What does it mean to facilitate an online meeting?

The topic and practice of facilitating online meetings and webinars is cropping up all around my work and play life. People are asking a) when to use online meetings and b) how do to them – WELL! I am in the midst of preparing some resource materials, so I’d like to ask for your favorite resources. And to kick it off, here is a little three minute introduction Chahira Nouira of UN University in Bonn and I made this morning. We had tried Wetoku but the images weren’t so great, so we reverted to Skype and my Flip Camera. Keep it simple!

YouTube – What does it mean to facilitate an online meeting?.

Don’t forget, please share your best online meeting facilitation tips!

Monday Video: What digital natives want from their library

YouTube – What digital natives want from their library. I have the current pleasure of working with librarians on a project, so when I saw this link on Twitter, I thought PERFECT! Not only an amazingly clever video for a conference opener, it also reminds us  of the world we live it – full of jargon, clever people and high expectations!

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!

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.