June 1998: email received from Lindy McKeown alerting me to an Australian College of Education event about vocational education, to be held in Brisbane in July.

The next day: phone call from Lindy when she said

"Wouldn't it be fun to webcast it?"

"What's a webcast?" I asked. You may be wondering the same thing! Webcasting is like radio or television on the Internet. Lindy McKeown has a great explanation if you'd like more detail. Go to
http://rite.ed.qut.edu.au/people/mckeown/webcasting/index.htm

Three weeks later:  after a big team effort, it happened. It worked, we learned a lot and then the team dispersed to their various normal work.

There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then! Eighteen months later, with three major events and several minor ones completed we have gained experience, knowledge and skills which have been improved with each event. 

After getting the technology to work there are important questions:
People from the original team swap notes from time to time which further strengthens the pool of knowledge and understanding - not only about the technical know how of how to make it all work but also the important questions:

Why bother?

What does it add?

What about it is unique that couldn't happen any other way?

and therefore....

What role does it have in our planning of online events for Professional Development and teaching purposes?

These are much more difficult questions to address than those that address the logistics of the technology!

VECO is an online community for coordinators of vocational education programs in Australia.

VECO's bread and butter business is professional networking and the simplest, most effective, fastest and least expensive way of doing this is through a good old fashioned email list. An email  list (voced-coord) is what we began with and that email list is still the core communication tool of VECO. This is supported and embellished by an increasingly sophisticated website. The important point here is that VECO is primarily about people.

As well as the day to day networking where help and advice are sought and given, resources shared and contacts made, the network is a vehicle for professional development - for bringing expertise to the community to inform focussed discussion and add breadth and depth to people's thinking and understanding of the issues surrounding school to work transition. To this end, an online guest progam has evolved since mid 1997.

One part of the vision for VECO is to have a national online community of school to work practitioners who are seamlessly using information and telecommunications technology in their day to day practice. Through their personal experiences they then have a different understanding of how they might incorporate ICT into their practice with students. It is here that our webcasting experiences fit in.

The webcast events held by VECO are archived on the VECO website and summarised as part of this web.  Go!

A good question! And a difficult one to answer until you've "had a go" or talked to others that have. For VECO the purposes initially were twofold:

• to bring quality face to face events to a wider audience than could attend in person
• to see what made sense to do with emerging Internet technologies because of the increasingly ubiquitous nature of the Internet