Full Circle Associates

Via Stephen comes this great description of a community celebration online! It harkens back to some stuff I wrote back in 2001 about "staying in the moment" online! In the workshop I teach on online facilitation, we talk about celebrations as part of a group's life. It is great to read of others' experience! I've included some snippets here, but click through and read his whole post if you work with online groups. There is a lot here that applies far beyond parties!

Virtual Canuck » Online End of Class Party

So, let me explain how we celebrated the end of class and the festive Christmas Season in MDE663 – a Masters of Distance Education degree course at Athabasca University.

The medium used was an audiographic webconferencing system (Elluminate.com) The fourteen participants were spread across Canada and one student was from Barbados and other from the United Arab Emirates (UAE)... The rest of us donned our party atire, filled our not virtual glasses and logged in for our usual Tuesday night class - between 5:00 and 9:00 PM at our local times.

I had set the scene by requesting that everyone bring a Holiday gift (that is a politically correct Christmas present) to share with the class. The gift could be in any medium supported by Elluminate (web tour, graphics, Powerpoint, audio or video file) Since we had been studying podcasts, patterns, copyright and next generation LMS systems, I had high expectations (and was not disappointed) in the quality nor variety of the gifts.

...Then we each took a turn at offering our present to the class. There was a musical recording of a Christmas Carol complete with a life howling dog accompaniment. A wonderful Powerpoint of how Christmas is celebrated in the Bahamas. A gift of a referral to a couple of very useful freeware utilities, a Flip Book http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/FlipbookPrinter/ of a video clip on paper. Of course we visited Santa, saw a few funny Jpegs and shared best wishes all around.

All and all a great party, and best (worst) of all, it is all recorded for posterity as an Elluminate file. I’d share the URL, but then would you really want your staff Christmas Party shared over the Net???

Categories: onlinefacilitation, community, communitiesofpractice