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Author(s): Paul Lowe, Margo Blythman, Marcia Chandra Revision History Department: London College of Communication, University of the Arts London 2010 June 30 Reference: good practice & innovation Reference: Project Title: good practice & innovation
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Final Report
Reference: good practice & innovation
OPEN-i: A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY OF
PRACTICE FOR THE PHOTOJOURNALISM
INDUSTRY
2010 June 30
Author(s): Paul Lowe, Margo Blythman, Marcia Chandra
Main
Contact: Paul Lowe [email protected]
Department: London College of Communication, University of the Arts London
Revision History
Date Version Description
Changed
by
Final Report
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Final Report
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Contents
CONTENTS .............................................................................................. 3
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................ 4
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................ 4
BACKGROUND......................................................................................... 5
AIMS & OBJECTIVES............................................................................... 6
METHODOLOGY ...................................................................................... 7
IMPLEMENTATION.................................................................................. 8
OUTPUTS .............................................................................................. 13
SUSTAINABILITY ......................................................................................14
OUTCOMES ........................................................................................... 14
LESSONS LEARNED............................................................................... 16
CONCLUSIONS...................................................................................... 20
IMPLICATIONS ..................................................................................... 20
RECOMMENDATIONS .............................. ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.
REFERENCES......................................................................................... 23
APPENDIXES ........................................................................................ 23
DISSEMINATION SUMMARY ..........................................................................24
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Acknowledgements
The ‘OPEN-i’ trial project was funded by JISC under the ‘Facilitating
Collaboration’1 stream of the BCE programme2 as part of the ‘Trialling
Collaborative Online Tools for BCE’ project3. JISC infoNet4 led the delivery of
outputs with support from other JISC Advance Services5.
The trial project team would like to thank the following for their hard work and
contribution to this trial project as well as the wider BCE agenda:
Executive Summary
Introduction
This report outlines the strengths and issues of the JISC funded BCE
collaborative tools project, Open-i. The aims of the project were:
• To create a collaborative online community of practice (COP) linking
masters level students, aspiring entrants to the profession, established
practitioners and key industry institutions
• To trial and develop a toolkit of web 2.0 approaches, in particular live
webinars, to enhance collaborative engagement online
• To evaluate the success or otherwise of the project and to draw out
conclusions for other similar projects
• To disseminate the results of the trial in relevant channels e.g. conference
papers, academic articles, staff development etc within a suitable
timeframe
The primary activity was to run a series of webinars to help build this community
of practice. These webinars are the focus of this report, although other activities
and platforms that were used will be briefly outlined.
1 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/bce/stream2.aspx 2 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/bce.aspx 3 http://collaborativetools4bce.jiscinvolve.org/ 4 http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk 5 http://www.jiscadvance.ac.uk
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Project description
OPEN-i is a global virtual community of practice linking photographers,
agencies, publications and educational institutions, currently involving almost
900 practitioners from the majority world as well as from the West in an online
network with the aim of engendering a debate and discussion about the future of
the medium in the world of web 2.0. OPEN-i is supported by the London College
of Communication, University of the Arts London, and the World Press Photo
Foundation and is funded by JISC. Initial partners included Getty Images, VII,
Noor, Panos, foto8, Tisch NYU, Drik, University of Bolton, University of
Westminster, and the University of Berkeley.
OPEN-i runs a regular series of live webinars and discussion sessions
presented by leading industry professionals to an invited audience of peers,
academics involved in the critical debate around images, aspiring
photojournalists from the majority world, and masters level students of
photography. This is supported by a social networking group with discussion
forums, homepages etc. Debates take place bi-weekly and seek to ask
challenging questions about the future development of the industry. All the
presentations are archived and available for later viewing online.
Background: Industry Context
The exponential rise of social media has created a new landscape of interaction
and collaboration where the boundaries between professional practice, citizen
journalism, the subject and the audience are blurring. The practice of
professional news photography and photojournalism has been transformed in the
last decade by a combination of technological changes, economic developments
and ethical challenges, creating an overwhelming need for the industry as a
whole to debate, discuss and open dialogue both within itself but also with
interested parties who engage with visual news media, a process that is difficult
to undertake conventionally because of the distributed nature of the profession,
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spread out geographically and economically with a large number of freelance
practitioners. An engagement between the industry and the academic world is
essential to both for critical reflection on the issues facing the media but also to
involve those entering photography in debates about its future role in society.
