On the IFVP LinkedIn discussion group there has been a hearty thread on online graphic recording. Some of us decided we wanted to play, so I hosted an short, hour long jam today using Elluminate. We played, drew and talked both about technology and process/practice.
Without spending any time reflecting and digesting, I thought it might be fun to simply share the link to the recording (ignore Fred Lakin and I rambling on at the end) and a few of the white board captures!
Thursday I’m a guest respondent for an ODI webinar on networks in international development. My friend and colleague Simon Hearn at ODI suggested a quick check of their online meeting room my heart dropped a bit when I heard they were using GoToMeeting . While GTM tends to offer a lower price point, there is a cost. It is a very one way medium. There is no shared participant chat room. Questions go only to the moderators. Control of the visuals (which are pretty limited) are in only one moderator’s hand at any one time.
Now, does that feel right for a session on NETWORKS? I didn’t think so. So I challenged Simon for some options. (Boy, with friends like me, doing this at the last minute, who needs enemies?) I said, let’s experiment!
For example to facilitate loose connections so powerful in networks, let’s set up a parallel chat. My first choice these days is http://www.meetingwords.com – an instance of the open source Etherpad hosted by Peter Kaminski. But alas, I didn’t know if it can scale for 100 participants.
I personally like IRC but it is pretty geeky for the unintiated. We were looking for something with little or no sign in requirements and easy, peasy interface.
Of course since I can no longer keep up with the rapidly growing and changing constellation of tools (volume and a 53 year old sleep deprived brain), I turned to my network — this time using Twitter as I find it a fast, effective environment for these quick, specific questions.
Within minutes the answers started coming from @lblanken, @qadmon, @band @livlab, @bmann, and @kabissa. I had three functional options within 30 minutes and Simon and I immediately started testing some of them.
Here are the options we are now considering:
Bottom line… my network curates my tool choices.
Could I have done this without my network? No way. That’s why understanding networks, having some sort of semi-shared language to talk about them is SO important. I’m looking forward to the ODI talk on Thursday.
If you are a network junkie, check out ODI’s two new papers:
Not Everything That Connects is a Network and Mind the Network Gaps.
Oh, and thanks to my dear Twitter friends!
(Edited at 10:40 am PDT to add another link)
Months ago I got an email from Trish at PKids, an organization devoted to childhood immunization and disease prevention, asking if I’d do a webinar in the way off future of February. Well, today was the day. Last week in preparation I realized I had to get my act together. With most of my current experience in international development and my maternal/child health days nearly 15 years old, it was time to tap my network. So before I share the slides I want to send a Twitter thankyou/shout out to all the people who provided retweets, links and information. You are the best, @eekim, @stephenjdowns, @SusannahFox, @epatientdave , @garyschwitzer, @SocMediaRckStr, @RavennaBlog, @CAPublicHealth, @paularobeson, @eqpaho, @CDCgov and all you other social media health geeks!
Here are the slides and attached is a PDF file with the slide comments (WhyMeWhyOnlinePKIDSFinalwnotes) which capture the basic narrative of the presentation. If you register on the PKIDS site, you can also access the recording of the webinar.
Skype 10-Way Video Calling & Some Pink Duct Tape | Synapse3Di. The video speaks for itself – and community technology stewardship. Brava!
Campus Focus had an interview with Stephen Downes a while back (yes, this post has been sitting in the half baked column for a while). He offers some great technology stewardship advice when thinking about “traditional” learning tech such as learning management systems and collaborative tools. I could not resist sharing one and encouraging you to read the rest of the article which is TERRIFIC!
… Don’t put too many people in the same space. Say that we’re running a massive online course with 1,200 people [enrolled]. The only way to manage a course like this is to [divide up] the students so we don’t have 1,200 people trying to comment in the same space. Instead, we encourage them to use their own blogs for that. The tendency [with collaborative tools] is to try to bring everybody into a single environment in order to foster collaboration, but my preference is to foster the collaborative activity itself outside the environment, and to use the environment only for reporting and communication. There are some really superb collaborative tools out there – Google Docs for example. If you’ve got 100 people in your class and you want them to collaborate – well, move them into groups of [perhaps] eight or so. Have them collaborate and then come back to the main area…. You don’t need to do everything in the collaborative environment itself, and in fact, there are many reasons why you shouldn’t do everything [there]. People think of collaboration as lining everybody up under the same banner. But collaborations work not when there is unanimity but rather when there is diversity. Having people perform different roles that draw on their different strengths, and having each person bring what is unique to themselves to the table, then valuing that contribution and finding ways to synthesize those individual contributions – that produces a stronger, more rewarding collaboration.