Comment from Jane Horne
Time: September 17, 2007, 1:19 am

Are you saying that only 40 of the seminars going to be podcast in total or will the recordings of most sessions be available as usual separate from this Connected Live coverage? LTS has maybe created a level of expectation from previous years that people unable to attend seminars will at least get to hear for themselves at a later date and sometimes get the presentations to download too which has been great. It would be a shame if you are reducing output of invaluable, long-term CPD material in favour of the more ephemeral reportage, no matter how good the latter turns out to be.

If you’re doing video, is it possible this year to put resources into getting good screencasts of demos - particularly sessions involving website demos, making sure that text is legible. Your audience is unlikely to have the eyesight of the bright young things on the film crew

Comment from Ewan McIntosh
Time: September 17, 2007, 9:00 am

Only 40 seminars will be covered in full, which is similar to previous years. We’re actually expanding the coverage to include interviews with those running 60 of the other sessions, and providing many more of the presentation materials alongside.

Connected Live will bring MORE coverage of the Learning Festival not less.

The idea of covering demos of websites is a good one, but the learning festival may not be the best place to capture it - we’d rather have good quality visuals and audio from a screen captured tour. This is something you will see in the revamped ICT in Education website over the next year.

Comment from Jane Horne
Time: September 18, 2007, 9:57 pm

I’d still rather have more raw seminar recordings but that’s just my personal preference so thanks for responding Ewan. 40 sessions- down from 47 last year and I’m sure 2005 had substantially more - closer to 90. Maybe it depends on whether you’re the kind of person that prefers manufactured pop videos where everything goes perfectly or would rather have the warts and all of live concerts. Sometimes the mistakes and things not working as planned bring much needed humour and reassuring humanity to proceedings as well as uncovering real world problem-solving tips and techniques.

It’s the breadth of topics and depth of details I love from the sessions, the enthusiasm from most speakers is infectious. It’s clear that they spend a lot of time and energy preparing for their SLF presentations so it’s a shame that more people can’t feel the benefit of that particular effort and now they’ve got the double whammy of having to give an interview too. Seminars feel more like peers talking to peers, an interview setup will bring a different dynamic.

Why not run screencapture software on the computers in the seminar rooms and pipe in the audio feed from the PA system, kill two birds with one stone? If what’s sent to the projector is good enough for the audience in the seminar room why not for an extended virtual audience? Having to recreate the resources artificially at some later date seems like a lot of unnecessary extra work.

Comment from whereisab
Time: September 18, 2007, 11:10 pm

It would be great to capture the screen live, but unfortunately, most capture applications slow the machines down when recording. For presenters, this would be a bit off-putting when they are already a little bit nervous of speaking to an audience!

Comment from Ewan McIntosh
Time: September 19, 2007, 8:04 am

I’ll write a post later, because you’ve given some great food for thought. At the end of the day we are offering deeper coverage of the ones we do cover, and still give a lot of the breadth - a real effort’s been made there.

I was involved heavily in getting podcasts up onto the SETT websites of old, and I can assure you that we’ve never covered more quantity. However, the quality of some of the recordings from last year was below what we would be proud of.

Although storage and recording capacity is limitless, we do still rely on developers to go around and manually switch on iRivers, connect speakers up etc… That has a very real cost in terms of time in a Festival where we welcome over 6000 people frace-to-face. At the end of the day, hard decisions have to be taken, and this year most of the seminars not being recorded directly will be followed up with more detailed content on the LTS web service.

As I say, probably better to put this in a post later.

Comment from Jane Horne
Time: September 20, 2007, 7:14 am

Please don’t get me wrong, I must sound ungrateful, that’s really not my intention. You’re planning producing way more coverage in total and more variety and that should reach new audiences in different ways just of a different type. It’s more trying to belatedly praise the podcast work that’s gone before and understand what direction you’re going in and where the best conference info/content is located.

Site issues

You know what you’re doing, it’s not always quite so obvious for a non-LTS person to deduce the level of SLF activity and the explanations behind what’s planned from the wierd updates at the SLF website!, Maybe it’s more of a design issue with the layout. The SLF homepage only has a rather demure link to to “video streaming” as any immediately obvious trace of new content material there. The trick right now is to remember to visit the Weblog section rather than expect new links to appear at the top level. There *are* updates in sublevel pages like say video links now added to page “Conference programme>Keynote speakers 2007″ but there’s nothing visual at the higher level give a visitor a clue where the updated pages are located in the menu structure, it’s very hard work to spot changes on the SLF site. Links to Connected Live are buried in a Weblog entry rather than being at the SLF top level - a casual visitor who’d bookmarked the conference site could easily miss it. It’s really pretty confusing having a blog called “Scottish Learning Festival Blog” but that’s not where the bloggers reporting from the conference are posting, instead that’s a site called “Connected Live”. Argh! Trying to figure out where the useful info from the conference is located takes a bit of digging.

