OLD! The “chairs” technique for synchronous web gatherings

Blast from the past!

This will give you a laugh about the types of things we were doing back in the early 2000’s for synchronous online interaction. This is a conversational snippet from the now defunct CPSquare community (a community about communities of practice.) Skype allowed us global teleconferencing, but no video at the time. I love that dredging this up reminded me I learned the technique from Fernanda Ibarra! The image referred to in the conversation is below. Ah, the days of clipart. More from 2010.

Picture of a circle of cartoon clipart chairs with a name underneath some of them and instructions in the middle.
Just used this today with a group of people most of whom had not used Skype  for teleconferencing before.   I posted the slide  (modified to arrange the chairs in clock mode as you talked about in the FCoP telecon the other day) as a google presentation.  Names were ready in the center and to open I asked people to “take a seat” by moving their names — demonstrating by moving mine.  Then we used the result for the speaking order (group was small  — only 8 people)  — it worked like a charm  — Fernanda Ibarra and Nancy White — you are  geniuses! As you said in your guest appearance at FCoP earlier this week, small things do indeed make a big difference.  One person mentioned the “chair thing”  as an example of “what worked” at the end of the call when we did a round robin of what worked, what didn’t, what would you do differently — so I had the opportunity to mention that I learned about the circle of chairs from you!

best,

Ann Braun

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 4:00 PM, < Help_in_Real_Time@conversations.cpsquare.org> wrote:


Excellent Webinars Reply #10
Posted onSat Feb 07 2009 19:19:00 GMT-0100 (PST)
Nancy White-
One Small Interactive Exercise per Webinar
I learned this small trick from Fernanda Ibarra, who I think is a Foundations alumna as well, so maybe we can lure her here. She showed me the value of doing some small, easy interactive exercise at the start of a webinar which stealthily increases people’s familiarity with the tool and adds something to the meeting.
Fernanda taught me about the chairs. She puts up a slide (I’ve attached my version) at the start and asks everyone to use the text tool to put their name under a chair. This sets the sense of group/circle/conversation, acquaints people with the whiteboard tools and is an easy, non-intimidating task.
Attachment: chairs.ppt

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