Open Networked Learning – Architectures of Participation

August 10th is history for the Webheads, for Worlbridges and the Webcastacademy. Bee Dieu was the architect. She was there in New Orleans in Merlot Conference orchestrating participation from her audience, the physical one and the online group divided into two. One group was in Alado, the others in Second Life by the campfire. Jeff LeBow was there bridging audio from Second Life and Alado to the audience who was there with Bee. Just fantastic! People in Alado could hear Second Lifers and the Jazz in New Orleans. I was there, thrilled to be hearing fantastic ideas about our networked learning, appreciating impressive photos as Bee spoke and streaming in the Webcastacademy in Sandbox A.
Bee was the architect, Jeff the bridge, and I was just an intern learning from every single word spoken, text typed and waves in Audacity, Simplecast. I was so excited with the whole audio-visual experience that I forgot to turn on my audio repeater! What happened? I was able to record everybody, but me!
Lesson learned: don’t get so excited that you forget the basics of testing everything before starting streaming.
Lesson learned 2: as Jeff pointed out, there’s not much you can do with the recording if there’s static going on during the presentation. What I did with the recording here, I took off the background noise just in the first part of the presentation before Bee starts to speak so that I could play around with the differences. Otherwise, I’d have to listen to it all over again and just edit the background noise when she was speaking. When the other participants were talking, the sound quality is much better, so If I just selected everything, there would be a distortion. Jeff’s solution, try to solve it before the presentation starts! In this case, it was not possible and I’d have to edit every bit of it…
What Bee was talking about, open participatory environments, was being demonstrated live by the human presence in the online setting sharing with her audience and the Internet listeners. It was history and, as an intern and speaker, it was just an amazing experience to be part of that story to be told. The Webheads, WorldBridges and Merlot were connected through the human presence around the globe led by Bee.
The multicultural gathering ended with Lee Baber playing the Banjo in SL and the globe listening in awe in different time zones.
Architectures of Participation at http://merlot.wikispaces.com/communities
Jeff LeBow’s Streaming Recording Leigh Blackall’s Description of the Event
Cris Costa’s Account
My own recording with audacity and some edits in the beginning of the keynote to remove background knowledge, turning down everyone’s voices and without my part of the presentation (audio repeater off!) is at