Category: online interaction

Useful Books on Online Community Building

Back in January, Meredith Farkas had a great post talking about how she was planning to teach Web 2.0 with Web 2.0 tools. I love reading people’s reflecting and “thinking out loud” about their work. I learn a ton from these posts. So first, thanks, Meredith.

I appreciated that Meredith was going to facilitate learning by doing and talking with people doing community. She also  noticed the lack of useful books about books on online community building. Here is a snippet from her post and the response I left in her comments. Any other recommendations?

via Teaching Web 2.0 with Web 2.0 | Information Wants To Be Free.

I made a lot of changes to the topics covered in the class in light of how much Web 2.0 technologies have changed. I’d originally wanted to teach a class on online communities, but I couldn’t find enough good readings (or a textbook) for an entire course (now that Nancy White, et al.’s new book on Digital Habitats is out, it might be easier to do). I decided instead to focus more on online community-building in the course and am spending two weeks on it. I’m also having three guest speakers who run online communities: Frances Roehm of Skokie Net, Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, and my hubby, Adam Farkas, of ODwire. I know there are a lot of other topics I could have covered (cloud computing, mobile technologies, mashups, etc.), but I’m pretty happy with this semester’s lineup and I look forward to read my students reflections and discussions on these topics.

My Response:

Meredith, I’m looking forward to seeing your course unfold with a large group – I find the diversity of conversations in a larger group VERY stimulating, even if more work!

As to books about online communities. Your observation about the gap is astute and the gap is there for a reason. If you look at the cycles of attention around online community you have the first significant rise after the publication of Howard Rheingolds “Virtual Community: Homesteading…” (By the way, the full text is available free online, thanks to Howard)

Then we had a few more great offerings from Amy Jo Kim, Cliff Figallo and Jenny Preece. There is also an excellent edited book by Smith and Kollock “Communities in Cyberspace.” They and Preece, I think, opened the door to academic interest and study of online communities.

From this initial start there were some other books, mostly aimed at what we now know were naive expectations about early forms of online communities for business application. There was a lot of hoopla.

THEN came the dotcom crash. “Build it and they will come” was realized as a pipe dream. And the interest in online communities subsided. (And I’d say for more than economic reasons – the limitations of software, the adoption rates for going online, etc.)

With the emergence of what we now call “Web2.0″ and “social media” (which, by the way, have their roots back into the 60’s and the history is a VERY fascinating online community and network story unto itself and an example of the interplay between technology and community – we explore it a bit in the start of Digital Habitats), and the increase use of the internet, another wave of “online community” emerged. This one was more diverse.

There was the “online community” associated with buying things prompted by the longevity and success of Amazon (ratings) and eBay (reputation) and more sophisticated applications that allowed businesses to tap into the people side of retail.

There was the “online community” associated with social networks. Here is where I’d say this is not online community and that the differentiation – or more accurately, the continuum between individual, community and network — really started to emerge. I’ve been writing a lot about this continuum on my blog and in my slide decks (choconancy) if you are interested. I won’t bore you now.

This has, in my mind, not only extended the possibilities of how we interact together online for a purpose, but also diversified design and facilitation approaches – something I don’t think books are addressing. You find this juicy stuff these days in Twitter chats with the #KMers and #lrnchat and others. It is still a distributed discourse – which is both fascinating and time consuming.

If you want to see some of the other books I’ve find useful, you can find them here.

Are Status Updates Conversations?

I’ve had this link in my “drafts” box for too long, so I want to drag it out and blog it because it raises an important issue. What happens when we trivialize the concepts of “friends,” “conversation” and “community” when we apply them to things that are sort of like friends, conversation and community, but don’t quite cross the threshold. In this image from a recent Forrester blog post, they have added to their original “ladder of participation” (which I find useful, but I cringe at the linearity because I don’t think it is always sequential as shown). What they added was Tweets categorized as conversation. Take a look.

Forrester

Yes, you can have a conversation in Twitter, but I think most Twitter traffic is not conversation. It is a flow of snippets, of 140 character fragments which we can, if we wish, make sense of. We can construct a narrative, but we may not be constructing the intended narrative.

Conversation implies for me turn taking, listening and sensemaking. Status updates… not so much. What do you think?

Related: The Conversation Prism

References on Lurking

I was asked about some useful references on lurking and lurkers this week, so I thought I’d refresh  myself with a few that I like. (I’ve written about ithere on the blog quite often over the years!)

Personally, I’m of the school of thought that lurking is a form of legitimate peripheral participation, that in most cases, if everyone actively participated we’d be overwhelmed, that we often and appropriately lurk offline and that lurking is not always “take and no give,” that people do in fact take what they learn one place and often use it and contribute elsewhere. It is more generalized reciprocity.

First, is an old discussion summary from the Online Facilitation list from 2003, compiled by Chris Lang which still has value to me. You an find it here   TIPs for Facilitating Lurking

Second is another distillation of conversation, this time from CPSquare. Download file.

Of course, this has been studied in the academic community, such as this paper on why lurkers lurk, from Jenny Preece and Blair Nonnecke (pdf prepub).

Finally, some fine blog posts on lurking by friends and colleagues. (Edited to add more links March 30)

My bottom line is one’s approach to lurking is context dependent. If full participation is a stated requirement (as in a job or a course) one must find ways to facilitate and enable that participation. The larger and more open the group, the more lurking is a natural and expected behavior.

Photo Credit:

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.