves. In order to illustrate how the Lanyrd page can be used we have created entries for our sessions on The Web Management Community: Beyond IWMW and JISCMail Lists and The Economical Way to Amplify Your Event. We will add the links to the slides we will be using either after the event – or possibly before if we feel it may be useful for remote participants to access the slides whilst the workshop is being held.

What You Can Do

In order to facilitate sharing of your slides and make the slides easy to find we invite you to go to the http://www.slideshare.net/event/iwmw2011 Slideshare event group and join this group. When you upload your slides to Slideshare you should click on the More tab above the slide and select the IWMW 2011 group. Your slideshow should then be included with other presentations used at the IWMW 2011 event.

In addition if you visit the IWMW 2011 Lanyrd group you can add yourself at a speaker if you are not already listed – if you are a Twitter user you can use your Twitter ID but if not just give your name as a text string. You can then visit the page for your session and simply add then add any additional resources relevant to your session.

Note that you may, of course, not wish to upload your slides until after the event (we appreciate that the slides may be updated at the last minute or that you may not want participants to be able to view the slides in advance.

An example of the Lanyrd page for the “Engagement, Impact, Value: Measuring and Maximising Impact” session at IWMW 2010 is shown below.

Brian Kelly has recently more on the implications of using scoop.it in his post Potential for Scoop.it at Events.

At the moment the IWMW page currently contains content published by event organisers, primarily from this blog. We are hoping the Scoop.it page will become more interesting as more varied content is published about the event (ideally with the #iwmw11 event hashtag so that such content can be easily discovered) by those intending to attend the event or have an interest in the topics which will be addressed at the workshop.

We intend to update the IWMW 2011 Scoop.it page on a weekly basis over the next few weeks and then see if we can update it more frequently during the event itself.

Friday was ‘Inside Big Ideas’ day and Universities were encouraged to throw open the doors and bust some of the myths about campus life in a 21st-century university. Staff and researchers at the University of Bath took part in a 24 hour Twitter marathon tweeting about the they work carry out by using the tags #UniWeek and #UniofBath.

Not wanting to be left out the @iwmw twitter feed published a series of tweets about IWMW’s work over the past 15 years.

All the tweets were geo-located to the University of Bath. Brian Kelly has written a blog post about the #UniWeek Twitter Marathon entitled Evidence For The #UniWeek Campaign.

For more information on IWMW and Twitter see the IWMW Web site.