Category: events

Why chat streams are critical to live events

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AK nails it!

Last week I was a virtual attendee at the annual Sloan-C conference. It was fun and educational enough to spend 3 days watching live streamed sessions, and a saturday catching up on some recorded ones. The recorded ones are not as fun since you dont have the twitter stream going :-

via Multilitteratus Incognitus: Campus vs. Online: fighting in the family.

This is what I’m ‘talkin about! And it is not just applicable to webinars but to all synchronous online interactions regardless of the tool. It applies to telephone calls. Providing and/or encouraging text based peer to peer and peer to the world interactions creates opportunities to engage those who would otherwise tune out. Does it distract? It sure can. Does it fracture engagement into smaller cohorts or with those “outside” of the virtual room? You bet. And we can use that as an asset, not a strength.

The risk? The presenter will become irrelevant. And that too may be a good thing. If the presenter cannot skillfully engage, and they become only a conveyance for content… well, maybe they should switch roles and we run a video with a chat channel. I’m only partly kidding. How often have you clicked into a webinar on one of those platforms which makes you send all your comments to a moderator, which has no participate peer to peer chat room and felt like a prisoner with your hands tied? Last night I was talking with the fab Michael Coghlan of Australia (we were talking about flexible learning, natch!) and those were the words he used. “I felt like my hands were tied.” Is that any way to have a meeting, to work together or to learn together? NO WAY, BABY! (yes, I’m ranting this morning)

There are  SO MANY ways we can use chat streams productively. Here are two sets of tips – one for the “presenter” or leader, and one for participants. This is just a starter. What are YOUR tips? COMMENT PLEASE (and feel free to SHOUT. This feels like a SHOUTING topic!)

A Few Tips for  Presenters and Webinar Leaders

  • Ask great questions and have people answer in the chat room. If there is no chat room in the tool you are using, make one else where or use a hashtag and Twitter. Don’t let the technology stop you. (I did in a webinar last month and I regret it. )
  • If you can’t track the chat room and present, get someone to help you to recap and weave in the chat with your work. Some people can do this while they are presenting, some need to wait until a designated Q&A time. Both are legitimate approaches but it is worth TELLING the participants what you need to best engage with them instead of feeling over stressed yourself. That does no one any good. Be honest. People will support you when you ask for their help. They will detest you if you simply ignore them!
  • If the topic is NOT suitable for public sharing via Twitter, say that upfront and ask people to “keep it in the room.” Don’t assume people will automagically know this. Transparent ommunication is a great thing!
  • Keep the chat transcript and or Twitter hashtag aggregation (ask me if you don’t know what this is) and look at it afterwards. If there is more to follow up with, create a blog post or other appropriate mechanism to share that follow up. (Example here) People love it when you show active listening even if it is asynchronous. They are being heard. That is part of being a #socialartist! (First link is explanation, second is Twitter hashtag)
  • Frustrated that no one is “listening” and they are all chatting? After the event, review your presentation and figure out how to make it more interesting/compelling and DESIGN for participation next time. If you are just delivering content or a performance, record it. Sweet!

A Few Tips for  Participants

  • Find out or ask what the practice/conventions are for chat in the event you are joining. If they don’t know what you are talking about, share some ideas. Don’t be the victim. It’s a waste of time and energy!
  • If you are a fast typer, be careful not to dominate and squeeze out others. Take  a break every now and again. A hog is a hog in text or through speaking!
  • Ask good questions if the presenter isn’t or is unable to. This helps engage your peers. Again, avoid victimhood!
  • If Twitter/public interaction is OK and there is no hashtag, suggest a nice short one and get things going. Leadership!
  • Capture and share Twitter and chat transcripts for the uninitiated. There is often a pile of gems waiting in these artifacts.
  • Think the presenter could have done better? Walk in their shoes a few times, and if you are great at it, offer to give them coaching. If not, remember the power of compassion…

OK, add your ideas! Let’s liberate webinar participants from listen only confinements.

fOSSa2011, Coders and Sketchnotes

I’m home from another adventure! I’m back from Maastricht, Bonn and Lyon where I’ve been working and playing on various thingamabobbers. In Lyon, I really stepped into a new domain for me, Open Source Software (OSS) development. I was invited by the energetic and creative Stephane Ribas to present at fOSSa2011, a 2.5 day gathering of mostly French and Italian OSS developers and academics, along with a few philosophers and inventors thrown in to spice up the mix.

Conceptually, the discourse on Open Source makes a lot of sense to me. I did get lost when they started talking code. So I decided to sketch the sessions where I could understand “enough” to do a little reflection and sense making. It turns out people seemed to really appreciate the notes based on the feedback on Twitter and from people directly. After the organizers scanned the paper images, we gave each of them their own picture. I sense that this is a unique way to know you have been “heard.” It also helped me get to know people a bit easier.