Aims & Objectives of the project
The focus of OPEN-i is on trying to re-imagine the profession in the age of
web 2.0. Our sector is undergoing radical change and transformation from the
old paid for legacy media model of magazines and newspapers that was its
original core area, to a new one of more participatory media, more access to
audiences etc through the web, but much less money from editorial clients, so
we are trying to figure out what new business models might work in the future
to produce work that is socially relevant, ethically founded, and has impact on
the audience and benefit to the subjects. The debate is focused more on the
practice of being a photojournalist than on the aesthetics, we talk more about
how to produce and disseminate the work we do than the work itself. In fact we
even decided not to allow members to post their photographic work to the site
unless it raised questions relevant to these questions, i.e. the site is not a
'portfolio' site to show your work to other people; other spaces exist for that
already.
The intention for this community is to try to break some new ground,
come up with some new insights or models for the future. One way we hope to
do this is by bringing together different types of actors e.g. academics,
practitioners, academic/practitioners, photo agencies, photo editors, photo
educators, new members of the profession and students so that in their
interaction there should be some transformational energy generated. Also it is a
way to 'test the water' and get a sense of what is happening in our industry from
a variety of perspectives. This has had the very valuable outcome of ‘feeding the
curriculum’ of our Masters in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography
(MAPJD) at LCC, providing the course with a high level of currency and relevancy
to the needs and demands of contemporary industry.
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Methodology
The project director, Paul Lowe, had previously developed a teaching
methodology of creating a collaborative virtual learning environment based on
using live web conferencing with Wimba supported by a Ning site to enhance
social learning as part of the delivery of an entirely online Masters in
Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (MAPJD) at the LCC. The BCE
project was designed to take advantage of this development both in the software
license obtained by the university but also more importantly in terms of the
experience gained in moderating and running online webinars. The OPEN-i
project therefore leveraged an existing investment in teaching and learning at
UAL and took that out into industry. The decisions on which software platforms
to use etc was thus effectively predetermined based on the tools developed for
the online MAPJD, which included Wimba for web conferencing, Ning as a social
hub, Twitter for information sharing, and You tube and Vimeo for hosting
archives and other videos. This had the benefit of meaning that the project did
not have to spend a lot of its initial energy on determining the best software
platforms to deploy, instead we focused on the meta level questions of how to
establish and build a community. Many of our conclusions are also ‘platform
agnostic’ as well in the sense that most web conferencing and social networking
platforms are essentially similar, with the decision to use one over another often
determined by forces outside of the control of an individual project (e.g.
institutional adoption); we have therefore again chosen to focus on findings that
deal more with the concept of using webinars to build a community or BCE
process rather than evaluation of the specific software we used.
The development of the network was informed by the work of Etienne
Wenger and his various collaborators, in particular the two publications
Cultivating Communities of Practice (2002) and Digital Habitats (2009), which
provide an excellent foundation for developing and nurturing a virtual
community. Wenger characterises a Digital Habitat as
not just a configuration of technologies, but a dynamic, mutually defining
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relationship that depends on the learning of the community. It reflects the
practices that the members have developed to take advantage of the
technology available and thus experience this technology as a ‘place’ for
community. A digital habitat is first and foremost an experience of place
enabled by technology. (2009, p 39)
In the generational encounter of bringing together established
practitioners with aspiring entrants to the profession a process of what Wenger
identifies as ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1999) can
occur, in which experiences and information are exchanged between
participants, allowing new entrants to the profession to negotiate the rules of the
game and help define their emerging professional identity. Of particular
importance to the webinar format is the power of narrating experiences, as
Wenger confirms
Sharing tacit knowledge requires interaction and informal learning
processes such as storytelling, conversation, coaching and apprenticeship of
the kind that communities of practice provide. (Wenger, McDermott &
Snyder, 2002)
Implementation
We thought a lot about how to establish and nurture the OPEN-i
community, as we were very concerned that the whole project didn’t come
across to the practice community or to the students as a cheap way of the
universities getting guest lectures from established professionals. Our initial
‘core membership’ was therefore all either established figures or
academic/practitioners; we waited until the membership hit around 50
professionals before we invited any ‘students’ to join (although most of the
‘students’ are professionals anyway, as we were drawing them mostly from
masters level courses etc where many of them are already well established as
professionals who want to enhance their practice). Additionally, we didn’t brand
the community with any University/JISC logos etc.
