Edublog awards (again)

Just thinking some more about why this event didn't quite work for me...

Firstly, I picked up audio thru the SL voice channel. In usability terms there are some issues with using one avatar's voice channel to stream in the audio for a RL event. With the way my SL client is configured, the volume on the voice channel is directly related to how close the listener's camera (and/or avatar) is to the avatar that is feeding in the stream. In the case of the Edublog awards, the avatar doing this was moving around the venue - as a result, the audio varied in volume unless I explicitly tracked that avatar with my camera. Furthermore, I also tended to find it somewhat counterintuitive that a generic stream was appearing to come from one particular avatar.

With hindsight, it might have been better to dedicate this job to some kind of 'alt' avatar, possibly made to look like some sort of a 'bot and given a name and/or group indicating its role in the event (e.g. setting the group to 'Edublog audio stream' or somesuch), positioned clearly up the front of the event space, and not moving around.

Secondly, I struggled a little to engage with the awards themselves because I wasn't familiar enough with most of the award nominees - clearly this is my fault for not doing my homework properly. It meant that I kinda felt a bit like an outsider. Prior to the event this would have been helped (a little... maybe!) by having access to either an OPML file of all the nominated blog feeds (allowing me to quickly add them all to my favorite rss reader) or a single aggregated feed of all of them (or both).

To demonstrate the potential value of this I've since created an OPML file of all the nominated blogs (though I suspect there may be a couple of errors in it - apologies to anyone's feed that I've got wrong). I've also created an aggregated feed of all the winning blogs.

Hope this is useful...

Edublog awards

I spent some time earlier on this evening at the Edublog Awards on Jokadia.

It seems to me that we still have a lot to learn about doing this kind of thing well. Just in case anyone thinks I'm being very rude to say that, please note that I absolutely include myself in that statement (as readers familiar with any of the de-briefs after my own SL events will know). In particular, the sound quality was variable tonight - I mainly got it thru the SL voice channel though it was also available as a parcel stream and thru ustream.tv. It went from good to bad and back again with everything in between.

I would have also liked there to have been more in-world discussion about the awards. As it was, there was a lot of noise but not a lot of signal (I did nothing to improve this it has to be said!). My gut feeling is that discussion would have been helped by having more in-world visual material available to complement the audio stream. There were slides that told us which award was currently being presented - but it might have been nice to have something about each of the shortlisted blogs - and then a longer slide about the winning entry.

Doing that might have helped focus our attention a little bit? Perhaps this is something that could be tried next year...