Feedback on April Learntrends

[Jay Cross]

What did we learn? How can we do better? Sugestions, brickbats, etc. please

[Wael Al Saad]

I joined the last 15 min. I was very inspired and now thinking that it is possible to design mass education programs for developing countries based on Mobile learning. Any links to UN here?

[Vijeesh Shankar]

Very Informative! We might be able to increase participation from different parts of the world by publicizing the network. Lets have more of such events, may be once in a month or two.

[Michael Eury]

I was able to join a few sessions, a bit tricky timewise in Australia. However I'd be interested to know if there may be some way of accessing some of the discussions after the event, (particularly the session on personal learning spaces)?

[Jay Cross]

Suggestions from participants

1. Inject fun into the event. Nancy White jumped in to lead a round of Pecha Kucha using slides she had never seen before. The spontaneity and spirit of fun raised energy levels. Need fun stuff sprinkled throughout.

2. Staging an elaborate event is like putting on a t.v. show. You need a technology steward, a host, talent, and a producer.

3. Speakers on a common topic should get to know one another and swap ideas on their approach in advance of the session.

4. Pictures of speakers make the event more real. For Learntrends, we could have simply cut and pasted people's photos from their community profile pages.

5. One of our moderators took on the persona of a radio DJ, asking questions, announcing times, and playing music during lulls. This was great. In the wee hours of the morning, another moderator conversed easily with anyone who dropped in, the talk-show therapist.

6. We encountered numerous issues with sound. No matter how much prompting we provided, people showed up throughout without headphones, not having done an audio check, or with mediocre net connections. I want a system that's as easy as tuning in a telephone conference call.

7. We recorded the sessions directly off the web, i.e. outside of Elluminate. Hope to have them up soon.

8. Perhaps lead an exercise that requires everyone to break the audio ice by saying something. Some people fear speaking up online.

9. An active chat inside Elluminate and outside via Twitter helped keep people involved and prompted participants to ask for what they wanted.

Elluminate

1. Great to have free VOIP. While we had a few ups and downs, by and large the conferencing system worked fine.

2. People with Macs who had downloaded Safari 4 Beta could not get onto the system. A few other people had show-stopper issues we have yet to resolve.

3. Screen-sharing and video suck so much bandwidth that sound and visuals degrade.

4. We could accommodate 125+ users without trouble.

5. Kim warned us away from Adobe Connect because it assumes high bandwidth (as in corporate settings).

6. Kim and I prepared instructions for Elluminate moderators; both are online at the Learntrends.com site. Also, see role descriptions for moderators and hosts.

7. Elluminate has a profile tool but it's not easy to find.

Ongoing

1. When we post the recordings, we'll encourage people to tag the good portions ("Six minutes in, there's a great discussion of XYZ") and give their opinions of what's worth listening to and what's better forgotten.

Thank God for Scott Skibell, who managed recording. "Jay, I've got two Mac's ready to go. I'm working on getting another license so both can record then compile. That way I can alternate Mac's between sessions. This strategy allows us to record the VoIP AND Twitter. I think that's the key, recording the audio and Twitter stream concurrently."

2. Great meta-lesson from the event: the more you deviate from people's routines, the more likely you are to lose them. Ross Button brought up, describing sending feeds to people's email accounts instead of requiring them to use an RSS reader. The same applies here; we need familiar tools.

3. Skype chat proved a worthwhile back channel for planners and moderators.

4. A single document with times, presenters, roles, etc., was an invaluable planning and coordinate tool. I would update the HTML in an external editor, then dump it back into the Ning community site. (Ning does not offer WYSIWYG rich-text editing.)

Lessons

1. Some people take commitments lightly. Several presenters never showed up. Some volunteer moderators disappeared when we tried to pin down times for them to cover.

2. Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations is a mouthful. I changed branding to Learntrends.

3. Twitter got out of control. The auto-follow feature (I think) for #Learntrends opened us up to spammers.

Next time...

1. Experiment with a more geographically representative group. I thought my personal contacts, the Learntrends membership, notices on Facebook/LinkedIn/Nings, and the Tweetstream would attract flocks of people. Not so. India, Australia, and Europe were woefully under-represented.

2. We could make conversations like this a recurring event, filling in dead time with prerecorded material but always ready to shift into live mode.

3. A few contests and awards could keep interest level up.

4. Some debates could enliven the event.

5. Some short introductions to topics (a la Pecha Kucha), followed by discussion.

6. Keep the planning effort tightly focused. Taking the planning discussion to a SocialText wiki was too confusing for this group.

7. I wish we'd had a scribe documenting the conversations. Also, using MindMeister would have helped track the flow of ideas.

8. Have a social media publicist on the implementation team.

Other

Gary Woodill, though sick in bed, was an enormous help in organizing the closing three hours of sessions.