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The initial invitations came personally from the project director, Paul Lowe,
(see appendix for sample invitation letter) as he has a level of respect in the
industry, but as the community grew we allowed members to invite others
themselves. The membership currently stands at almost 900, about a third of
whom were invited by the project team; the rest came via third party
invitations. This has had the effect of significantly multiplying the reach of the
network, as many of the members are not known to the original project team.
Each member so far has been individually welcomed to the community by either
the project director or the project administrator.
The community manifests its value in a sense of both producing something in
common, and in engaging in interesting conversations, but the idea was that the
interesting conversations should have some form of structure/goal, and that the
community itself should produce the agenda for the conversations. We therefore
started out with a small 'editorial board' of thought leaders in the industry, with
a mix of genders, backgrounds and global locations. They were interviewed by
the project director to get their views on the major issues facing the industry,
and then we had a series of group meetings both F2F and via web conferencing.
From this process of brainstorming the issues we came up with a survey of the
landscape of the terrain of the industry, and generated a series of key topics to
get the community going. These have formed the basis for the first series of live
webinars. The main issues focused on new business models emerging from the
process of digitisation of the media, the development of multimedia, ethical
issues around the coverage of crisis events and conflicts, the relationship
between NGOs and the media, and the need for a more global perspective on
the industry. The overall goal for the first year was to work through this series of
topics, returning to each of them periodically and in more depth, and then
summarising the discussions to try and formulate a sense of where our practice
is today and where it might be going in the future, and what might be done to
try to effect positive change in that.
We have run webinars approximately every two weeks during the project,
with a variety of times and days of the week to allow different participants from
different global locations too more easily participate (note that this has not had a
clearly noticeable effect on attendance at the webinars). Each webinar last
typically for 90-120 minutes, and most participants remain online for the whole
session. Attendance has varied from 15 to 70, with an average of around 25-30
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at each session; the demographic has been a good mixture of photographers,
students and other professionals, and included the senior director of a software
company in the US; a photo editor and professor from Slovenia; the managing
director of a photo agency in the US; a magazine editor from London; a
university professor from the USA, a staff reporter from Bangladesh and a
picture editor from Malta. All the presentations are archived and available for
later viewing online. The ability to generate mp4 files from Wimba classroom has
greatly enhanced this feature, allowing OPEN-i to make its sessions easily
available by presenting them directly within the Ning interface instead of having
to view them through the Wimba archive itself. The sessions are all archived and
hosted on Vimeo and to date we have had 2045 views of these, with highs of
481 and 253 views and a weighted average of 60 views per session. They can be
seen on our Vimeo channel at http://vimeo.com/user2416391/videos; using
Vimeo has made it easy to embed them in other websites to increase cross
traffic.
What has emerged from this process is the need to have a variety of
different kinds of webinars to debate different kinds of issues, so we developed
several types of webinars:
• Themed panel presentations where an invited/volunteer group of 3-4
'thought leaders' in the community (or from outside of it) each present on
the same theme/concept, then a q&a with the audience. This is how we
plan to initiate each major conversation we want to deal with
• A follow up session where a smaller group meet to discuss that topic of
the panel presentation in much more detail - a kind of workshop session
to actually try and come up with some new ideas/insights
• More ‘portfolio like’ presentations about geographic or organisational
themes e.g. one about what is happening in photojournalism in Asia, or an
individual photographer presenting their work
• Presentations linked to events, exhibitions and festivals of photography or
real world conferences where we put together a panel to engage in a
series of questions in a round table discussion. Most notably we organised
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a one day conference on the relationship between NGO’s and visual
media, and webcast the event live through OPEN-i.
