Futuresonic Conference 09

Posted by Zak Mensah on Tuesday 19 May 2009 at 1:11pm
Tags: e-learning | event |

Last week, 13th – 16th May 2009 I attended the 4th Futuresonic Conference in Manchester at the Contact theatre. It’s a conference centred around social technologies and attracted a healthy range of industries including education.

Iamge of a futuresonic ad at a bus stop

You can read much on this event so I will not labour much on the individual talks as this has been done exhaustively elsewhere. However I wanted to share a few things about the conference and why it's worth the Fe/He sectors attending, face to face or online.

The keynote presentation from Stowe Boyd titled "Social Tools: The Shape of Future Culture" was informative and I now have a backlog of over 10years of Stowe's reading to catch up on.

The takeaway point for me from the conference was that social tools (coined by Stowe Boyd I believe) were already impacting us in a great way and that this is the future, there is no going back. Social tools of present and future affect us as people and as stakeholders in business (from our own businesses/departments to the businesses we use). At present, many see social tools as a fad but Stowe demonstrated how it's already infiltrated mass culture and the sign of things to come.

We as a service for example, already automatically search for comments on blogs/twitter about our service provisional and use it as an indicator of performance and to shape future delivery.

Two separate sessions from BBC speakers were thought provoking and showed some direction that the BBC is heading towards regarding supporting community engagement.

The first by Phillip Trippenbach, a BBC journalist with social media and gaming interest described how games are very educational and where digital media/social media fits in. This was talk that really excited me and he has described it in full in his blog, linked at the end of this entry.

Second was a more technical focused talk by Simon Cross and Ben Smith, Web Developers at the BBC with a social twist around the semantic web. They explained plans to use RDF to begin to give social context to the BBC site. For example, "Who of my friends has watched HEROES?". This type of ability in the future will be extremely valuable and would help large organisations like JISC to have improved (by community) searchable content.

Encouraging real time interaction

The organisers and speakers encouraged the use of live blogging and twitter. This was output on screens around the event. If you do a twitter search for #futr09 you will be able to read many peoples thoughts during the events.
If anybody from FE/HE will be attending next year please give me a heads up as I'd love to meet you and enjoy the event all over again.

Event in one word: Motivating.

If you have attended any non FE/HE directly related conferences let us know in the comments as we are always on the look out for great thought provoking events.