Earlier this week I ran a workshop on "Visioning Web2.OU Personal Learning Environments" at the OU CTSS Conference. I'd lost the original abstract, so as far I was concerned I had a clean canvas to play with, subject the content bearing some relevance to the title.
I've tried running several interactive workshops before, both in seminar/meeting rooms (as for In search of the googLE (<- that page needs updating with slides via slideshare and links via an H20 playlist) and the OU Library IT Training Suite, which is where last week's workshop was held.
The first 'interactive' workshop I ever ran in the IT Training Suite event was on social bookmarking (before the days of slideshare - though I'll dig out the presentation and get it uploaded there if I can find the machine it's archived on!). That workshop was run almost along 'traditional' lines - I put links up and got people to follow along with what I was doing, with elements of free exploration - like free-for-all pivot searching on tags and users in delicious.
This time, I thought I'd try and run the workshop so that participants behaved as I behave in a 'normal' conference session (presentation, not workshop). That is, I sit there with my laptop, following links mentioned by the presenter, looking people who are mentioned up on Amazon (and maybe adding one or two of their books to my wishlist for a further look, post presentation), googling all sorts, and pre-blogging notes about the talk.
In other words, I only give the speaker my partial attention but I give the bits of topic that are relevant, meaningful and or useful to me my whole attention.
Disrespectful to the speaker? Maybe - but it means I come away with a personal resource package based on the presentation that I can always refer back to, develop further, post to the blog (= share with others who maybe couldn't attend the session), and so on.
One thing I've found about this approach is that I can't be doing with presentation slides full of text - which is one reason why I try not to fill my slides with lots of text heavy bullet points. Keywords and links do it for me when I'm following a presentation - glanceability is the key.
My audio attention (?) is pretty much dedicated to the speaker (as well as the audience - sighs, laughs, mutterings etc.;-), but my visual attention is split between the speaker's face/body language, glances at slides, and my laptop screen.
So - at the start of the workshop, I primed the audience along the lines of: "I'm going to ramble on a theme, pop up some links on screen, mention lots of others. Feel free to chase down those links that interest you and only listen to the bits of the talk that catch your attention, ask questions whenever you like and pick me up when your googling proves something I've said is wrong."
Needless to say, the slides correspondingly only capture a part of what was covered in the session (you can check them out here: "Visioning Web 2.OU Personal Learning Environments" on slideshare):
I had intended to put together an H2O playlist, but that's still on the to do list. Certainly, I need to find a way of effectively link sharing during this sort of presentation, pushing links to people as I mention them (rather than providing them all up front) so they can follow them at the time; a link presenter, if you like (maybe like deliShow, although that requires the links to be queued up in the correct order in advance. Maybe a link jockey would be the answer (cf. a Google jockey) who pushes links out to the audience as the speaker mentions them - and maybe feeds links back to the presenter from the audience?
For the links that are mentioned in the presentation, I maybe need to flash them up in a large font for a few seconds before displaying the slide? Or have a slide design that prominently displays a relevant URL.
Did it work? Not for me to say, though I did get this comment back:
I thought it was good that you said people should feel free to explore things while you were talking. It meant that Chris and Martin felt free to type their notes into emails/blogs too [this is the post Martin was working on - and yes, I do that in other people's presentations too...], rather than just sitting staring at you. I think that format worked for the people who were there. It might have been off-putting to beginners who wanted hand-holding, but I'm sure other participants would have supplied the hand-holding if asked. Basically, I found it easier to stay focussed than I would have if you'd either expected us to just listen & watch or only look stuff up when you told us to, which is the way people usually present in that room.
Would I do a workshop in that way again? Almost definitely, though I'd try and make sure there was a link playlist available beforehand.
And did anyone Google me wrong? You betcha - I got picked up on my misquoting of William Gibson (first slide, proper...)
Posted by ajh59 at May 5, 2007 03:43 PM