ELT notes

Labels: skype, twitter

Posted by Claudia Ceraso at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments View blog reactions

Back Channel
The back end of the conversation is the beginning of the conversation.

Twitter so far has been the best ally to conferences, unconferences and the tearing down of walls. It has brought more interconnectedness than we had probably imagined possible the day we wrote our first blog posts.

The edublogosphere is becoming more open to different circles of contacts and except for one or two star edubloggers, they all -including this star- tend to open up to hear from a wider circle of 'friends'.

Distributed Conferences
We seem to be experimenting with being closely linked to an ever-growing and far-reaching circle of contacts. We all want to create experiences as synchronous or near synchronous as possible. We are far from the days when blogging was writing the quiet, lonely reflection and then press publish to reach others. Now the reverse is happening, valuable ideas arise when like-minded people strike up conversations which will, in turn, prokove thoughts that will be perpetuated in blogs or wikis. A kind of everlasting conference springing from a muted chat conversation at the back of the room.



Back channelling (chatcasts)
As the Twitter tool has limits for this new need, so Skype chatting came into the picture and the Chatcasts were born.

What have we learnt from the experience?
A few good things:

-There is a unique added value to the just-in-time, in-the-moment connectedness. We need more of that.

-In spite of the speedy style of a chat with 40 or more participants, it is an opportunity to share deep reflections for those who have been reading each other for a long time.

-Chatcasts, just like face-to-face conferences, are also a chance to make new connections with like-minded people, who could perhaps have met anyway -at a much slower pace- in a blog comment thread.
Perhaps not an experience to suit all learning styles, but meaningful conversation can spring from people looking over the shoulders of attendees. Streaming and archiving the chat can be as valuable as the presentation podcast itself.

The back channel comes to the fore
People will simply not stay silent at the back. They want to take over the conference and connect to have instant feedback from their wider network. When you need to reach 30 people, Skypecast is not enough... We need to simplify issues of how to:

-access (direct access vs finding the Skype user name who captains the chat)
-archive (a unique URL you can quote and link to)
-search
-share

So? What is next?
Twitter is also the starting point for on-the-fly ideas which may turn into something big...

Chris Craft writes,
Edublogosphere.com, a future centralized back channel?

My thoughts.

It is the word centralized that makes me wonder. I agree we need another venue for informal back channelling. But not a mere alternative to Twitter. I think we have to review our chatcasting experiences and try to push them to the next level.

What were the drawbacks of chatcasts?
Perhaps the number of steps and formal organisation required to make it a success:
-Someone must captain the chat. This person will be somewhat overworked.
-There is a limit to the number of people you can join in the conference mode.
-You need to have the Skype contact name; get it on time.
-A privacy issue. It is necessary for the captain to add new contacts to his Skype, which he may or may not be interested in keeping afterwords.
-How do you get to know if the next conference you cannot attend will have a back channel option of some sessions? The first announcement of a chat could come from anyone in the Twittersphere attending an event somewhere in the world. Unless it is your own presentation and you announce it in your blog ahead of time, it takes good luck to come across a tweet with an invite.

All in all a fairly formal process to get to backchannelling. I think that part of the success of these online meetings is that the enthusiasm you experience resembles a face-to-face encounter at the coffee break in a conference. Lively and mostly informal.

What do we need for future synchronous conversations?
Announcing an event
About creating a site which can be the 'centralized' place to announce events... I believe a calendar in EdubloggerWorld is a far better option. It is open to groups in other languages and we can probably profit from interchange with an 'interpreter' and captain making the back channel of a conference in another country. Backchannel could be a way to go beyond barriers of place, time and language.

Making anyone, anytime a chat Captain
But the marvel of it all -so far- is how simple it is for anyone, to put people in conference mode. It only takes a Skype account, plus Twitter. Choose a tag and you continue conversing in blogs; paste the script to a wiki and let readers (even those who missed the sync chat) start forum threads. So flexible and distributed. You do not even need a conference as a starting point. The need to chat could start with any collaborative task.

More than a need to centralize it, there is a need to make it as open as possible. That is what http://worldbridges.net./ achieves.

We also need to make it transparent. Something that tells you who is there with you, as a meebo chat or a Google doc that tells you who is editing.

Facilitating Openness
-No passwords. No sharing personal IDs unless you want to.

-Ease to integrate to other online 'events' -not just conferences- e.g. provide the archivable chat that a google docs does not yet have.

How will this communication need translate into a form and content?
That is, it would be great to separate form and content. Tool and venue. I think we need a place on the one hand and a tool on the other. That's why the word centralized leaves a bug buzzing in my head. The tool could be the centralized aspect; but conversations are, by nature, distributed.

After all, isn't the whole idea of back channelling a conference a way of shifting the conversation focus to the attendees and their blogs instead of the speaker at the conference centre?




Related Reading

Previous ELT Notes post on Chatcast

Chatcasting: A Summary. By David Jakes, August 26, 2007.

