Masterclass Social Software
Due to other priorities, I may very well be the last blogging-participant blogging about this, but still here is my post.
On the 17th of May, I visited my first ever workshop on social software with the title “Masterclass Social Software”. The workshop was held in Utrecht and organised by De Digitale Universiteit (the Digital University). There was no fee to participate!
In general one might say that all of the around 100 attendants were all still searching for the real value and appropriate application area of social software. And not only in Dutch Higher Education, but in business as well. This was also reflected by the fact that around 20% of attendants were not linked to educational organisations. These people, like myself, were attracted by the subject, never mind the environment of application.
There were four specific subjects on the program:
- Ad hoc transient communities (Peter Sloep)
- Wiki’s (Iwan Wopereis)
- Weblogs (Pierre Gorissen)
- E-portfolio’s (Wilfred Rubens)
For these subjects there was both a brief introduction as well as a real workshop. Of course, I attended the workshop about wiki’s. This was also the most popular one and it was led by Pierre Gorrissen and the popular podcast Edukast.
Around 30 people gathered in a separate room and worked in five groups on separate assignments regarding wiki’s. All assignments were worked out directly in a dedicated wiki, very nice for a workshop on wiki’s!
As is common practise with events like these nowadays, that dedicated wiki was already made available prior to the event. Participants were asked to list their names for the workshop they wanted to attend and provide some idea’s for discussion. Although eventually this did no seem to work, only 2-3 days before the event people started to get interested and edits on the wiki exploded, well in relation to the number of participants of course. As concluded by Pierre: wiki’s work!
So what is the value of an events like this? Well:
- it gives yourself a real stimulus on the subject,
- you learn new things,
- you meet interesting people (like Marina, Eric and Gerard)
- and it is just a thrill to attend! (so when is the next one?)
All in all a very nice and well organised event. Just a couple of tips for the organisers:
- allocate more time to workshops and panel discussion, they are worth it
- present your suggestion for a common “tag” for the event. We do want to find those blog posts and pictures after the event!
Some links:
- The special masterclass wiki (results of assignments workshop; many links on wiki’s)
- The presentations
- The very elaborate report on the masterclass from Dutch A-list blogger Frank Janssen of Frankwatching
- A report from Pierre Gorissen including a short video and a couple of photo’s uploaded to Flickr
Technorati tags: Social software, Wiki, Education, Web2.0, Web 2.0
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posted May 25, 10:32 PM on May 25, 2006 |
category: Social software
/ Web2.0