As noted earlier, ArchaeoInformatics.org is making their lecture series available through streaming-video. Another group, including the Society for Applied Anthropology, University of North Texas Dept of Anthropology , University of North Texas Center for Distributed Learning , all coordinated by Jen Cardew is doing similar work. This group is busy putting up podcasts of presentations given at the 67th annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). The podcasts are going up at: http://sfaapodcasts.net/

This is a great idea for conferences, and I’ve already participated in a few meetings that make a point of podcasting presentations (along with associated powerpoints). David Wiley, a leading figure in the world of open educational resources, organizes an annual conference where the vast majority of presentations go online.

Conferences are often very busy, and one often misses papers because of schedule conflicts and concurrent sessions. Having later access to these papers would be very helpful. Also, many students can’t afford to travel to conferences, but can gain valuable information about current research (bearing mind that many results presented at conferences only make it into publication after a few years, if at all). I also think the IP (intellectual property) incentives should be remembered. It should make people more comfortable to share research and results if a public record of their contribution is made.

On the flip side, conference papers are often a bit less formal, and people sometimes want the freedom to speak “off the record”, and be a bit more provocative than they would be if their every word was archived. This raises some interesting issues. Because memory and bandwidth is getting increasingly cheap, it is more and more feasible to record absolutely everything in a conference. Although, since most people realize conference communication is less formal than peer-review publication, I doubt this kind of thing is too much of a concern.

Nevertheless, in the future, every slip of the tongue will be out there, and indexed by Google.