• Seminars based on specific groups within the community e.g. non
profits/NGOs where they would meet to discuss issues specific to them
The webinars were delivered using Wimba live classroom 6.0, supported by a
social networking group on the Ning platform with discussion forums,
homepages etc. Also, as the webinar software is available 24/7, rooms can be
easily made available online at short notice for any other debates, discussions or
working groups that emerge organically from the network. One notable feature
of the sessions is the ease of explaining how the platform works to both
presenters and attendees, and the almost instinctive way that the text box has
been used as a ‘backchannel’ to amplify and comment on the presentations by
the audiences. There have been some technical issues, largely with sound
quality, but these are no worse than with other web conferencing platforms and
normally relate to bandwidth issues or not having good quality microphones for
participants.
Ning was particularly useful as a mailing list for people to be updated and
invited to webinars and to create an identity for each member as they each had
their own homepage. We have the impression from talking to some people and
seeing people online that although it wasn’t used much for discussion it may
have been used as a contact database for more private conversations. It can be
seen at ……One area that we expected to form a larger part of the community
was the discussion forums on the Ning site; we put significant effort initially into
‘seeding’ these with questions and debates, but they were relatively little used
by the community. Our instinct is that this is because the rise of blogging and
the existence of other, longer established forums for the broader
photojournalism and photographic community that serves this function. We
came to realise that what we were providing that was unique was the live real
time interaction and the archives of this, so we focused our energies to this goal
and withdrew from promoting the asynchronous discussions.
We approached several ‘partner’ organisations to collaborate on webinars,
and this proved very successful; we held several sessions where we essentially
provided the platform and the technical support, and another party organised
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the debate, speakers and promotion on their channels. This again allowed the
project to reach out to new areas and members. In particular, an alliance with a
well known online and print magazine for the industry, foto8, has been very
successful; we held 2 webinars to coincide with the publication of the new issues
of the magazine, the archives of which were cross posted onto the foto 8 website
where they obtained a high number of views on with over 700 in total. They
found this archive very useful as it generated a resource that they can now use
in the future. Another successful alliance was with the Magnum Photo Agency,
who made use of OPEN-i to organise and run a series of professional practice
workshops in locations in Europe and the USA; this was one exception to the use
of the discussion forums as these were very active for the participants on the
workshops.
Initially we felt that we should not promote the webinars widely and make
them accessible to non-members of OPEN-I, as we wanted to keep the
discussions focused and professional; however as we continue with the project
we think that we will begin to market the sessions more widely as the number of
participants at the sessions is not excessive. We will therefore begin to explore
using a facebook page and promoting the sessions on other partner sites more.
We would also like to try to generate more coverage of OPEN-i in industry blogs
etc so will target this as a priority for the future, as this kind of visibility could be
seen as a marker of the success of the program.
A spin-off of the initial project idea that was a direct result of a
demonstration by the JISC team at the initial BCE project workshop was the use
of a flip video camera to capture short interviews with industry figures. We call
these ‘flipbites’, and they consist of 1-2 minute ‘talking head’ clips where the
speaker talks about one issue or question. We have recorded these at
conferences, exhibitions and other industry events, and they have proven to be
very popular with the community, with over 7000 views so far of the 24 clips
posted to date. This demonstrates that projects need to be agile enough to
introduce new innovations quickly when they emerge as useful possibilities.
These can be seen at our Youtube channel at
http://www.youtube.com/user/OPENiPhotojournalism
Apart from the use of Wimba, which is paid for by the university, the project
has used either free, open source or other platforms that were not specifically
intended for academic use. Our email system was gmail, and we used Twitter,
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Ning, You tube and Vimeo for communications and video hosting. Essentially we
looked out at industry to see what it was using to distribute and share work, and
used those ‘industry strength’ platforms. This had the additional benefit of
meaning that we didn’t have to deal with any internal IT issues over licenses,
approval etc, which meant that the whole project was agile and could adapt to
any changes rapidly and effectively. Additionally, we ran OPEN-i as a special
project through the CLTAD, the University of the Arts’ Centre for Learning and
Teaching in Art and Design, with the Associate Dean of CLTAD as the project
sponsor; this meant that we operated as an independent project and could react
to decisions quickly.
