This post was written and originally posted on Maha Bali’s blog, and has been adapted by me for me 🙂
Would you like a peak into the eMOOCs conference (European MOOCs) that starts today?
This is an open invitation to anyone who would be interested in joining this experiment Maha Bali and I are trying out. It’s “virtual conference correspondence” (VC) and it’s a spin-off from the pilot “virtual buddy” (VB) program (details here) we tried at #et4online in April (where I was an onsite participant and brought Maha Bali into the conference via google hangouts. We streamed the meetings with people onsite and we occasionally included other virtual participants in the meetings – you can view the full playlist and storify).
The plan for tomorrow is the following:
At 12:30 Mons time (Belgium, that’s 6:30 am EDT, 11:30am BDT), a group of people onsite will meet Maha and me for a quick hangout. The person helping us organize this is Inge DeWaard who is one of the conference organizers, and hopefully we will include both keynote speakers, Dave Cormier (who will talk about rhizo stuff) and Sian Bayne (who will talk about use of bots in #edcmooc), as well as a co-author of one of the featured conference papers, Whitney Kilgore. The conference this year is flipped, such that some conference material is already available online on Edx in advance of the conference (such as Whitney’s paper on #humanMOOC).
So my hope is that if all the logistics and tech work out, we can have a quick chat with everyone on how this new model of a flipped conference is going, and to also give other virtual people a chance to ask questions to they keynotes or just to watch them as we chat.
Google hangouts take up to 10 people, so between Rebecca (who is unsure her internet connection will be good enough, but fingers crossed!), Inge and myself, and also Aras Bozkurt who expressed interest in joining, we have 6 more spaces. Anyone welcome. Just tweet to Maha @bali_maha or respond to this post and let me know and I’ll invite the first 6 people who ask 
I hope this works out well! Thanks to Maha for setting all this up, and to Inge, Dave, Sian and Whitney for agreeing to play with us.
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