My talk was a mish-mosh of ideas that relate to supporting communities of developers and related roles in the OSS space. I talked general, not OSS, but with the intent that the ideas were applicable. Slides are also below. I went out on a limb and had them start with the face co-drawing exercise from Johnnie Moore. I sense it pushed some out of their comfort zones, while others seemed to enjoy it. My goal was both to show another “face” of co-creation and collaboration, AND to break out of the traditional academic presentation mode.

As I reflected on the 2.5 days, there were a ton of amazing ideas, but it was challenging to be sitting and listening in schoolroom set up all day. Just imagine these same people using OpenSpace and what additional space for conversation would be available! Next year the fOSSa theme is “archeology” looking back at the open source software movement. I suggested they do a large graphically captured history wall. YES! I hope I can help contribute to that next year, on site or remotely. In the meantime, I’ve been given a lot to reflect on regarding the politics of OSS, the wonderful side conversations with the wonderful Miguel Cornejo, who I finally got to me F2F, and finally, the enticing possibilities of RepRap machines from Adrian Bowyer! Holiday project?

My thanks to all the organizers, hosts, speakers and presenters. I had a wonderful time, including the great wine tasting meal on Thursday. Pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/choconancy/sets/72157628002081730/

via fOSSa2011 sketchnotes.

fOSSa2011 sketchnotes

And the slides…which make little sense without the talk. Sorry.

fOSSa2011: Five Things About Online Community and Networks

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Today’s before and after #Change11 MOOC Slides

I’m working on getting the chat – which was SUPER rich, but in the mean time, here are the “before and after” slides of our conversation for #Change11. We used the white board a lot!

It was really a stream of consciousness hour — not a presentation at all, where we played around with change (what, who), multiple-membership (the heaven and hell of many places/people to learn with and from) and the roles of “social artist” and “transversal.”

I confess full blown jet lag non-linearity. When I have the recording link, I’ll edit this post and put it in. To those present, what did you walk away with (beyond, perhaps, a headache!) 🙂

#Change11 MOOC Session – October 31

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via #Change11 MOOC Session – October 31.

#Change11 My MOOC week is here…

…and I’m not really ready!

Can one every be ready for change? I don’t think it is so much ready for change, but living in a way that embraces the fact that change is already happening. Or perhaps this is self justification for my lack of preparation as the host or whatever of the Change: Education, Learning and Technology

As I wrote quite a while back in Preparing for my MOOC Contribution , I would not focus on a particular piece of writing. I’m interested in BEING in change. That act of being aware of, engaging in and reflecting on change. In this case, it is about change in education, learning and technology, but I still think I’ll frame this as about US, about practitioners, rather than on those more abstract things of “education, learning and technology.”

We are kicking things off on Monday with Dave Cormier hosting me at 9am US Pacific on the live platform (Dave, I need a URL please! EDIT: here’s the URL http://t.co/SM9BFhnA) where we’ll draw together on the whiteboard a bit and explore. Explore what? Good question. Here are the things on my mind:

  • Multiplicity of groups… how do we work creatively with multimembership? What is the role of the transversal?
  • Social artists via Etienne Wenger’s definition. (I have a little slide with that which I need to get online ASAP!) One thing I was thinking was to raise the idea of social artists, then ask people to go find stories about social artists in their learning life and share them with the double tag, #change11 and #socialartist
  • Why small things matter.

I know… these are all over the place. But face it, I’ve been all over the place lately, so lets just roll with it, right?

Then at 1pm Pacific time @giuliaforsythe is hosting a Google+ meetup.

So jump on in and join us!

Follow-up from the Leadership Learning Community Webinar

Last Monday I was a guest of the Leadership Learning Community for an short online gathering. The description was pretty loose and they expected around 50 people to show up.

Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action
We have so many online tools at our disposal to theoretically connect and activate engagement with others. But what happens when we say “we’re building an online community” but few engage? When is it worth the work and effort? What are our options? And if we build it, what are some starting points to help us work towards successful engagement?

We were using a GoToWebinar platform, which I’ll admit, I don’t like because it is really a broadcast tool, with no peer to peer interaction and all participant interaction funneled to one person (and there were four of us involved in producing the event, so lots of forwarding, etc.)  I decided to abandon a more formal presentation style to try and engage people from the start because after all, this was what the webinar was about! So we started with some polls, and then with my host, Grady McGonagill, we took questions during the presentation and Grady and I diverged into conversation as well. Consequently, I did not get through the material. So I promised to follow up with the slides, resources and answers to any outstanding questions we did not get to. Thus this blog post. Here we go…

