This Tuesday (8th Feb), through work as the coordinator of #media2012 citizen media network, myself and 4 other students have been invited to attend Podium’s (the further and higher education unit Ofor London 2012) national conference on education and the Olympic Games. We will be providing social media coverage of the event – live blogging, photography, interviews and video documentation (basically amplifying the event, wherever possible). The conference has speakers from the London Organising Committee, BBC Olympic media team and academics from across the UK and aims to provide opportunity for discussions around how the London 2012 games can facilitate links with education institutions and potential legacies beyond game’s time.
As the conference venue doesn’t have any wifi, we will be working with 3G mobile connections and working a lot offline (which prevents us from live-streaming or working with large multimedia files) – nevertheless, it is a good opportunity to document and share information that was never intended to have a lifespan beyond the physical event.
This is also an invitation to try out potential models for the network, especially in a more ‘official’ capacity and as a team activity – as well as making links to activities in London itself. The content will be collected via the #media2012 posterous website initially (as we can’t guarantee how much ‘live’ activity we will actually have) and will be later edited down for the main site.
As coordinator, the Podium event it gives me a chance to see what platforms we need (like ‘official’ channels, guest editors, aggregating platforms etc) and how we can start working towards activities during 2012. They’ll be a lot of information in a very short period of time (just like Vancouver) so it’s a great test run in terms of how a national network might begin to start feeding together, as well as looking at what is happening at London at the time.
In additional to this, there are a number of academic events on the run up to London 2012 happening this year. Thanks to David Jarman for point out this list on the HEAcademy website.
