Now, where do I start after such a busier than usual weekend?
Hhmm.
As many of y’all (yes, that’s you Dad) will know, S3.0′s Mark Hahnel and I attended this year’s Science Online Conference in London, 2 – 4th September.
Pretty much from the onset of planning the event, Martin Fenner (one of the organising team) and I wanted to livestream the event to reach as wider an audience as possible. Financially however, this wasn’t going to happen so I offered my assistance to help out in this regard. I couldn’t do this on my own mainly because, I don’t currently possess a laptop/ipad etc. etc..
That’s where S3.0′s Mark Hahnel came to the rescue and offline, we’d been beavering away in the background (pre conference) to do our best to livestream as much of the conference as we could.
The lovely peeps at the British Library (BL) provided us with a secure internet connection in not only the main Auditorium, but also the 4 breakout rooms. AMAZING.
Things worked pretty well on day one, but on day two, the BL’s secure connection was offline, so we had to (like everyone else) rely upon the #itdidntalwayswork wi-fi connection.
Remarkably, this didn’t affect us too much although attempting to stream the final Panel Discussion proved impossible, so we simply gave up.
So there’s some background for you.
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Gosh, now where was I?
Oh yes,
With so much video/audio “in the bag” (and in the public domain I might add) what’s a boy (or Grrl) to do?
Despite her throat being a wee bitty unwell, Aleks Krotoski did a terrific job delivering her Keynote talk at 10am on Saturday morning.
So without any further ado, here…………. it is:-
The Web offers an unprecedented opportunity for social scientists to gather actual behavioural data about research participants, providing insight into and evidence for theory and practice; however, the computer-mediated medium also introduces practicalities that need to be considered when development studies. Ethical, methodological and design issues are implicated by the constraints of the so-called “lean” medium, as are the identity and influence processes that research questions seek to study.
What unique social information must we be cognizant of when seeking to understand online behaviour, and what is the real potential of the Web for social science?
Graham Steel