Full Circle Associates

I’ve been home just over a week after three great weeks in Australia, which started off with a keynote and workshop at ConVerge11 in Melbourne. (You can access all the session notes here.) The keynote was at 4pm on the first, packed day and I was asked to help encourage people to come to the cocktail reception afterwards. So I took my charge as “drive them to drink!”

Keynote

My goal was to provoke some thought about how we step beyond this idea of “creating communities for learning online” and instead think about connecting for learning — across cohorts, with the outside world, with our sponsoring institutions and with ourselves. After all, we can’t simply keep joining more groups. That does not scale. When we do utilize community approaches, we also need to think about how we make them the best they can be.  So I wove in the idea of the social artist (borrowing from Wenger and Houston). I confess, I dumped a LOT on people in an hour. If they didn’t need a drink when we started, I’m sure they did when I finished!

Below are my annotated slides because, as usual, my slides make no sense on their own. First is the Slideshare deck, and below is the PDF handout which is actually easier for reading the annotations.

Every time I prepare for a keynote presentation (Title: LEFT AND RIGHT, UP AND DOWN: CONNECTING GROUPS AND NETWORKS) I sit with three big buckets to work on:

1. What IS the focus (as I have a busy, full brain that can go down ratholes in a nanosecond)
2. What is the balance of performance, sharing and engagement?
3. Who is inspiring me right now.

I wanted to share some of my answers as a way of thinking and prepping for my keynote next Thursday in Melbourne at ConVerge, and a subsequent massive set of shorter workshops on facilitating online learning in the following weeks. Thinking out loud with you really helps me. Did you know that? Thank you.

In this first post I’m going to start with the inspiration, because that’s where I feel the need this morning. I seriously don’t want to start in old PPT. I have tons of glorious images. I can DRAW glorious images. So what. Who cares. I want to MOVE people when I’m in Australia and I want to be OF VALUE. So there! Let’s talk inspiration…

Jim Groom – Occupy Education

I love Jim and he drives me crazy. In a good way. Clearly he leads with passion. He follows with conviction and he IS a performer. He blends the three buckets into a nice stew. He also alienates me a itty bit, which is good. I can’t step away. The edginess is something I often lack — authentic edginess. Not performance edginess.

I have seriously considered doing this:

Any other inspiring clips to share with me? As I scanned my YouTube favorites, clearly I have not been keeping track of great keynote presentations. I mean, look, THIS inspires me!

cc Some rights reserved by incognito2020

AK nails it!

Last week I was a virtual attendee at the annual Sloan-C conference. It was fun and educational enough to spend 3 days watching live streamed sessions, and a saturday catching up on some recorded ones. The recorded ones are not as fun since you dont have the twitter stream going :-

via Multilitteratus Incognitus: Campus vs. Online: fighting in the family.

This is what I’m ‘talkin about! And it is not just applicable to webinars but to all synchronous online interactions regardless of the tool. It applies to telephone calls. Providing and/or encouraging text based peer to peer and peer to the world interactions creates opportunities to engage those who would otherwise tune out. Does it distract? It sure can. Does it fracture engagement into smaller cohorts or with those “outside” of the virtual room? You bet. And we can use that as an asset, not a strength.

The risk? The presenter will become irrelevant. And that too may be a good thing. If the presenter cannot skillfully engage, and they become only a conveyance for content… well, maybe they should switch roles and we run a video with a chat channel. I’m only partly kidding. How often have you clicked into a webinar on one of those platforms which makes you send all your comments to a moderator, which has no participate peer to peer chat room and felt like a prisoner with your hands tied? Last night I was talking with the fab Michael Coghlan of Australia (we were talking about flexible learning, natch!) and those were the words he used. “I felt like my hands were tied.” Is that any way to have a meeting, to work together or to learn together? NO WAY, BABY! (yes, I’m ranting this morning)

There are  SO MANY ways we can use chat streams productively. Here are two sets of tips – one for the “presenter” or leader, and one for participants. This is just a starter. What are YOUR tips? COMMENT PLEASE (and feel free to SHOUT. This feels like a SHOUTING topic!)

