BCEct Final Report UoA OPEN-i infokit

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

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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’

Reference:

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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

Reference:

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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

Reference:

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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.

Documents

BCEct Final Report UoA OPEN-i infokit