We all have experience of users to draw on.  The conference is about sharing our stories with other projects, drawing on their experience and reflecting on what we have learnt.  We are at the stage of shaping the programme, so please have a look at the theme and outline and contact Isobel with your ideas for what you would like to do

Overview

Who, or what, are User 2.0?  How are web2.0 technologies impacting on learners, teachers and institutions?  How are users shaping the technologies? This conference will focus on the interactions between different users and web2.0 technologies.  This online event attempts to address some of those questions, and invites the Emerge community to share their stories of the challenges met when users and new technologies come face to face.

Several intertwined threads run through the conference.  The first is understanding the way in which people use web2.0 technologies.  Here we can draw on our own experience as users, as well as the experiences of project stakeholders and colleagues.  However, different types of users have their own concerns and interactions with web2.0, making it difficult to generalise experience and pointing a need to understand their different perspectives.  This second thread is largely the focus of day two of the conference.  The understanding we gain, though is of limited use if we cannot articulate and share it.  Thus the third thread is sharing our experience; two radically different articulations of experience, patterns and stories, form the prelude and finale to the conference: patterns attempt to abstract principles of effective practice from common experience, whereas stories are a strongly individualised and contextualised account.  The juxtaposition of patterns and stories thus confronts the issue of generalisation raised by the second thread.  Still in the third thread, the social event provides a chance to share more tacit knowledge of users.  The final thread, reflection, is about learning from our shared experience, and is a specific focus of both patterns and stories: what have we learnt? How can it help us more forward? Where do we go next? The conference winds up with a radio broadcast reflecting on these issues.

Day 1: Communities of users - Patterns

Introductions

Opening keynote: half hour keynote address that will set the scene for subsequent debate and discussion

Workshop: Creating and sustaining learning communities: .Patterns elicitation hosted by the Planet project.

The existence of communities of users is the assumption upon which web2.0 is built. Emerge is one such community; individual projects have their own, often overlapping, communities, and may see community formation as essential for engaging users.  This workshop gives projects a chance to exchange ideas on what works in creating and sustaining communities, and hands on experience of developing patterns as a way of articulating effective practice.

Reflection: on issues of representation, including patterns and digital stories, generalisation and contextualisation 

Day 2: User Perspectives

Introductions

Keynote: half hour keynote address that will set the scene for subsequent debate and discussion

Community slots (3 or 4): the day will explore the interactions of different types of users, learners, teachers, institutions, with web2.0 technologie.  It will give an opportunity to explore discipline and cultural issues, and how these cut across the user types.  The outcome will be a better understanding of user perspectives which can inform future planning and development.

Projects are invited to host slots.  The slots should be strongly interactive and/or discursive and, eg.

o       Panel discussion followed by audience questions

o       Showcase emerging issues studies

o       Whole community activity, eg. slide sharing, tagging, folksonomy building, profiling, etc.

o       ??sense making activity

Reflection: on user perspectives, How does the community want to represent its experience?

Day 3: Reflect Workshop

Introductions

Keynote: half hour keynote address that will set the scene for subsequent debate and discussion

Workshop: storytelling and reflection: focused on how a project, can use its experience so far as an insight into what was achieved from a personal perspective, and as a basis for what to do next. Digital Storytelling is a reflective learning method whereby participants engage in producing a multimedia presentation of their experience on a given subject.  Narration, music, digital photos and such like can be used to build up a narrative form. 

Some issues that could be the basis of workshops:

• Implementation and technology.
  • Reflection, deciding on what to focus on.
  • Writing the narrative.
  • Collection of material, what methods, what technology.
  • Selection and editing of materials.
  • Assembling of work.
• Storage and transmission.
  • What storage mediums could/should be used.
  • How to share the Story effectively.

Reflection: on what we have learnt, and the way forward. (?radiobroadcast)  Representing experience for the future community

Cheers

Isobel

The definition of a community of practice is that it forms around a common practice.  The idea of the U&I programme, I think, is that for the Emerge community, user engagement is (?should be?) the common practice. 

Viewing user engagement as the common practice, the user engagement support team then has three concerns or questions.  The first is a benchmarking-type question 

1) What is the practice? (what are the community doing at present, how are we interpreting user engagement, what is our experience of user engagement) 

Followed by two practice change or enhancement questions: 

2) How can we enhance community engagement with the practice? 

3) How can the practice be enhanced? 

Articulating the role of user engagement in the Emerge community in this way points up the logic of taking an AI approach to the user engagement practices of the community - evaluation of the community should include evaluation of the community’s engagement with its practice.

So, that's one thing you can cross out of your diaries now - but something to look forward to...

 But once we got into the swing of things, and projects started thinking about how they would draw it, or adapt it to their needs, the ideas started flying. 

The UIDM is a model for user engagement that is developing, and it is the community that needs to develop it. Outputs from the workshop, and discussion fora, are on the Moodle (http://vle.jiscemerge.org.uk), so pile in and let us know how you think it should look.