Tag: Twitter

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.

Belated Reflections from “Journalism that Matters” PNW

Earlier this month  I attended  the Journalism that Matters Pacific Northwest gathering here in Seattle. With the theme “Re-Imagining News and Community in the Northwest,” I was given the chance to stop, listen and reflect on journalism, my community and me. A chance to look at the news ecology.

I am not a journalist. At most, this blog is simply a reporting of my thinking, my being, working and learning in the world. However, from 1981 – 1989 I worked for a news organization in a variety of roles, close to, but never as a journalist. That foray taught me a lot about broadcast journalism, both the highs and the lows. I started when broadcast journalism was still playing a central role in local civic participation. I left when it was plunging towards “news as a commodity to sell advertising.” From true dedication of broadcast time and resources to community issues, to selling public service announcements essentially as advertising with advertisers’ needs driving the decision making. It was bleak.  At that moment, my disillusionment was profound. I think in many ways I turned my back on journalism because the “business” had, in my estimation, burned both me and my community. My eyes could not see the journalism in broadcast journalism. I returned to only reading the newspaper.

At the gathering, I had the chance to turn back again and face journalism, but with a different constellation of people who are part of and interested in journalism. This was the 14th Journalism that Matters gathering, an ongoing series of conversations that grapple with journalism in an entirely changed context than I knew it in the 1980’s. Best of all, they are filled with people who remind me of the best of what I saw early in my career.

The Open Space notes from the sessions can speak best to the range and outcomes of the conversations. They ranged from free thinking brainstorming to concrete action and next steps. I’m perhaps rather distant from the journalistic steps, but I can offer my reflections. So with that long preamble, here I go.

Bev Trayner, Josien Kapma and David Wilcox, people from my network, tweeted a question to me right at the start of the conference, asking about the role of social reporting in journalism. That elicited some Tweet based questions of “what is social reporting.” So already the meaning making had begun. For those who still want to know, according to David Wilcox, social reporting is “an emerging role, set of skills and philosophy around how to mix journalism, facilitation and social media to help people develop conversations and stories for collaboration.” (See the social reporting wiki for more.)

I suspect citizen journalism is a form of social reporting. For me the question is about transparency and how one chooses to be a social reporter. Is it as someone trying to objectively cover an event? Editorialize? Synthesize? Focus on particular outputs? Some of these transgress traditional journalist  practices and perhaps even ethics. My conclusion is that social reporting sits on the continuum that includes journalism, but often moves outside of its bounds and becomes more subjective than objective. If that is what is needed, that’s useful. Ethically it suggests we should disclose our intentions and agendas as social reporters!

When I did not have enough background or experience to actively participate in conversations, I focused on …guess what… some social reporting, picking up comments that resonated for me and sent them out over Twitter. I think I disclosed that these were just snippets I appreciated. Hm, I had better go back and check! I blogged a couple of times (here and here), but I kept finding myself drawn back to the overall event Twitter stream and to the interactions to my Tweets both from my network and people outside of that network.

I wondered what a summary of those Tweets would reveal. I have captured my tweets and, more interesting to me, the responses and retweets (RTs) from others. You can find them here –> JTMTwitterSummary if you are interested in look at them. I wish I had the time and attention to analyze them, but I don’t. My quick take aways are:

  • surprise at how many people found the snippets interesting enough to respond or retweet
  • the large number of new followers I gained over that weekend — and I still wonder why they  chose to follow me instead of simply following the #jtmpnw tag. I’ll leave that musing for others.
  • My favorite tweet did get retweeted: RT @NancyWhite: Journalism can convene the conversations that help make meaning across the network. It doesn’t have to DEFINE them. #jtmpnw

Themes and Streams
Finally, there were a few themes that I connected with in the Sunday Open Space sessions around the role of games and fun in journalism, “slow news” and journalism and global health. From my perspective, both of these show us that journalism can play a very important role in a networked world that is, in many ways, different from an earlier hub and spoke role predicated on broadcasting and printing.

Games, Fun and Journalism
journalism mattersAka, “Spinach and Ice Cream,” this conversation started with some reflections about our beliefs about what news people “should” be consuming and what they “like” to consume. Wary of stereotypes, and wondering who makes these judgments, I kept quiet for a while. But I was deeply amused by the “spinach/ice cream dichotomy” offered. Hey, I like ’em both.

