Figure 2: A view of the DIVERSE Live team hard at work.

DIVERSE 2011

In 2001 the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP)-funded project DIVERSE, which promoted lecture capture across four UK HEIs, came to the end of its two-year run. To mark the end of the project a large international conference was organised at the University of Derby, bringing together practitioners, educators, technicians and academics in an informal setting; all of whom were united in a common interest in the use of visual technologies in learning and teaching. This DIVERSE conference became an annual event, and DIVERSE conferences have since been held in the Netherlands, the US, Canada, Norway as well as several other locations around the UK. This year’s conference was held 28 – 30 June in Dublin City University, Ireland.

The DIVERSE conferences have survived for this long with no institutional backing or external funding, but entirely through the enthusiasm of the organising committee, the hard work and commitment of the local teams that host the conference each year, and the delegates to the conferences, many of whom return year after year. Well done to the DCU organising committee: Ger Cannon, Eamon Costello, Dr. Margaret Farren, Leone Gately, Morag Munro, Emma O’Brien and Peter Tiernan. A particular word of recognition must go to Yvonne Crotty, DCU and Diverse 2011 Conference Director, who creatively and imaginatively led the team to achieving a most successful and innovative conference.

The conferences have become important to this community in that the technologies and pedagogies they focus on are often overlooked, or sidelined, in a sector for which “elearning” is often synonymous with (almost entirely text-based) “VLEs”. These meetings are an annual opportunity to meet with others who value and experiment with video, videoconferencing, 2D and 3D visualisation and so on.

Over the years, several innovations have been introduced and these have become an integral part of the conference, providing some of its unique flavour. During many of the conferences a team, formed from a combination of students attending the hosting university and students of Aase Knudsen (Lillehammer University College) and Mike O’Donoghue (now at Manchester University), comes together to create live streamed broadcasts of each day’s events. However, this year there were new additions to the broadcast crew. Yvonne Crotty, School of Education at DCU, worked with Mike and Aase in the planning of the broadcast event. Eoin Campell and Damien Hickey in the School of Communications, DCU must also be commended for their managerial roles in the whole Diverse Live production. Of a 36 strong crew there were 27 students from DCU, 10 students from Yvonne’s MSc. in Education and Training Management (eLearning) programme and 17 of the students from the MSc. in Multimedia who are taught by Eoin and Damien.  The DCU students teamed up with the students from Norway and Manchester to create live streamed broadcasts. The production studio was in the foyer of the conference venue (The Helix), so that the behind the camera activity could be seen by the delegates. Not only does this mean the conferences can be broadcast, making the content available to many more people, it provides a learning opportunity for the students, and introduces a new generation to the community.

Another mainstay of the conferences is the Creative Concept Coffees. These are opportunities for delegates to network and come up with research projects to conduct throughout the year. These are presented in the closing plenary and voted on, with the winning proposal having their attendance at the following year subsidised. Although only one team is supported, the process is excellent at prompting collaboration, and therefore goes some way to prolonging the sense of community beyond the few days of the conference.

Last year’s CCC winners, Kirsten Snyder, Kevin Burden, Theo Kuechel and Jeff Beaudry from the  Universities of Mid Sweden, Hull and Southern Maine, presented their work on providing resources for cross-cultural digital storytelling on the subject of ecological disasters and on the process of collaboration between themselves, colleagues in their respective countries and other colleagues in China. The first part of their presentation was conducted at a distance via FlashMeeting, demonstrating how effective this is as a tool for communication. The team has also developed a framework and a workflow for supporting the creation of these digital stories.

This promotion of social and environmental awareness through students’ creation of digital artefacts was not one of the planned themes of the conference, but for me this was the dominant message of the majority of the papers I saw. The first presentation to touch on this theme was the plenary by Brigid Barron of Stanford University. Brigid analysed students’ use of digital technologies and found that the minority were what we might call digital visitors. The majority were digital residents but there was another minority group (of about the same size as the “visitors”) who regularly produced digital media objects, such as videos. She found that these students were more creative and more socially activist. Her research followed this up to investigate the pathways to engagement that had brought learners to the point where they wanted to create these objects. This theme raised for me the need to extend our views of categories of digital engagement to include those who create (as opposed to only living) online and find ways to encourage this form of engagement.

Citizen journalism is one example of developing social awareness through creating digital artefacts. Don Heider, Adrienne Massanari and Meghan Dougherty from Loyola University Chicago support citizen journalists through developing ethical guidelines for bloggers. Dr. Stephen Jake McNeil from Kennesaw State University, USA and colleagues have been developing a citizen journalist course, in which students use an iPad 2 to cover news stories, with which they can record, edit and upload video all while out in the field. Other innovative practice was explored by Vance Scott Martin of Illinois University, who teaches history by getting his students to create wikis on different aspects of North American history and uses the wikis as prompts for class discussions. He finds that this democratises the whole process of learning, and motivates students who are not otherwise engaged with learning. The keynote on the final day from Ricki Goldman also showed how students could be engaged, and learn to adopt different points of viewing others’ attitudes through conducting interviews and preparing videos on environmental topics and presented work from 20 years of working in this field.

However, the highlight of the conference was the keynote at the close of the second day from Michael Wesch, an anthropologist who has studied the impact of new technologies on culture and on learning, and has disseminated this work through some of the most viewed videos on the Internet. Michael reflected on his time as an anthropology student, recalled the experience of producing those viral videos, and how producing and sharing videos can give students a voice, develop their media literacy and encourage their social and political awareness. He also showed the audience how to pwn, mash-up and upload videos within the space of a minute. The lecture room was standing room only with many people attending from outside the conference, and deservedly so.

Another constant of the DIVERSE conferences is that after the official close of the conference, there is a hand-over to the next year’s conference. The conferences are planned at least 18 months in advance, which means that the location, time and themes can all be decided upon and announced at the preceding conference, provides an opportunity to promote the venue and the location and for everyone to meet the new hosts. From the moment DIVERSE 2011 ends, 2012 is officially underway. Next year it will be hosted by K.U. Leuven and run from the 3^rd to the 6^th July. We hope to see many of you there.

Links

2011 conference website is at http://diverse2011.dcu.ie/welcome.html

2012 conference website is at http://lambik.avnet.kuleuven.be/diverse2012/

DIVERSE Live videos are at https://secure.vimeo.com/user2805215

DIVERSE Facebook Group at http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=288779894044

Follow DIVERSE announcements via VIDEO@jiscmail.ac.uk

Photo credits: Julio Castro, Carly Mathews-Lynch, Alberto Ramirez Martinell, Mark Childs and Margaret Farren

Mark Childs

Senior Research Fellow Elearning

a5575@coventry.ac.uk