Category: events

Reflections on IOC2010 Keynote and Virtual Scribing

Today I did a kick off talk at the International Online Conference 2010 (aka #IOC2010) on the “me-we-network” continuum, pegged with the semi-provocative question, “Should we be using communities in learning.” My main point was to put on the table the value of distinguishing the types of human configurations we can use, how they vary and why we shouldn’t lump them all under the generic and oft-misunderstood term “community.” Before the experience fades from memory I wanted to jot a few reflections.

This was a fully online live event using Elluminate with the cracker jack Learningtimes team behind the scenes. Shortly before the talk they let me know that they were going to have a virtual graphic facilitator scribing, live, visible via application sharing while I talked. They didn’t know I also do graphic facilitation — and was thrilled. Here we were, jumping off the cliff of learning and experimentation again. YAY!

First, if you are interested in the talk, the slides and artifacts are here. Second, if you are interested in my reflections on our process of weaving the talk, slides and scribing, read on and scroll to the bottom of the post to see the fabulous work of Dan Porter of Scriberia and the new LearningTimes in-house Virtual Graphic Facilitator! It is really beautiful. We watched for another 45 minutes after the talk ended to watch Dan rearrange objects in the image, add captions and color. He said he was using a large touch screen monitor. Waaay cool. Debrief after the picture!

nancy-communities-ioc2010.jpg (JPEG Image, 1032×815 pixels).

Click for larger image

After the talk some of the 110 participants stayed logged in. The facilitation team first went to a break out room to debrief, but we quickly realized that a debrief with the remaining folks would be useful.  We shared a few of our reflections then had some useful feedback from a handful of participants.

During the talk, I stopped to both read the chat room more closely and look at Dan’s emerging image, as much as for me, as to give the rest of the folks a rest from my typical break-neck presentation pace. In retrospect, I would have cut about 15-20% of my content to do this reflection piece with the visuals more deliberately and give more time/space for that very reflection.  Jonathan Finkelstein noted that Elluminate, while it devolves a ton of control to the individual, actually made it harder to help people move and resize windows to either see both the slides and the application sharing.  So if they did not “get” that process quickly,  they may have felt stuck  missing one or the other. One person reported seeing only the drawing and thus was confused with some of the things I said which were meant to complement an image on my slides. (I use mostly photographs and images with just a few words.) Another felt a bit overwhelmed trying to visually process both, but also said it was interesting. (A cliff jumper like me?)

Remembering back to last month’s live integration of Twitter in a F2F presentation, I also realized that I could have scaffolded  the visual participation – again by reducing some content and using some small activity up front to help transition into the multiple visible options.

At this point Dan was wrapping up his visualization work and joined the conversation, adding a bit of the technical how-tos (responding to some participant queries). We talked about options of him chiming in, but he decided since this was a fairly new practice of scribing live online, he’d just scribe.  We talked about how cool it was to compare the electronic scribing to our offline paper/chalk/pen work. Electronically you can move objects, clone, resize and color – things that are pretty darn hard with paper!

Dan will be scribing Friday’s keynote and will again be doing it for another LearningTimes facilitated event, this time with the Smithsonian (it looks very interesting! “Problem Solving With Smithsonian Experts” online, free, in April. Check it out. ). We agreed it would be fun to reconvene and debrief again after these events to consider what we learned as presenters, scribers and participants in live online events.

People like David Sibbet and Nancy Margulies have been doing amazing work with this as well. If you are interested, do check out their work.

Finally, related to the visual part of this post is a useful video from David Sibbett which brings home some of the points about the importance of both the visual and the kinesthetic in our learning — something we need to weave into our online work. TEDxSoMa – David Sibbet – 1/22/10.

Thanks to Dan and the Learningtimes folks for walking the edge together today at IOC2010!

Evaluation in Complex Settings and Leadership

I was browsing around the site of a very interesting conference to be held in Australia, Show Me The Change, and I noticed a number of people I respect and follow were involved. No wonder – the site was engaging, inviting. If I were in Australia, I’d go. Here is a bit about the gathering:

A National Conference on ‘Evaluation of Behaviour Change’ for Sustainability

We all know that behaviour change is complex. How do we show what’s working and how do we evaluate it? You are invited to participate in Show Me The Change and explore what matters most to you. You can take part in the ongoing conversations here, on our Show Me The Change blog. We’d love to hear your ideas and your comments. If you’re a Twitter user, please use the hashtag #smtc for your posts there.

