Remote attendance at Eduserv 2010

Election fever is well and truly over and I, for one, welcome our new con-dem overlords. No more physical attendance at conferences for me, so today I settled down to  remotely attending the Eduserv Symposium on the Mobile University.

The remote experience was better than I expected. The catering was certainly better with proper milk in my tea rather than uht and I didn’t miss the chicken satay or onion bhajis for dinner. The quality of the audio and video in the stream was very high (provided by Switch New Media I think). I could also pick and choose the sessions I wanted to watch, with Christine Skelton’s talk on ‘The role of a university computing service in an increasingly mobile world’ my favourite.

Sitting at my office desk though, it was difficult to pay attention to sessions with the constant physical and email interruptions. Being able to pause and pick up the stream would have been a big help. There’s an argument for staying at home to watch a conference like this, getting the advantage of the break from work and inspirational sessions whilst also saving the time and money of normal conference attendance.