A Few Tips for  Presenters and Webinar Leaders

• Ask great questions and have people answer in the chat room. If there is no chat room in the tool you are using, make one else where or use a hashtag and Twitter. Don’t let the technology stop you. (I did in a webinar last month and I regret it. )
• If you can’t track the chat room and present, get someone to help you to recap and weave in the chat with your work. Some people can do this while they are presenting, some need to wait until a designated Q&A time. Both are legitimate approaches but it is worth TELLING the participants what you need to best engage with them instead of feeling over stressed yourself. That does no one any good. Be honest. People will support you when you ask for their help. They will detest you if you simply ignore them!
• If the topic is NOT suitable for public sharing via Twitter, say that upfront and ask people to “keep it in the room.” Don’t assume people will automagically know this. Transparent ommunication is a great thing!
• Keep the chat transcript and or Twitter hashtag aggregation (ask me if you don’t know what this is) and look at it afterwards. If there is more to follow up with, create a blog post or other appropriate mechanism to share that follow up. (Example here) People love it when you show active listening even if it is asynchronous. They are being heard. That is part of being a #socialartist! (First link is explanation, second is Twitter hashtag)
• Frustrated that no one is “listening” and they are all chatting? After the event, review your presentation and figure out how to make it more interesting/compelling and DESIGN for participation next time. If you are just delivering content or a performance, record it. Sweet!

A Few Tips for  Participants

• Find out or ask what the practice/conventions are for chat in the event you are joining. If they don’t know what you are talking about, share some ideas. Don’t be the victim. It’s a waste of time and energy!
• If you are a fast typer, be careful not to dominate and squeeze out others. Take  a break every now and again. A hog is a hog in text or through speaking!
• Ask good questions if the presenter isn’t or is unable to. This helps engage your peers. Again, avoid victimhood!
• If Twitter/public interaction is OK and there is no hashtag, suggest a nice short one and get things going. Leadership!
• Capture and share Twitter and chat transcripts for the uninitiated. There is often a pile of gems waiting in these artifacts.
• Think the presenter could have done better? Walk in their shoes a few times, and if you are great at it, offer to give them coaching. If not, remember the power of compassion…

OK, add your ideas! Let’s liberate webinar participants from listen only confinements.

I’m home from another adventure! I’m back from Maastricht, Bonn and Lyon where I’ve been working and playing on various thingamabobbers. In Lyon, I really stepped into a new domain for me, Open Source Software (OSS) development. I was invited by the energetic and creative Stephane Ribas to present at fOSSa2011, a 2.5 day gathering of mostly French and Italian OSS developers and academics, along with a few philosophers and inventors thrown in to spice up the mix.

Conceptually, the discourse on Open Source makes a lot of sense to me. I did get lost when they started talking code. So I decided to sketch the sessions where I could understand “enough” to do a little reflection and sense making. It turns out people seemed to really appreciate the notes based on the feedback on Twitter and from people directly. After the organizers scanned the paper images, we gave each of them their own picture. I sense that this is a unique way to know you have been “heard.” It also helped me get to know people a bit easier.

My talk was a mish-mosh of ideas that relate to supporting communities of developers and related roles in the OSS space. I talked general, not OSS, but with the intent that the ideas were applicable. Slides are also below. I went out on a limb and had them start with the face co-drawing exercise from Johnnie Moore. I sense it pushed some out of their comfort zones, while others seemed to enjoy it. My goal was both to show another “face” of co-creation and collaboration, AND to break out of the traditional academic presentation mode.

As I reflected on the 2.5 days, there were a ton of amazing ideas, but it was challenging to be sitting and listening in schoolroom set up all day. Just imagine these same people using OpenSpace and what additional space for conversation would be available! Next year the fOSSa theme is “archeology” looking back at the open source software movement. I suggested they do a large graphically captured history wall. YES! I hope I can help contribute to that next year, on site or remotely. In the meantime, I’ve been given a lot to reflect on regarding the politics of OSS, the wonderful side conversations with the wonderful Miguel Cornejo, who I finally got to me F2F, and finally, the enticing possibilities of RepRap machines from Adrian Bowyer! Holiday project?

My thanks to all the organizers, hosts, speakers and presenters. I had a wonderful time, including the great wine tasting meal on Thursday. Pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/choconancy/sets/72157628002081730/

via fOSSa2011 sketchnotes.

I’m working on getting the chat – which was SUPER rich, but in the mean time, here are the “before and after” slides of our conversation for #Change11. We used the white board a lot!

It was really a stream of consciousness hour — not a presentation at all, where we played around with change (what, who), multiple-membership (the heaven and hell of many places/people to learn with and from) and the roles of “social artist” and “transversal.”

I confess full blown jet lag non-linearity. When I have the recording link, I’ll edit this post and put it in. To those present, what did you walk away with (beyond, perhaps, a headache!)

via #Change11 MOOC Session – October 31.