CREW

From 30 June to 3rd July 2008 CREW is recording What Is? sessions at the ESRC Research Methods Methods Festival 2008 in Oxford.  This is with the kind permission of the event organisers and speakers from those sessions.  CREW’s approach is to use our CREW-kit to create Access Grid recordings of speaker presentations, including automatically time-synced views of speaker slide presentations.  Audience participants will get an opportunity to contribute online comments on what is taking place during the What Is? sessions by making what we call ‘live annotations’ via the web tool CREW provides.  These will also get synced with the session recordings post-conference, which will help make an easy-to-view, searchable record of which questions were asked, which key points were made and so on during these valuable Research Methods Festival sessions. 

The entire recorded experience will be replayable via our CREW events website, the latest demo of which is at the CREW demo website.  You will see the ESRC Research methods Festival is listed among other events shown at this website.  If you scroll down the page for the Research Methods Festival 2008 event listing you can see information about the event and an example user annotation entitled “CREW Project Records Sessions and User Contributed Content”, created “on 25 June 2008 12:07:24 by nikkir” (i.e. added by Nikki Rogers – CREW Technical Manager).  In fact it is possible for anyone to log in and add these sort of user comments, photos, references, web links and so on to the appropriate sessions or overall event via the CREW demo website.  We encourage event participants (and even those who were not there) to do so.

Within a week or so of the conclusion of this event we aim to have all recorded sessions linked and replayable from the CREW demo website.   We hope that by preserving event related content in this way, and in context, we add value to the event and offer those who were present - and indeed those were not – an intuitive way to access ”nuggets” of key information even after the event is past.  We will be inviting participants to complete a questionnaire which we will also release post event to give us feedback on whether or not they found the experience of attending recorded sessions positive and whether they or colleagues find the playback-with-comments CREW features useful among other aspects of our eventing software.

For more information please contact CREW Technical Manager Nikki Rogers. Many thanks to all involved in this pilot effort!