1. Beyond Borders – and Ash Clouds

Photo of the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano

Eyjafjallajokull Volcano - NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre

The Beyond Borders conference was held in Oxford in April – just as the Eyjafjallajokull volcano ash cloud was disrupting travel.

Its aims were to showcase work done at Oxford University this year during our OpenSpires project and provided an opportunity for discussion and debate on different aspects of creation, use and re-use of Open Educational Resources (OER). The conference featured speakers from Oxford, other international research institutions and opinion-shapers in the open education community.

Three international speakers were unable to attend. So, this being a technology conference and a very fine venue we did our best. Here’s how.

We used -

  • Skype - to quickly chat with people whilst setting up and testing
  • Polycom/Tandberg hardware system, IP to IP for a Swedish keynote who used his local town service - this is best for audio/ video
  • WebEx - for a Seattle speaker - good for sharing screens, chats, multiple participants - web based so the poor guy didn’t have to travel to a commercial service at 4 a.m. his time - free to use
  • Simple webcam video recording for a speaker stuck in a hotel in Finland. Worked really well.

Find out more:

About the day and participants experiences

>Delegate blogs from the day

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