Metamedia

On Presenting to Twitterers, or, Presenting 2.0

With great timing on the heels of my review of my experience at Northern Voice 09, several people posted links today to a wonderful summary article by Olivia Mitchell:

• How to Present While People are Twittering

This is a wonderful summary of 1) why people are creating the backchannel, 2) how this effects the presenter, and 3) how the presenter can actively incorporate this activity into the presentation.

I especially like her observation in section 2 on the loss of eye contact as the principal measure of gauging audience response.  Instead, speakers will need to measure response by the flurry of typing.

And she gives these four positive ways of thinking of the backchannel :

The typing means you’re provoking interest
Your colleagues can answer questions for you
You’ll get immediate feedback
They won’t fall asleep

The Backchannel in the Classroom

These are all items that would be of great interest in the classroom as well, especially for the monster lecture courses common in large universities.

Teachers like David Silver are using Twitter as part of their teaching, so the next step will surely be students beginning to use it as part of their learning,  whether directed by the teacher or not.

You Can Tell When Lunch Was...

Just in case you don't think this is happening, here's Miss604's Chart of Twitter Backchannel at NorthernVoice09 showing the volume of Twitter traffic during the morning and early afternoon.

iTunes U Proves Better than Going to Class ?

From NewScientist comes news about a preliminary study comparing students listening to podcasts of a course lecture to students who attended the class for the live lecture.

"The students who downloaded the podcast alone averaged a C (71 out of 100) but those who attended class averaged a D. And those who listened to the podcast and took notes did even better - their average was 77."

The thing that I find interesting is how iTunes U and podcasting are assumed here to more or less synonymous. I'm sure Apple marketing is smiling with glee at that.

Pretty ironic when you stop to consider that the technology is just the basic simplicity of an RSS feed for some audio files.

Of course, Oxford got it right by having its lectures both ways.

More Musings:

• David Wiley at OpenContent
• Stephen Downes

What's Wrong With This Picture?

What's wrong with this picture?  You don't really need to look carefully, it should be pretty obvious:

 

No, not those avatars. Those are perfectly normal in SecondLife.

Rather:  Of all the possible new and exciting ways of doing things in a virtual 3D world, we replicate the rank and file seating of the 19th century industrial classroom.

My SMART Board Commercial

I was asked recently to train a student for our Communications (ie Marketing) department in how we do our faculty Showcase videos.

So I had him film me doing a five minute introduction on how to use a SMARTboard, a tool we are belatedly introducing to our classrooms.

The instructions were to them come up with a 30 second commercial in the modern style. I helped with suggestions and even taught him the basics of GarageBand to do the music.

Here's the result.