Technical problems

visit “Conference programme” on
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/slf/seminarsandkeynotes/index.asp
Click on “Podcasts from the Scottish Learning Festival”
that doesn’t take you to a feed but instead redirects you back to
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/slf/seminarsandkeynotes/index.asp

Trying to navigate back to this post following links on the Connected Live site was impossible, had to use my browser history instead, think there’s a technical problem with Connected Live navigation as the posts accumulate

go to
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/connected/
Click on “See the full Connected Live blog” link
that takes you to
http://ltsblogs.org.uk/connected
The “« Previous entries” link at the bottom of the page links to
http://ltsblogs.org.uk/connected/connected/page/2/
but following that link redirects you back to
http://ltsblogs.org.uk/connected
(Firefox 2.0.0.6 and Safari 2.0.4 ,G5 Mac)

Back to the seminar discusson

I’ve evangelised the feeds and recommended many of the 2005/2006 sessions to a range of acquaintances who have an interest in child care in sectors like HE/Research, Health, Social Care, informal youth workers, Local Government staff and parents and and not a single one has ever mentioned the technical quality as an issue, only praise for the content. I know this wont do anything to salve Ewan’s LTS professional quality angst.

Can’t say I’ve tried any commercial capture apps recently only freeware like camstudio.org. It produces AVI or SWF files and doesn’t seem to overly tax a three year old Pentium 4 PC when casually browsing websites, not sure how well it video clips. Can only speak about my own machine but sound capture in that product is pretty unreliable though I haven’t really tried too hard to investigate that issue. The definition of what’s perceived to be slow may be unique to each individual and what they’re used to.

Beta products like Jing, http://www.jingproject.com with a more flash-based and pretty unobtrusive approach look intriguing and might be fully up and running by this time next year. The TeachMeet folk had some kind of FlashMeeting (http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/) setup, with a webcam for video input, what was the quality like for that?

There are so many possible permutations and exciting formats, technologies, screencasts,webcams,external camcorders/software/hardware recorders/gizmos aplenty. Maybe a hardware refresh all round would also cut down your existing developer work? If capacity isn’t an issue then are developers having to start the recorders any more than once a day?, is it battery life or trying to make editing easier? Dinky new recorders like the Zoom H2 (~£150) already take SD cards up to 4GB which would get you over 24 hours of recording at 392kbps MP3 that might cut down on the number of pit stops by the crew.

Reduce labour costs to save on budget. I really applaud the introduction of your film crew, for a multimedia skills-rich future, Scotland needs to nurture the next generation. Those students need things in their portfolios/CVs as work experience and job referees so scrounge around for an even bigger pool of media students, allow your valuable developer resources to be redeployed more sensibly elsewhere, using them to push buttons and plug in cables seems like a peculiar misuse of their skills.

To protect and support continued improvement and expansion of seminar services maybe it’s time to think about raising even more sponsorship money and use it to fully fund hardware, personnel and post-production costs reducing the burden on LTS staff similar to how Mark Hunter’s production company gets a namecheck and URL mention in the episodes this year.

One last technical point :

re iTunes:Apple’s given you a plug in the “new and notable” K-12 section and Connected Live is this morning already sitting pretty at the number one slot in K-12, bravo! 39 last time I looked in the general Education category. From your iTunes Education ranking for your original LT Scotland feed you must have also have hundreds, if not thousands of subscribers to the previous LT Scotland podcast feed - the one in iTunes under the separate heading of “The Scottish Learning Festival” - but that looks like it’s been orphaned and a second new and separate feed URL and different iTunes entry has been created for Connected Live rather than building on that pre-existing audience. The kind of people that subscribed to LT Scotland on the basis of the 2006 coverage would likely appreciate knowing about receiving 2007 now but that older feed isn’t being updated so they wont be getting any of the new material. Maybe post an audio entry in the old feed to let them know about the existence of Connected Live and where they can subscribe to the new one if they haven’t done so already.

BTW don’t feel anything in this post needs a response, just reporting technical gremlins, thinking out loud and voicing opinions.

I’ll shut up now and leave you in peace to enjoy the rest of the conference.

Thanks all, your work is really appreciated!

Comment from Lucy Crichton
Time: September 20, 2007, 10:41 am

Thanks for your comments, Jane.
We’re just starting with Connected Live and it’s intended that it will continue to cover a lot more than the Scottish Learning Festival. That’s why we have blogging and i-tunes feeds from both Connected Live and the the Scottish Learning Festival websites this year.

We’ll have a good look at all your comments and have a think about how we can improve!

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Lucy