Paul Riismandel

I’m very excited to organize another panel at Streaming Media West. This year its focus is on “Making Effective Online Video for Education.” This topic is near to my heart because I think the issues of quality and effectiveness too often get lost in the rush to get video onto the ‘net. It’s not snobbish to say there’s a real role and value to producing video that looks and sounds good, in addition to conveying important, useful content. The bottom line is quite concrete: if you can’t hear or see what’s going on clearly, then how are you going to understand it?

The session is in a pretty prime slot, on the first day of the conference, Tuesday Nov. 5, at 1:45 PM. It’s still not too late to register for the conference.

This will be my fourth SM conference and I’m looking forward to it. I find the SM conferences to be big enough to have a diverse lot of online media professionals, but small enough to not feel overwhelmed. The folks who attend the SM conferences are serious about online video and audio; they’re not hopping on a trend. I recommend them to anyone working in the field of online media. I especially recommend these conferences to educators because you’ll get exposed to some ideas from outside the ivory tower that are useful and innovative. Frankly, too many educational technology conferences are more faddish and insufficiently focused on the quality of experience which leads to effective instruction.