Just got back from the ICDE2009 conference, or more precisely the 23rd ICDE World Conference on Open Learning and Distance Education including the 2009 EADTU Annual Conference in Maastricht. The conference organisation left much to be desired (embarassed as I am to have to say so as member of the organising institution), but the content of the conference was overall pretty good. I have twittered during the conference, so you can find my thoughts about the sessions I attended. I also tested Coveritlive.com during one of the plenaries to avoid overloading my followers with tweets they might not be interested in (see previous post).As we were about 6-7 twitterers at the conference (which had an attendance of about 600 people) we established an unofficial backchannel through the use of the #icde2009 hashtag. I found the use of the backchannel quite interesting, because it added an aspect of interactivity, which was often lacking during the sessions themselves, especially the plenary sessions.
I also made a Slideshare Event page for the conference, where I tried to gather all presentations that were available online. I think conference organisers should encourage participants to publish and share their presentations before or during their presentation (Great example set by Terry Anderson).
Just today @timbuckteeth (Steve Wheeler) pointed out this article on the use of Twitter as a backchannel. I try to embed the article in my blog, so enjoy.
More than just passing notes in class? The Twitter-enabled backchannel