The decision to continuously evaluate the project and to have a project
evaluator as part of the team was a vital one, as it enabled the process of
development to be much more iterative and founded on evidence from the
community itself. The evaluation included a web based survey and focus groups,
as well as the evaluator attending most of the sessions as an observer.
Finally, note should be made of the successful use of a project wiki to
manage the project; this meant that the dispersed project team could easily
access key documents and that an ‘action diary’ noting what was going on and
who had done what was available to everyone.
Outputs
The OPEN-i community membership currently stands at just under 900,
with a demographic mixture of academics, students, professional practitioners
and industry professionals. The project has delivered to date 15 webinars and
webcasted a full one-day conference, with a total attendance of several hundred
participants and 2045 views on the archives. It has also filmed 24 ‘flipbites’ with
a total of 6906 views. These sessions have engaged with serious and timely
issues, and have provided a forum for the industry to debate that does not exist
elsewhere.
Additionally, the project team in collaboration with the JISC/BCE team ran
a very successful one-day event at LCC entitled ‘Mediating Boundaries’ which
included a keynote and workshop led by Etienne Wenger. (See appendix for
more details)
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Sustainability
The project has developed a systematic process for setting up webinars,
and promoting them, and a set of guidelines for participants and presenters (see
appendix). A webinar now takes typically around a day in total spread out over
several weeks to organise and produce, in addition to moderating the session
itself. The Ning site has now been set up as well to require as little maintenance
as possible. The running costs of the project are low; the Ning site costs around
£150 per annum and the other software platforms are either free or paid for by
the University.
Because the community provides such a rich vein of professionally and
academically relevant material to the MAPJD course at LCC, the project team
believe that the time invested in maintaining OPEN-i is justified in the amount
that it feeds back into the curriculum of the course, particularly in maintaining
the currency of the staff and students alike. We therefore believe that even
without additional support, the OPEN-I community can continue to hold regular
webinars for the foreseeable future. However, funding is being sought internally
to support the project, and we are also negotiating with an external industry
partner to collaborate with on a more long-term basis.
Additionally, the various external partners we have worked with have
expressed the desire to continue to provide content for the webinars, and we
plan to begin to open up the webinars more to the community itself, giving a
space for peer-to-peer feedback on photographic projects. Whilst we feel that
the work done so far has been very valuable, we fully intend to continue with the
project for the future.
Outcomes
OPEN-i as been effective because it has engendered a community of
practice that links industry stakeholders who normally operate in the same
sphere but do not necessarily communicate effectively with each other. Input
from the academic world has secured a high level of debate and discussion
within the network, acting as a knowledge transfer process both from academia
to industry and, just as importantly, from industry into the academic context. It
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has fed directly into curriculum and course development in the LCC photography
programme, giving the students fantastic opportunities to engage with the
profession at the highest levels. Stephen Mayes, director of one of the most
significant photojournalism agencies, VII, and a regular contributor to the
network, feels that OPEN-i ‘offers a unique platform to share information,
expertise and experience with other practitioners around the world’. It provides
a ‘completely new opportunity’ that has introduced him to ‘new people with
different perspectives and information that has allowed me to expand my
thinking. OPEN-i is a terrific resource‘.
Professor Fred Ritchin of the Department of Photography & Imaging, New
York University, notes that this project is a ‘major step forward in creating a
virtual community based upon learning and sharing experiences’. He notes that
Paul Lowe’s ‘energy and thoughtfulness as both moderator and director of the
enterprise gives it much more credibility and complexity than it otherwise would
have’, and that ‘OPEN-i is as transparent, open-sourced and serious as any
network I have seen’. The membership of OPEN-i is substantial, and we have
hosted numerous webinars on a wide range of topics, many of which have
attracted attendances of over 50. The session archives are a fantastic resource
for students and for the industry. Ken Kobre, Professor of Photo and
Videojournalism at San Francisco State University, sees OPEN-i as ‘changing the
face of photojournalism and photojournalism education’, with the webinars
providing ‘a refreshing way for a diverse group of photojournalists and students
to communicate with one another, providing an important forum that helps give
direction to the field’. He concludes ‘While no one can tell how the journalism
business will evolve in the future. The discussions taking place on OPEN-i .. will
prove to be an important forum that helps give direction to the field’. Professor
David Campbell of Durham University has found the community to be an
important resource in his academic research, in which he has:
sought to learn from practitioners about the complexities of the current
visual economy. OPEN-i has been invaluable in making that aspiration
real. It brings together a community around shared concerns and breaks
down the barriers between theory and practice. Being able to participate
in webinars, access material online and benefit from the network's support
for our investigations, has helped advance my work.