Questions

  • Any tips or recommended resources for facilitating hybrid online/phone focus groups with smaller groups (5-15 max)? Also, any recommendations re: optimal group size for this sort of interaction? If the group is all online – you are lucky. The most challenging groups are mixed online and offline. For facilitating, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. 1) Think multi-modality. Audio alone doesn’t work well for a lot of us to stay engaged. Have a visual element – a shared Google doc or presentation, a wiki/chat room in Meetingwords.com or use the white board in a web meeting tool. Of course, this visual aspect needs to be relevant. I really like pairing chat rooms w/ audio (be it on phone, skype or whatever) where people can talk to each other without having to wait for audio “air time.” This does challenge some people who are less comfortable multitasking. You might consider methods like “the clock” both for phone and web meetings (see here and here). 2) Think 7 minute chunks. Break things up alternating content sharing with interacting, visual with audio. Remember, it is hard to pay attention when our bodies are not in the same place. 3) Group size issues are similar to those F2F. Once you get over 5 or 6 it is harder for everyone to have a chance to speak up. With some web tools, you can do break out rooms — just like F2F!
  • How do you balance “quality control” with network engagement/ participation/ responsibility? I was very intrigued by this question. It is probably helpful to figure out what we mean by quality control. I’ll take a guess and someone chime in if I get it wrong. I’m assuming this is about content — did a member give correct or useful advice. Was the data shared accurate, etc. My experience is that in communities where people care about what they are working with (the “domain”) they also care about quality and help weed out the “iffy” stuff. The key is to cultivate habits of critical thinking and useful practices to apply that thinking (which means civility!) If we are talking about “quality people” I’m assuming this means attracting people who know something about the domain. Again, if the learning matters, you will attract good people. It can feel, however, like a leap of faith. One word? LEAP!
  • We have persons in developing countries as well as in places where the internet is not an issue… this produces a big challenge to overcome to connect the majority of them. How do you engage them? How do you make them feel part of the community (normally they believe and put money, but not always participate). Again, I need to be careful in my interpretation of this question! When we work globally, we have both similarities and differences to account for. First, if there is clarity on shared domain (what the group is interested in an how it is concretely relevant to them today!) you are ahead of the game. Many global communities I’ve been involved with have very broad, generic domains. While no one could disagree with them, they were so broad everyone deprioritized their participation. A big tent may hold many people, but a big tent can also be empty. Consider focusing the domain in a way that carries relevance for people NOW. Then make the tent bigger later. Second, cultural diversity (linguistic, national, professional, gender, etc.) can be harder to detect online, but can trip us up faster. I find making these differences discuss-able little bit by little bit helps. Encourage people to share their ways of working and interacting. Compare and contrast a bit. This helps people find common ground and know when to “cut some slack” for others’ behaviors which they may not — ahem — love themselves! Finally, talk about participation — don’t assume it. Ask for small, doable things from people to build that sense of and experience of engagement. Don’t ask for TOO much — people are busy no matter where they live! Small bites are tasty! (See also the next two questions)
  • Do you have any recommendations for technology when your community is spread around the world? In my experience where bandwidth and electricity are limiting elements the most effective technology is email based technology. The use of text on mobile phones is the first technology that might unseat email. There are also community rhythm issues when you have people coming from diverse bandwidth contexts. For example, when you have a mix of folks who are “always online and reply quickly to messages AND people who are online once a week or every two weeks, you can get a lot of asymmetry in participation with those on less feeling left out and “late to the party.” If this happens to you, encourage the always-on folks to slow down. It’s good practice for us “fast fast fast” people!
  • What does diversity mean in this discussion?  How does class diversity and online access play a role?  How do multilingual networks connect and thrive?  What hosting platform handles multilingual groups best? Diversity means MANY things and some have different implications than others. Lets start with linguistic diversity. I have used platforms that have multilingual interfaces — and which one will work for you depends on what languages you need. But the user interface is just step one. That helps people get online. But the key is having a) critical mass within each linguistic group for ongoing interaction and b) “bridgers” who help summarize and translate. I’ve blogged a bit about this issue and you can read some of the articles here.
  • Can you repeat at some point how to access the wiki? I mentioned two wikis. One was my online facilitation resources wiki here. The other is the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit, a collaborative effort to capture a variety of online and offline methods.
  • CPsquare doesn’t give much on their initial website — any chance you all can give more guidance on how to connect to it? It is hard to get a sense of all the wonderful things that happen around CP2. First, it is important to know it is a membership community. You can see the blog for free, but ya gotta join, ok?  For example, there is the quarterly “Foundations of Communities of Practice” online workshop which is a deep dive into CoPs. John Smith, the community steward, told me to mention”help in real time” which is a discussion board for Q&A with fabulous people resources, the month telecon on “shadow the leader” where the community hears about the community leadership practices of one person over the arc of a year  (currently Marc Coenders on evolving his evolving business model), the R&D series on student projects where mostly PhD candidates support each other and then when drafts of work are ready, the community offers feedback. For more details, read CP2 blog for news and updates. My shorthand? CP2 is a place to engage with others who care about communities of practice!

Have other questions or thoughts? Chime in with a comment.
Slides:

Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action

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