More seriously, it is interesting to think about game theory and the aspects of games that engage us.  Can they foster community engagement about “what matters?” There were some great tweets and the start of a conversation about this, but attention is fractured and scarce. The themes slip through my mind and my fingers and I let them go.  But there is something here…

Slow News
Michele Ferriere caught many people’s imagination with the comparison of slow news to slow food. The localness. The savoring. This one comes down to a line from the Chinook Observer’s Cate Gable: “Slow news is like slow food — it takes a community.” I wonder if networks are more likely containers for fast news, and communities for slow. I have no idea. Something to chew on….

Global Health
Sanjay Bhatt, the session convenor, asked “how do we leverage Seattle know-how for entrepreneurial solutions to global basic needs?” My response was that journalism can help us convene the conversations that help make meaning across the network. It doesn’t have to DEFINE them. So the next step might be to visualize the network of people interested in global health news and began weaving the network by raising issues, convening conversations and reporting those conversations. I tweeted out many resource URLs from this session if you are interested.

Journalism and Networks
From these musings, my key take away was that journalism has a role in network weaving. So many of the networks emerge, they aren’t built per se. They are powerful if we are aware of them and use them. We can notice them. Amplify thing in them that have value. Dampen the things that don’t work.

In community activism, issues need both internal (private) facing spaces and external facing spaces. Journalism can weave across those external faces to see patterns of civic engagement and make them visible.

Social Media in Intl. Dev: Podcast with Bill Anderson on Twitter

My first conversation with Bill Anderson on scientific research in international development was so good we kept going to record a “part 2” on the specific application of microblogging and Twitter in science.  (Check the first post for Bill’s bio.)

The Podcast

podcast-logo Bill Anderson on Twitter for Science

Resources

Science Twitterers that Bill mentioned (first name is the Twitter name):

In addition, here are a few useful tips:

The Rough Transcript

What have you noticed about scientists and science organizations using microblogging tools like Twitter?
Two things. When I was first involved with Twitter I followed my friends. Then I started to notice that some of the organizations that I work with in my NGO work with science and data were twittering. So I migrated who I followed to individuals and organization in science that give good examples about how to use something like Twitter to get information out without overwhelming people. When the Mars rover was out on Mars and operational, the people in the project set up a Twitter account and had the rover twittering. “Today I’m going to dig in the dirt. I love this job.” One of the most wonderful uses of twitter to provide information about what is happening and putting an informal face on sophisticated engineering and scientific research.

Why is it important to make science accessible and available to the public?
It makes it available to almost anyone. You can be six years old or 86. You can still wow – I’m following a robot! That’s cool.

How does that change science?
It makes it available. That’s important because without science we aren’t going to be able to get ourselves through the 21st century as a species. That’s what I believe. So second we have to make it accessible and understandable to everyone for learning or even contributing. If the general public were much more aware about how science works, what it produces, what it does, they might have better interaction with their own elected officials. That is my own personal view. I also think it is kind of fun.

Which science Twitterers are you following that you have found valuable?
We talked about open access to scientific literature in the earlier podcast. The National Academies Press is Twittering — not very frequent. They say “here is our new report about H1N1 flu” and some things that pop up from their libraries. The Columbia University Center for Digital Research in Scholarship – posts things once in a while about their research. The American Scienctist Forum – which has been a very strong advocates for open access to all research literature Twitters when new organizations implements mandates about how their research results need to be made available.

A wonderful project, the Ethnos project, is all about ICT for D – Internet Communication Technology for Development. This is an Advocacy org. They post a lot of interesting results of projects in Africa. A recent posting about broadband work in Ghana. The Public Library of Science, The Encylopedia of Life, the Conservation Bilolgy Institute in the state of Washington, the CDC has CDCEmergency which puts out reports, most recently on H1N1 virus, NASA Ames Space Center is Twittering. (We’ll share these Twitter IDs in the blog post).

Any advice for new Twitter users interested in science/science in the public interest?
I really like Twitter because it is fast and easy. You can’t ignore the fact that it has a lot of visibility. People can get connected to it very easily. For example in Facebook the American Academy for the Advancement of Science –has been on Facebook for a couple of years. They have someone in their office who named themselves as their Facebook ambassador of AAAS. I thought was fascinating. Facebook has a little bit more overhead about getting involved. Some value there, but kind of heavy weight. Whereas Twitter is lightweight.

You need two things: a website where you can publish information about what you are doing, either in in a simple blog format or whatever, then get a twitter account with a title related to your org name or mission and then send out little notes about what you are doing.