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Finally, the project has found support from Etienne Wenger, who feels
that it is one of the ‘best examples he has seen of the ‘articulation of a masters
course and development and support of professional community in a way that
serves the needs of both’ that uses ‘similar technologies so takes advantage of
the synergy between the two.’ He also notes that OPEN-i ‘seamlessly broadens
the course into an open process of continuous professional development. I would
very much like to see his approach recognized and emulated widely in higher
education’.
The project has also developed an institutional capacity and understanding
of how to develop virtual communities of practice, and how to use the webinar
format as a way to engage with industry as well as for teaching and learning
that the institution hopes to develop further through the work of CLTAD
Lessons Learned
Value of the Community and the Webinars
• The project brought a high level of debate to an international audience of
photojournalists with a good mix of current students, former students and
industry figures in a format of synchronous activity that had not
previously been available. It makes the participants feel part of a
professional network connected globally in what is a very dispersed
community
• There was a good level of participation with the numbers varying between
20 and 70 with one exception, with almost all participants staying till the
end of the webinars
• There is evidence of international and global involvement in both the
topics discussed and the range of participants, both presenters and
audience. This diversity has mean that participants have access to
different perspectives on issues, including sensitive issues such as the
Middle East
• Each webinar used multiple presenters which meant that for each
presenter it was a reasonable time and work commitment; twenty
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minutes is much less of a demand that one and a half hours, and
participants enjoyed the to and fro between multiple speakers
• The video clips on the Ning site have been very successful getting large
numbers of hits
• Other stakeholders are beginning to buy in and take responsibility for
individual sessions and a number of spin off events emerged from the
main webinar programme including workshops and ‘real world’ events.
• The management of the project was unproblematic since it was sponsored
by a key central university unit who controlled the budget and control UAL
use of WIMBA. They were also represented on the steering committee by
the associate Dean. This meant there were no bureaucratic or technical
difficulties caused by the university.
Non technical issues with the webinars
• It is difficult to know what clock to use to indicate times of webinars.
After some initial confusion we settled on GMT but UK participants found
this confusing during British Summer Time. Additionally, those outside
the UK and US were happier using the 24-hour clock.
• It was difficult to get the timing right. Some wanted the webinars during
their working day; for others this made it difficult.
• Some would have liked smaller, more in-depth seminars
• Sometimes it felt as if the presenters were not very well prepared and
were talking off the cuff. This meant that these presentations seemed to
lack direction.
• Some thought it would be good to have an agenda or outline showing the
structure and when it would be appropriate to ask questions
• Sessions without images, or where it had been impossible to get the
images in synch with the talk, had not been so engaging
• One participant felt that the discussion became too academic at times.
Others like this so there is a difficulty in pleasing a very diverse audience
with different motives for participation.
• The perspective tended to be western even when talking about other parts
of the world.
• Some people who offer to host webinars do not follow through
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• It would be good to have more follow up activities through more active
use of the Ning site
Top Tips for community building: things to think about
• Realms: what kind of online spaces does your community need –
asynchronous vs. synchronous, webinars, blogs, discussion forums etc.
Think about creating a ‘virtual commons’ where interaction can take place
across a range of temporalities
• Rhythms: how often do you want to provide activities for the community? Too
frequent and people will be overwhelmed and unable to commit time, too rare
and people will lose interest and the initiative will be lost
• Relationships: what kind of relationship are you trying to engender between the
participants – colleagues, friends, contacts, collaborators?