I can’t believe I’m actually enjoying wandering through a conference site. Thanks Johnnie, Viv, Bob, Anne, Andrew, Geoff, and Chris .

Then I remembered I had a blog draft noting something that Chris (as in Corrigan) had written waaaay back in September of 09. Time to dig it up.Why not mash up evaluation and leadership?  In truth, I think they have a lot to do with each other – at least participatory leadership does.

If you are interested in leadership, go take a look at the post — too much good stuff to just tease you with a quote!

Chris Corrigan » Describing participatory leadership
How do you explain participatory leadership in one sentence?

International Online Conference 2010 Sneak Peek

I’m going to help kick off the 8th annual Online Conference for Teaching and Learning with the topic,  “Should we be using communities for learning?” Now don’t worry. I have not abandoned community. I just feel we need to increase our discernment of when to USE it! Here is a sneak preview short podcast and the intro. (Dates: March 17-19, 2010.)

If you are interested in participating in this fully online event, you can find the details here. If you want a discount of $10 USD off, use this code: nwfc9 . I have one free full registration to give out to the first person who posts their reflections on the use of community in learning either here as a comment or on their blog. If you blog, drop a comment with the link here.

We are navigating a tumultuous and very interesting transition of how we think about learning. We are stepping beyond the boundaries of “course,” questioning the continuum of formal and informal learning — all in a time when technology is fundamentally changing what it means to “be together.” From this context, the idea of using the social structure of “community” for learning has come center stage. Community has shown to be valuable in some contexts. But should it be the structure? Is structuring our educational frameworks around community central, or does it deserve a different place along the continuum of individual–community–networked learning. When is community the sweet spot? When is it the trap? Let’s talk.

Check out a preview podcast with Nancy White, hosted by LearningTimes GreenRoom hosts Susan Manning and Dan Balzer.

via International Online Conference 2010 » Program.

Online Facilitation, Twitter, Backchannel and Keynotes

As promised earlier, here is my reflection of the keynote I did at the Instructional Technology Council’s annual gathering on February 22nd. The topic was “Online Facilitation: 14 years on. What have we learned and what do we need to learn.”

As usual, I decided to try something new. Why do the same old shtick – there is no learning there? So inspired by Cliff Atkinson’s book “The Back Channel,” I decided to integrate a Twitter tool into the slides and thus into the body of the talk, consciously breaking in and out of the audience. (NOTE: Update for Timo Elliot’s Twitter tools are here: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2009/10/powerpoint-twitter-tools-update-make-some-noise.html ) 

Below I’ll share first, my reflections on the session, then links to all the session artifacts.

First: Reflection

My topic was about my past experience with online facilitation and where I thought it was headed. After a moment’s inspiration in yoga class, I realized the metaphor of the practice of yoga fit – both as a thread and a fun visual tool, which of course sent me scurrying to Flickr for creative commons photos. There was a wealth!

Cliff had graciously sent me a copy of the book, but I had not read it until last week. Perfect timing. As I read about some tools Cliff had found for integrating Twitter backchannel into a talk, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to both talk about a practice, PRACTICE the practice and do something to increase the interactivity of a keynote.

Let me stop for a second and share too, that the stakes were high. The conference started with an amazing “Late Night Learning Live” biting and sharp comedy set up by Jared Stein and Marc Hugentobler. They were brilliant. Stein has a career as a deadpan comedian, with the look and timing to match. The videos they included were rip-snorting and the commentary hit the spot. For more, see Jim Groom’s review of their session.

Then Sunday morning, the “supreme artist of  North America” (did ya see, I wrote it, Jim!) “Reverend” Jim Groom lit up the room with fabulous, concreted examples of open learning at Mary Washington University, replete with volunteer choir and “Amen’s” from the crowd. (Well, that was me. I could not resist.) So the heat was on. This was no “low expectation” moment. I even skipped the drinking and partying Sunday night to prepare. 😉

The content you can view through the artifacts below, so I’ll reflect on the Twitter backchannel experiment. To prepare, I downloaded the SAP Twitter tools from Timo Elliott and installed them. And of course, tested them. Then I used Cliff’s advice about how to frame key messages in 140 characters or less so they could easily be tweeted by the audience. To focus the backchannel, I used Timo Eliott’s autotweet tool. This means I embedded a bit of code in my slide notes pages that would generate an autotweet with that text when the slide came up. I did not autotweet on everyslide, but only on the main points. You can read the auto tweet in the PDF of the slides and notes. This practice not only helped me focus (which is difficult for me. I’m a rambler) but it also turned out to be a very effective way of creating some “retweetable” moments during the talk.  More on that later.