The other piece is to talk to “Follow People.” Machines aren’t Twittering, it’s people. People know people. Your experience in twitter — you spend time, you find and follow people. Howard Rheingold once mentioned that the way to manage Twitter is to look at it like a stream. A stream of information going by. Look over there, spend a little time, flip over there, and then go back to my work. I don’t try and keep up with everything that is being Tweeted. That’s a faster way to do it. Find, start following and see where that leads you. On Twitter if you pick organizations or people interested in the work you do, you will pick up information you would not have gotten from other sources.

Twitter Focus (#seascorcher)

hot in the shadeI have been following the twitter hashtag #seascorcher where all of us Seattlites are connecting, communicating and often commiserating about our record breaking heat wave.

It has been interesting to reflect on a) how much I’ve been on Twitter today and b) what I’m Tweeting about. The local issue has caused me to connect and focus locally which is quite different than my normal pattern. (You can read the recent tweets here Nancy White (NancyWhite) on Twitter).

The heat has me hiding inside in front of a fan, downstairs, with my main computer off and just my little netbook on my lap. A large ice tea has been refilled many times by my side. It is too hot to focus on some of my work, so Twitter has been both amusement and communication, but with a very different use pattern than normally. I’ve tweeted FAR more than usual as well. I’m reading tweets voraciously when I normally dip in and out and skim, skim, skim.

What I find really interesting is the shift of focus. You know that old saying, nothing pulls people together like a crisis. Our heat is doing that. People are swapping cooling tips, places to get ice cream, air conditioned public locations for cooling off, and of course, the current temperature. The news media Twitterers are at it bringing many flavors of classic and citizen journalism into the story. The local coop is tweeting cooling food ideas. Everyone is getting into the game.

Is this community building? It could be. Some connections formed this week will grow. Others stay anonymous and ephemeral – the moment enjoyed and passed on. Very network like. But it gives one slice of a geographic community.

And you know what? It is fun. I feel more connected to Seattle that I usually do, since I work with global networks. Yet even my global friends are chiming in. This is fascinating. The power of events, of something at a specific point in time that captures our attention. And imagination!

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Social Media Marketing GSP: A Tweet-book

First Set of TweetsToby Bloomberg is not the type to let the dust gather. She is always looking at things, asking “what can we do with that” and, rather than just asking, she starts trying and doing. She is a force to be reckoned with!

She is at it again with her latest experiment, Social Media Marketing GSP: A Tweet-book. She asked me to be one of her guinea pigs… um… I mean interviewees… for chapter 6 on communities and networks. Of course, I had to say yes. Here is a bit of context. My tweets are embedded. Let’s see if this makes any sense!

So what’s a Twitter-book you may be asking? It’s a book written using Twitter as platform and distribution channel. Social Media Marketing GPS #smgps is the first business book to experiment with this format.

This Twitter-book is structured as a “real” business book and includes: a foreword, introduction and chapters. Each chapter will have a 1 question interview with people knowledgeable about the topic. All posts will be hash-tagged #smgps.

Chapters and interviews will be tweeted Monday – Friday through the end of April. I invite you to join me in this experiment in a new way to write a business book. Please add your insights and learnings to the stream; they’ll be incorporated into the book. My ultimate goal is that this Twitter-book will serve as a resource about social media written by and for marketers. So explore .. have fun .. discover and don’t be afraid to try it out.

second set of tweets Now that Toby is on chapter six, she has sussed out the process a bit and suggested earlier in the week that preparation is worth it, and that trying to not get carried away with too many tweets is also useful. That asks the writer to be both succinct per post (140 characters) and overall. With the size of the question Toby asked me, that was challenging. How to be brief but substantive, eh? It is harder than it looks.

It is also interesting to try and express something that both works read forwards and backwards. Readers reading back on Twitter, get it from tail to head. Those reading the recap on the blog and eventually the “book” (whatever form that might take) get it in order. Tricky. Interesting.

As I tweeted out my 12 140 character or less contributions, a few people wondered if I a) should be writing a blog post instead (they missed the context and Toby’s intro, I suppose) b) had too much nervous energy and c) how they might contribute. I think the burst of volume might not have been appreciated by all those people following me.

Hmmmm… what do you think? final set of tweetsAre we pushing a medium too far or is this a useful, creative application? Or something all together different?

Here are a few other creative writing experiments with Twitter:

The interview for Chapter 6 is also now up here.