I thought up the concept of a 24-hour event (in lieu of the original 3 hours) only nine days before we went live. I hoped to catch the spirit and activism that pulled the first BarCamp together in less than a week. We didn't make it. Our community bonds are weak. Except for the planning team on the Skype Chat, people didn't get enthusiastic about the concept.

Our Twitter publicity didn't take off. Several hundred Tweets floated out. Most people preferred to use the chat in Elluminate.

Attendance? I can only hazard a guess. On Tuesday morning, we had 125 listening in at times. On Wednesday morning, we had 50-60. In between, some sessions had 30-40 people, others dwindled to one. Given the revolving door of attendance, I'd guess 250-300 people were involved at least part of the time.

[Eduardo Peirano]

Jay, great review of what happened on April Learntrends event. Audio is always a problem. I had bandwidth issues when Screen-sharing. Lightly commitment was also an issue. I LIKED VERY MUCH your concept of a 24-hour event. I really hope we are able to have another 24 hrs Event in the future. It let me and others lead our own session. My session was at 4.00GMT. There were few attendees then. I appreciated very much the feedback I received during my presentation. I can't believe it lasted one full hour. I am sorry that I didn't have much time to prepare a better presentation since it was only approved a few hours before the Event started and my preferred topics already had scheduled sessions. I wanted to help the Event by filling an open available session!! Jay you and others did an great job managing this 24 hrs event. Thank you very much!!

[Eduardo Peirano]

Jay , you wrote: "Great meta-lesson from the event: the more you deviate from people's routines, the more likely you are to lose them. Ross Button brought up, describing sending feeds to people's email accounts instead of requiring them to use an RSS reader. The same applies here; we need familiar tools."

The same applies to corporale learning. Use the tools, corporations are already using, such as email. Yes, use email to send course lessons to their inbox. As an example, during my presentation, at 4.00GMT, I talked about About U, where each online course is sent to learners via email on a daily or weekly basis.

[Jay Cross]

Exactamente, Eduardo. It was a pleasure to talk with you yesterday evening.

[Lydia Zhang]

Jay, thanks so much for your enthusiastic effort to make it a 24-hour event. Like last November, I was able to join a few sessions this time. Every time I came in I was surprised to see you still there:)

I did want to actively participate. But for me as a Chinese, every time I had an idea, I needed to translate it first and then communicate. That made me ineffective in getting all the information. So I decided to be a silent (but happy) leaner and concentrate on listening.

I’m still working on translating what I got into Chinese and hope it would benefit more colleagues here.

Love this event and wait for the next.

[Sui Fai John Mak]

Jay,
Thank you very much for this fantastic 24 hour event. I felt greatly excited to learn with you and others throughout the sessions.
I learned about the importance of collaboration, emergent technologies, emergent learning ideas and practice through the presentation and discussion.
I love both the planned and impromptu presentations and discussions, which reflect what we all value in our informal learning. This also reveals that learning is taking place in an emergent social landscape other than the formal education platform and system.
Didn't we all learn through practice and reflection via this sort of technology mediated conversation/session?
Renewed thanks to Jay.
I would love to join the next event.

[Heike Philp]

Hi,

RE: Timing

I would very much appreciate at least 15min time off between sessions.
This was a 'glued to the chair event' causing exhaution and this is why
people dropped off.

Last time you did a 2h and then 1h break concept which I thought
was great and only half a day and for a longer period of 5 days.
This was a great format I thought and very engaging because it
left time for a discussions offline. The problem then was that it was
only in the American morning hours and every day the same times.

What I could see nicely working is perhaps a 2x2h a day and then
time shifting around the 24h clock over a period of a week.

Rgds Heike

[Kathy Jeep]

I agree with Heike on needing built-in breaks. There were three sessions in a row I tried to participate in, but I know I mentally checked out at certain points. I really liked the informality of the sessions (and the de-emphasis on PowerPoint) and the impromtu discussions and fluidity of thought. I think I'm personally getting more comfortable with less structure and understanding that I'm not always going to get 100% of the discussion 100% of the time -- and that's ok. I'll run with the morsels I do get... it like being in one of those money machines where the cash is flying around and you grab what you can.

I'd like to volunteer as a moderator next go-round, so I hope my schedule will be more open for that.

[Heike Philp]

Hi,

RE: Presenters on Demand

May I suggest to create a drop-a-wish-box for people to suggest
presenters rather than presenters wishing to present and then to
invite these 'requested presenters' to join?

This way, the menu of the e-learning table will be greatly enriched
by people actually choosing what they would like to eat and
recommending whom they would like to invite and why.

How could this 'Conference on Demand' work?

Here is an example...

Heike Philp recommends to invite Prof Sugatra Mitra to this
conference because of his research in using computers on
children in India, the famous 'Hole in the Wall' projects.
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

... and then Jay would write a nice email to Prof Mitra inviting
him as an 'invited keynote'.

Rgds Heike