• Roles: who will do what in the community, and who will be paid and who will
work for free?
• Resources; how can you leverage existing investments, and what can you get for
free and what needs to be paid for?
• Respect: treat members fairly and don’t make them feel like they are being
exploited – how can you ensure they feel valued?
• Responsibility: who is responsible for what, but also what responsibility does the
community have to itself to participate actively and sustain the debate?
Technical side of the webinars
Positives
• WIMBA was in general fit for purpose. The university already has a
license so there was no extra cost in our using it.
• The platform enabled real time participation by the audience with very
little time lag. It enabled participants to engage with an external audience
in a relatively simple way, and it was clear who was speaking from the
participants’ list. Participants liked being able to ask questions live, and
the system of putting up one’s hand in order to speak in a way that
everyone could see in order was perceived as encouraging an easy, fair
and democratic form of discussion. The role of the moderator encouraged
audience participation in a managed and accessible way
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• Participants appreciated the capacity of WIMBA to show images while
talking. In the context of photography this was a key feature as everyone
can see the same images at the same time
• Participants appreciated the ease of access, flexibility, comfort and time-
saving of being to log in from home or wherever they happened to be, and
that Wimba is simple to access and login from anywhere. It did not
require significant training.
• The text box was a good way for the moderator and others to give to refs
to e.g. websites that arose in discussion and for encouraging interaction.
Participants instinctively took to using the text box as a ‘backchannel’ to
amplify and comment on the presentations, enabling a form of ‘legitimate
peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991)
Negatives
• Audio was a significant problem although participants recognised that it
was normal to have audio difficulties at this stage of technology
development. However several pointed out that it interfered with their
engagement with the webinar, and the quality of the audio was
particularly important when participants include non-native speakers of
English. The specific audio problems were the audio breaking up, feedback
from multiple mics, background noise and speakers not aware when audio
goes down.
• There were a number of system crashes, and some websites with Java
protection made the system crash when they were loaded. This is now a
known problem with Wimba and can be avoided in future. However, as a
mark of the resilience of the participants, most managed to move to
another room that we had available and continue the webinar after a
group email was sent out.
• The system was only as good as local internet connections, and many
participants experienced frequent dropping out and having to log in again
• Some participants found the text box a distraction and that following
complex text streams and audio simultaneously was too hard
Top Ten tips for webinars – technical
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• Have multiple back up arrangements for accessing the login url in case
one route fails
• If the system goes down, keep chatting as everyone logs back in so that
they can hear that they are re-connected
• Decide at the start what clock is being used for times if working
internationally and give this a high profile ensuring all participants
understand.
• The fifteen minutes before the official start time are important for
welcoming participants and building a sense of community
• Have an intro and closing slide with presenters names, websites etc
• Ensure that the audio is as good as possible by avoiding multiple
microphones in the same space and people speaking from noisy
backgrounds.
• Provide an advice sheet for presenters
• Ensure audience know how to tell who is speaking and where there is
multiple use of one microphone then ensure the moderator indicates who
is talking
• Ensure that questions coming in through the text box are picked by the
moderator if the main speaker does not spot them.
• Provide advice notes for participants covering:
Exit button
Talk button
Putting up hand
How to write in the text box
What to do if you lose contact
What to do if the whole system crashes
• Understand that the role of the moderator is crucial and that must involve
chairing the session so that discussion flows well and that all forms of
participation through text box as well as oral questions and picked up and
dealt with.
• It is important to have back-up for the moderator in case the moderator
loses contact through system failure or own local internet connection.
Conclusions, Implications and
recommendations
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Although in some areas of academic activity such at e-learning and
pedagogy, the webinar format has become relatively common, it is still a new
experience for most outside of these ‘e-pockets’ and as such still has the
potential to engage and excite an audience. Despite technical issues, mostly with
sound and internet access, the overwhelming feedback from the project to date
has been very positive, people are willing to accept a certain degree of
imperfection in the delivery if the content is relevant, engaging, contemporary
and challenging. The value to the course team of the MAPJD has been immense,
giving the students and academics unparalled access to the heart of the
professional industry, and directly enhancing the development and currency of
the curriculum.
