Sorry but I will not be blogging too much in the next few days. Reason is that I've just become a father (again) a few hours ago so I'm going to be busy

Addendum Oct, 5, 2005: Thanks to everybody for congratulations, whether blogged or emailed !

However I will be back and have plans to write on:

- Some more news about the Skype delirium that seems to take place in France right now (Skype forbidden in universities)

- The impossibility to have an Internet connection at Lille 3 University, other problems this institution obviously faces and why this is somehow more or less typical of issues faced by universities in France

- A brief history of PowerPoint (part 2)

Many thanks to Isabelle Dreveau for her great post about Speechi and its integration into interactive whiteboards. This is a short and very clear article that really describes the philosophy of the whole system. Unfortunately for english speaking readers, her post is in french...

"The University does not open Internet connexion in the classroom". This is what they told me yesterday at Lille 3 university. So I apologize for not broadcasting live the conference with Speechi Live - but we still need an Internet connexion to do that.

This is just a quick post. More on this later - I'll try to make you understand what's wrong with french universities.

Installed the Speechi Live software. Opened the accounts. Tested the mics. Verified the interactive whiteboards...

Everything looks ready for tomorrow's conference, but I feel I'm missing something...

Thanks again to Eric for inviting me at the "Blog En Nord" (Blog In North) conference tomorrow. I was recently refering to this event as a Speechi Live "Oversize me" experience.

So we will tomorrow "Speechi-cast" the whole conference live (starting at 2 PM french time) with Speechi Live.

- You can watch it live at http://www.speechi.net/live/blogennord

This will be free but by invitation only, so if you want to attend, just email blogennord@speechi.net soon enough (i.e now) to get a password.

People who registered will get a live, real-time broadcast of the PowerPoint presentation (in Flash), together with the sound of the conference AND will be able, if they have a Skype account to ask questions in real time (1).

You just need a browser with Flash plug-in to do all this !

- People who don't want to register or who don't want to watch (or who don't want to ask questions !) can just listen to the live sound flow in any MP3 player like Winamp. The sound URL is : http://216.66.69.100:8000/LIVE.MP3 (case sensitive).

The "Skype" button you will see at the bottom of your browser will let you contact a moderator, who can then decide to connect you - or not, depending on the moment and number of pending requests... Please do not be disappointed if we can't talk with everyone.

I really thought it could not get any worse than that when I heard in a conference a few weeks ago that September 11 "actually" had a positive impact on e-learning. Reason mentionned by the speaker was that large US companies refused to put their managers in planes and had to use more Web conferencing (I guess Web conferencing and e-learning are not the same thing but I did not dare asking the speaker because I had previously made a "thank you, Ben Laden, for helping developing new educational methods" comment that had chilled the audience.

I think english readers of this blog cant' have heard of Ketady so I'm posting about this because I think it's a fantastic idea.

Ketady is a "social answering engine" (I'm the only one responsible for this definition). In french, Ketady means something like "What'd u ask" and you can basically think of it as a "social" Google answers. This is a very new idea (about 2 months old) and the community is still pretty small (about 5 000 users) but I can tell you result quality is already better than Google answers, for most questions.

You have to register the first time you use Ketady and to tell a little bit about yourself (you give them a few lines profile in free format). You can then ask any question to the "system" but you also accept to receive questions from others. In fact, as soon as you register, Ketady classifies you as an "expert" (based on your profile). This classification will improve with time since Ketady also analyses all questions you ask and all answers you give and the more you play with the system, the more pertinent their analysis becomes.

So when a user asks a question, the question is automatically passed to the best rated "experts" for the question. If they decline to answer or don't answer satisfactorily, it will be passed to other experts, etc...(I simplify the approach: Ketady holds several patents about the algorithms and the related workflows).

The beauty of the concept is that it is a 100% social approach. It is free. Ketady expert rules are also defined in such a way that we are all experts about something, but we will not receive more than one or two emails a week (a little and fun price to pay for the help the system gives).

I think this is an extraordinary idea. The french article I wrote about Ketady was titled "Die Luft der freiheit weht" in reference to Stanford and Google (I really think that Ketady's concept is THAT big).

This approach has lots of implications in education. I know it is hard for english readers to test Ketady which only exists in french right now (Ketatdy's founder told me that they planned to go international in 2006). But what do you think ? Do you have ideas ?

Before creating Speechi, I have made extensive research on how and why PowerPoint was created. It is a pretty interesting story, I think.

This article will be written in english only since Skype use is now forbidden in french universities (thanks God, we do have a great national security organization !).

During the summer, I have interviewed the key people in charge of e-learning at the EDHEC business school (e-lerning is an important topic there because EDHEC has two campuses in Nice and Lille, which are 1000 km away).

I don't know if I really should thank Eric for his wonderful post annoucing that Speechi Live will be used to broadcast the "Meet the Bloggers" conferences (in Lille, on Sept 28th).

As I said to Eric, the software is still beta and we will use our development architecture for the conference, which will just NOT make it if we have too many connections or if we encounter an unplanned problem (regarding unplanned problems, I have one and only one reference).

So, we will try very hard and you know what to expect...

We could not miss that one (although I still have not read it all) since our mission is (remember) to:

"Improve education, improve education, improve, improve, improve, improve education, by all means of technology - and good sense"

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