A chatcast I took part in... This is a chatcast example archived in a wiki.
Learning the Guitar at the ACSD14 Global Learners. By Darren Kuropatwa

Some reflections on that experience by the chatcast 'Captain'.
Chatcasting from a Management Perspective. By Terry Freedman, August 15, 2007.

Follow-up on this in my del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/fceblog/chatcast


Image Attribution
Jakes Rolling out the Chatcast by Shareski
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/858483919/

BLC07_1 by torres21
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torres21/864182814/

Labels: backchannelling, chatcast, Chris Craft, edubloggerworld, skype, twitter, unconferences

Posted by Claudia Ceraso at 7:22 PM | Permalink | Comments View blog reactions

Chatcast
It still does not have a proper page in the Wikipedia, but the term exists.

Just out of a chatcast or skypecast (link to come soon) of Darren Kuropatwa's presentation at BLC. These are my first thoughts on the experience of being there.

Here, there and everywhere
The only way I know of making sense out of new things lately. Plunge into technology. So much more to gain than lose.

Three vital steps to being there -technically speaking.
The connection route today was in three steps:
-Twitter
-Contact DJakes via Skype
-I am in!


First thoughts while reading the thread
This is so fast, will I be able to cope?

Pitfall
Joining the chatcast late, makes you miss part of it. You just get the updates as from the point you joined in.

Use of @name is a great organiser

About context Priorities - Communication protocol - Literacy
(Just raw notes here, maybe too raw)
I had an internal struggle to say thank you or some other emotional responses at the beginning. I repressed it. Priority was to focus on ideas flowing.

On a chatcast, be confident they understand you're not being impolite at all. You can send a thank you note/post afterwards; but better not there.

So here it goes: THANK YOU. (Sorry for shouting but, I've been repressing for about 41 minutes).

Mananging the experience
Every hit of the chat takes up space and forces the reader to look up, refocus again to catch the thought before your object of attention goes up, gone and out of sight.

When I think about designing online environments for my students this image comes to my mind:

If it feels like this, we miss the point.

Attention Management. A Literacy?
Every hit at ENTER, every keystroke, is an attempt to catch people's attention. Literacy implication: handle it with care. Master your fingers.

Priority seems to be to let readers focus on ideas and respond enlarging them. Getting ahead somewhere with the brainstorming. Collecting thoughts that will be well worth a post -or a few.

Slides
I am particularly visual. I must see. I was at Developing Expert Voices on Slideshare and felt a need to know which slide Darren was at. To get into the general idea being addressed at that moment. I imagined the slides would not have a number posted on them so I suggested posting some first words on them. Chris Lehmann helped us out.

Questions
I wonder how live audio added to the chatcast would change the speed and focus of the comments fetched. Audio from the room. Audience responding by chat only.

How many participants could the chatcast hold?

Epiphany -at least for me
All in all, I am surprised to find that speed of delivery and depth of reflections can go hand in hand in a chat environment.Definitely having read each other for a while gives the participants a sense of conversation. A certainty about which topics and questions need to be posed at conferences if they are to take us ahead.

A curiosity
I got lost. I could not tell who was there in the room listening to Darren and who were following from a distance. Not that it mattered. I guess being involved makes "a difference".

No doubt Darren's presence was energising and inspiring beyond the walls of BLC.

(Cont.)
I'd like more experiences like this in the future.

@Chris Lehmann and David Jakes-
I'm adding you to my Twitter (http://twitter.com/fceblog).

--------------
Also reflecting on the experience of this blc07 conference

A selection:
Will Richarson - Learnin' at BLC
"Good lord that’s some intense back channel chat. And it’s not so much a love for the tools as it is a love for what the tools allow us to do, to experience. It was just one pretty raw learning moment after the next, and it’s a feeling you don’t want to lose."

Ewan McIntosh Sustaining Change...
"a large number of educators don't know where their education system foundations lie. Without these foundations teachers can only flail about looking for traction for future ideas. It's vital that we look towards what we can learn and adapt to our own situations and that we get the 'top' educated and understanding why the teachers and students in the frontline want and need certain things - like Skypecasts for lessons for parents to follow lessons, too, from afar. "

Stephen Downes The Resistance to Change...
Stephen points at Doug Noon's post and Ewan's. On the role of the teacher and why buil learning communities.

21 July
Darren Kuropatwa's post on imagining the possibilites for the future of conferences.
"Open it up to the folks who aren't physically there on your twitter and skype networks and you begin to get a sense of what participating in this conference was like. As the presenter speaks pictures are taken, uploaded to flickr and shared within seconds. The speaker says something that a member of the chatcast challenges, finds the source and drops the link into the chatcast. Dean starts streaming the audio live via a skype conference call. Invite students into the chatcast, have the presenter respond to questions in the chatcast as they too participate, and .... it was intoxicating! People from the UK, Canada and the US, who weren't physically there, were there."


Attribution: Animation found in Ana María's blog

Labels: attention, blc07, chatcast, Chris Lehmann, communication, Darren Kuropatwa, David Jakes, literacy, skype

Posted by Claudia Ceraso at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments View blog reactions