The OPEN-i community has established itself as a significant platform for
debate, dialogue and discussion within the photojournalism industry, and has
generated a reputation as a space where high level, intense, challenging and
fruitful exchanges can take place between actors who would otherwise find it
hard if not impossible to communicate in such a way. Maintaining the activity of
the community is sustainable, especially if the focus becomes more clearly on
the live webinars and their associated archives rather than other activities. The
webinars provide an excellent resource for teaching and learning, not just at our
own institution but at others as well, keeping our program current and directly
related to the needs of industry. We suggest that there are several ways in
which the webinar format could be used to enhance BCE activity.
• Develop a CoP along the lines of OPEN-i that uses a regular program of
webinars on issues relevant to the academic and industry/community
contexts to build the community. This needs significant commitment in
terms of budget, with at the very least a paid part-time community
coordinator on 1-2 days a week.
• Run a shorter, more focused series of webinars aimed at a specific issue
or interest group that allows the academic community to act as a ’critical
friend’ or that is aimed at enhancing student understanding of the realities
of the external workplace. This could potentially be incorporated into a
course or departmental curriculum, or run as part of an enterprise office
outreach program
• Run a specific project aimed at mapping employers expectations for
example, where external stakeholders are invited in to a ‘talking shop’
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• Run a one-day event via webinars, similar to a conference, but aimed
more specifically at a particular issue relevant to the BCE agenda.
We believe that our project has been successful in enhancing BCE in what
one might call a ‘stealth mode’ of operation, for many participants in the
webinars the fact that this was a university based project was either irrelevant
or invisible, and in fact might even have been a negative factor if they had been
more aware of it in the sense that it might have been perceived as a ‘student
space’ rather than a professional one. However, by initiating a serious and
engaged debate around complex issues facing our industry, we are confident
that the project has enhanced the potential of BCE for 5 vital stakeholders
• Practitioners have benefited from the ability to debate and discuss
with each other on key topics
• Academics have been able to directly engage with the professional
community and act as ‘critical friends’
• Students have been able to enhance their practice through ‘legitimate
peripheral participation’
• The MAPJD course at LCC has benefited from direct access to
contemporary practice enabling it to remain current and at the leading
edge of professional practice education
• UAL as an institution has built up valuable experience and capacity in
how to use this approach to enhance BCE by leveraging existing
investments
In conclusion, we feel that this model of using webinars to engage with an
external industry community from an academic one is an excellent one to pursue
for other institutions. Whether in the form of a major initiative like a community
of practice, or a smaller, more focused intervention to engage with key industry
or community figures, the webinar format is an excellent one to reach over the
walls between institutions and the outside world and to connect students,
academics and practitioners together. It offers a potential solution to the oft-
quoted problem that universities do not understand the needs of business and
vice versa; by bringing people together in dialogue these barriers can be broken
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down.
References
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: a guide to managing knowledge.
Wenger, E, (2009), Digital Habitats, stewarding technology for communities, CPSquare, Portland OR
Appendixes
1: Project team
Project Director: Paul Lowe – responsible for overall direction of project, selecting online platforms, initial interviewing of editorial board and recruitment of membership, planning and moderating most of the webinars, writing project reports, disseminating project
Project administrator: Marcia Chandra – responsible for maintaining the Ning site, welcoming members, downloading and editing archives and uploading them to Vimeo, arranging webinars, technical support during most of the webinars
Project evaluator: Margo Blythman – responsible for ongoing evaluation of the project, writing project evaluation and reports.
2: Relevant URLS
Ning site
You tube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/OPENiPhotojournalism
Vimeo channel http://vimeo.com/user2416391/videos
3: Evaluation report
see attached
4:Presenter guidelines
see attached
5:Sample invitation letter
see attached
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Dissemination Summary
The course team have presented papers on the OPEN-i project at Wimba
Connect 2010 in the USA, Wimbaday in the UK, the e-learning guild online
seminar series on social networking, and the Solstice e-learning conference at
Edge Hill University, and will present at ALT-C and Designs on e-learning in the
USA both in September 2010.