Ellie Lovell

So it seems that a while ago I lost my blogging mojo – turns out it was just on holiday… in Austin! It’s now back in my possession (for the time being) and over the next few days, I hope to have a few SXSW related blog posts for you.

SXSW is a massive festival in Austin, Texas which includes interactive, film and music events. I was there for the interactive element (12th – 16th March) with a great gang of people from the West Midlands and have come back with a few things to say about the experience. I thought a good place to start would be a list of the sessions I attended (with links to the event details on the SXSW website)…

Friday

1. The Young and The Digital (Book Reading), S. Craig Watkins (details)
2. Content Strategy: What’s in it for You?, Margot Bloomstein (details)
   
3. DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Book Reading), Anya Kamenetz
4. Understanding Content: The Stuff We Design For, Rachel Lovinger, Karen McGrane (details)
   
5. Wave and Communication’s (R)Evolution: Better Than Being There, Jay Cuthrell, Daniel Raffel, Jared Goralnick, Casey Whitelaw (details)

Saturday

1. The Era of Crowdsourcing: Guiding Principles, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Scott Belsky (details)
2. Universities in the “Free” Era, Glenn Platt, Peg Faimon (details)
   
3. Mind Control: Psychology for the Web, Ben Scofield (details)
4. Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity, Danah Boyd (details)
5. BBC Digital Planet Live, Gareth Mitchell, Michelle Martin, Bill Thompson (details)
6. New Publishing and Web Content, Jeffrey Zedelman, Erin Kissane, Lisa Holton, Mandy Brown, Paul Ford (details)

Sunday

1. Africa 3.0: A Look at the Future of a Connected Africa (details)
2. Influence and Innovate: Transforming Media Education, Cindy Royal, Tyson Evans (details)
3. CrowdControl: Changing The Face of Media or Hype, Lila King, Pete Cashmore, Randi Zuckerberg, Joseph Kingsbury, Jason Rzepka (details)
   
4. Sunday Keynote with Valerie Casey (details)
5. Fans, Friends and Followers: Creating Your Own Cult (of the Non-Apocalyptic Variety), Scott Kirsner, Gary Hustwit (details)
   
6. Improving Social Media with Live Streaming Video, Brad Hunstable USTREAM (details)
   

Monday

1. Open Science: Create, Collaborate, Communicate, Tantek Celik, Natalie Villalobos, Ariel Waldman, Jessy Cowan-Sharp, Kirsten Sanford (details)
   
2. Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web, Tom Lillis, Joe Alterio, Andrea Grover, Joshua Glenn, Riley Crane (details)
3. Student Start-Ups: Entrepreneurship in the University, Hung Truong, Ellen Chisa, Ben Congleton, Rishi Naryan (details)
4. Gary Vaynerchuk Presentation (details)

Tuesday

1. UKTI Digital Mission Great British Breakfast
2. Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World, Simon Johnson, Clare Reddington, Nina Steiger, Duncan Speakman, Toby Barnes (details)
3. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr (Book Reading) (details)
4. Interactive Infographics, Eric Rodenbeck, Casey Caplowe, Ben Fry, Shan Carter (details)
   

(The ones in italics were the most enjoyable/relevant to me and I hope to elaborate on them in a future blog post)

It was a rather packed schedule with so many sessions to choose from for each time slot that it was often hard to narrow it down. Sometimes I would find myself sat in a presentation watching the tweets from another session and having a bit of session-envy! Fortunately much of the content should be available online for me to look up but it doesn’t compare to actually being there!

Anyway, I hope to spend a bit of time over the next couple of days hunting for links to presentations online, reflecting on some of the things I learnt, and writing a few things down including the social aspects and some general comments on SXSW and things I would do differently next time… so please visit again in a couple of days (and hope that my blogging mojo is still with me!)