The next morning I arrived early – always an important speaker practice. I set up the lapt top to test the backchannel pages and THEY DIDN’T WORK. Barry Dahl, who had been my support team and encouragement, and I tried to figure it out. Finally, it dawned on me. There had been a Window’s update and then an Adobe Flash update. The slides used Flash. A quick download and all was well. Ready to start.

At the beginning of the talk, I did an in room activity to identify who knew what Twitter was (just about everyone), who had an account, who had used the account for more than two weeks and who was Tweeting live. I was inspired by a conversation with busynessgirl on Sunday to use the “stand up if…” technique. Then I did a little hand raising poll to see how people felt about the concept of integrating a back channel into a face to face presentation to surface that yes, many of us have mixed feelings. This set the tone as an experiment, not simply as a performance gimmick. Finally, I offered Cliff’s suggestion of setting the tone by asking people to “Tweet unto others as you wish to be tweeted unto.” Or something like that. 😉

To  jumpstart the Twitter stream using the #ITC10 tag, I asked both those in the room and my external community to chime in. (I had also posted to my network about an hour earlier, to “prime the pump.” )

When I brought up the first slide that showed the live twitterstream, I already had some great content to show and weave into my patter.

Then I launched into the main body of the talk, with the autotweets triggered at the start of each key section of the talk. At the end of each section, I pulled up the backchannel slide and wove in a few tweets and gave stuff away. Yeah, I gave away books and chocolate… even a bottle of wine. (Yeah, Jim, that was YOUR bottle!). I like to role model reciprocity. This helped break up the talking head effect, engage folks and it sure engaged the TweeterTable – about four fabulous folks energetically tweeting and raising their hands every time there was a giveaway. Thanks CMDuke, aka Chris Duke, ajwms, aka Audrey Williams, Dr. Donagee, Howard Beattie and others. (THANKS for your energy.)

When I finished, I wasn’t quite sure how it went. My sense is that it went really well for some people and the whole talk was a bit abstract for others. And those not on Twitter could not have had the same experience. So my guess is “mixed reactions.” I rushed at the end, mostly because I had not correctly estimated how much time I’d take setting up the experience and time on the back channel slides. I’d add more time there and less content the next time I do it. I did not get to properly debrief at the end with the room. That was a miss.

I could not WAIT to see all the tweets, so I ran up to my room, took off my shoes and read back. It was fascinating to see a) how positive it was (no snarking), that there were some very interesting side conversations between those in the room and folks out in the world, and that there was a LOT of retweeting of the key messages. Cliff Atkinson’s formula is a gem.

I started to send replies to all who tweeted, then I felt like I was generating too much traffic, so I eased off. I need to figure out how to do a proper thank you to all the people who contributed to the back channel conversation and, in my mind, raised the value of the talk. There are also tweets still coming off of the recording.

All in all – I’d do it again!

Second: Presentation Artifacts

  • The slides can be seen here and on SlideShare
  • The conference recorded my talk using Mediasite. You can find it here (requires Silverlight).
  • I set up a wiki page for resources, to embed my slides etc. I try and do this regularly, but I was doubly encouraged by Cliff’s book and Beth Kanter’s ongoing work. It is nice to see others experiencing similar patterns, reinforcing the importance of taking time to do this.
  • My audio recording  itc10NancyWhiteTalk
  • I put a lot of notes into the PPT file, so I save the HistoryofOnlineFacilitationWithNotes notes pages as a PDF.

History & Future of of Online Facilitation[slideshare id=3241556&doc=historyofonlinefac2-100221204556-phpapp02]

View more presentations from Nancy White.

ITC Keynote: The History and Future of Online Facilitation

Wow, they got the video up fast, so I guess there are two Monday videos today! Here is a recording of the keynote I did a little over 90 minutes ago! The presentation wiki has slides and I’ll reflect on the Twitter backchannel experiment (and thank all the Twitterfolk who helped make it happen) later in the week.

Online Facilitation 13 Years On: What We Learned and What Do We Need to Learn?