When state sector gets into UGC: Connected Live is, well, live!

The best way to follow what's happening at the Scottish Learning Festival this week might very well be through Connected Live, the new rolling education news site for Connected magazine, from Learning and Teaching Scotland. It's just gone live this morning and, I think, it's looking pretty damned good.

The content's not bad, either, since it brings together some of the best educational bloggers in the country with their take on the Scottish and global education scene, as seen through the blogs, podcasts, wikis and videos of the education community. It's well worth having a peek at a few of the posts that have already gone up on the Connected Live Blog, especially if it's your first time following the Festival in person or online.

If you would like to join us, just let me know and I can send you the details.

More video & audio podcasts than ever
Over the Learning Festival we will be hosting regular video and podcast updates on Connected Live, every hour or so at the latest. You can subscribe right now through iTunes (search for Connected Live or Learning and Teaching Scotland) so as not to miss a thing - there's some archive stuff from Marc Prensky and Peter Ford to get you started. Mark Hunter of the world famous Tartan Podcast and our student film crews will be getting under the skin of the Festival, while our LTSers will be recording more sessions than ever in full audio podcasts, forty in all. Over the coming months we'll add to that with summary interviews with over 60 speakers.

We'll also have our guest bloggers writing the occasional post to keep you up-to-date on the seminars you weren't able to make, and the editorial team will try to bring together all those posts from across the edublogosphere that help sum up the excitement of the event.

If you want your post to be caught by us, just tag it 'ScotLearnFest07' and we'll include you!

I hope you like Connected Live. The team that put it together are numerous and each brought some incredible skill to make it happen. There are plenty of firsts for a state education agency in there:

• RSS on tap.
• An aggregator of Scottish blogs, but some incredible international 'switches' to come
• Near-live blogging, podcasting and vlogging of coverage from events and policymakers
• Twittered coverage on the homepage
• Post-moderation (not pre-moderation) of user generated content
• Nascent tag clouds as navigation (this is getting developed more in the coming months)
• But above all, the concept of web first for working out what content and initiatives the new technologies and learning team will be taking forward with the Directorate in the future. No focus groups, just raw feedback from you, the participants.

I'm really looking forward now to jumping on the train through to see the team and catch up with plenty of folk from online and offline worlds this week. You'll see a different kind of blogging from me over on the Connected Live blog (get subscribed now) as well as here, on edu.blogs.com. Should be fun...

Comments

[Jon Melville]

Look forward to subscribing to the blog, will keep trying the link this morning!

[Jane Horne]

Re "more sessions than ever in full audio podcasts, forty in all". It was 47 last year and a couple of years ago more than double that were being captured at source. Fans of 'as-it-happens' coverage will get fewer seminar recordings than ever, not more. No matter, times are a changin'. I'll still download everything you can distribute, bring it on! Talking of downloads...

Re iTunes
If you'll be posting multiple items per day to a RSS feed, by default most iTunes subscribers will only get the most recent item downloaded automatically - remind people to go to their iTunes preferences and Podcasts tab and then make sure that the option "When new episodes are available:" is set to "Download all" to make sure they get all the items in the feed.