Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

It’s only Wednesday, yet this week I’ve had three separate conversations in three completely different contexts around moving conversations that occur in the same place and time (ie. face to face) and extending those conversations online.

Conversation One

Part of my continuing work with TV Ontario and The Agenda on the Road’s AgendaCamp is to figure out how to leverage tools such as wikis and Flip cams and YouTube and Twitter to move the passion and energy from the face to face AgendaCamps to the web so that people who weren’t at the camp can participate and people who were at the camp can continue to make real change as a result of the conversations started at the camp. This is a challenge. It take lots of effort from the folks at TVO and Mark Kuznicki to get the communities flourishing pre and post event. It also raises an interesting question around the role of TVO in this regard. As a public broadcaster they are providing a technical platform for the conversations to take place, but it’s more than technology that is required. It takes community management. Or to be more accurate, Community Management. The reason for the CAPS is that this role of community manager is an emerging discipline that takes real skill and finesse to do successfully.

Conversation Two

I went to a meeting at The StoreFront, a community space in my neighbourhood that started off as an OCAD student project but has now evolved past that and is trying to figure out what to become in order to serve the needs of the community. So there is a physical space but that can only serve so many people and only one thing can go on in the space at any given time. How to multiply the effect of a physical community space? Online, of course. And the question pops up again: How Do You Effectively Move the Conversation Online? It starts with having an infrastructure to support that movement, so The StoreFront should be putting all of their meeting notes on their site but don’t have that capability right now. In the mean time we’ll have to link to some of the artifacts from the meeting. I did some graphic recording of the conversations, even though I’m no professional. I also recorded some of the report outs using Flip cams.

Conversation Three

On Monday I met with some people from a company in Ottawa called Intersol and they do face to face facilitation for lots of government clients and private sector as well. We got together to discuss the impact of social media technology and its relation (threat?!) to the face to face market. Having spent the past five years designing and facilitating face to face events I have a good understanding of how to get people to work well together. For the past two years I’ve been looking at social media applications in the corporate/enterprise context and specifically how to use them IN CONJUNCTION with face to face collaborative methodologies. Ie. how to move the conversation online after a corporate collaborative session.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

I feel strongly that social media technology is democratizing the world because the functionality is not hard coded into the tools. It’s the users of the tools who are constantly coming up with ways to use the tools. As a result, the people who are skilled in group collaborative methodologies, facilitation and event design are becoming more valuable in a world of social media.

Face to face gatherings will always accomplish more than electronic events and there is an opportunity to create additional and lasting value by using new electronic tools to extend the conversations into the online arena. People who are schooled in human dynamics and interaction are extremely well positioned to be thought leaders in this emerging area.

Looking at the “ins” & “cons”

When designing large collaborative sessions with complex topics it is almost always the case that there is a big variance between the few people who know a lot about the topic and a few who have little to no context and everyone else falls somewhere in between. Sponsors are generally very anxious to do a lot of “education” around the project so that everyone gets up to speed. Usually this results in a desire to do a 3 hour PowerPoint presentation. This makes me cringe. (I don’t understand how the same people who complain about sitting through 3 hour presentations end up with a desire to present one.) I try to explain that people don’t learn well this way and the information will not stick. 

I started reading a book recently that has really helped me hammer my argument home. Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams by Mitchel Resnick of MIT talks about the difference between instructional learning and constructional learning. He argues that by telling people what you think they need to know, the results are mediocre at best. By having people create something on their own (or with small groups), the concepts are much more likely to stick. It’s a learn-by-doing approach.

With the type of work that I’m in, this concept wasn’t new to me, but the fact that I can now summarize the concept in a framework that clients really seem to get, was a valuable insight for me. I think most people know this as well, but with a lack of a better tool than PowerPoint to use for “education”, it seems to be the default. Suggesting the “instructional/constructional” framework to clients seems to introduce the contrast between socratic methods and constructional methods. They suddenly see “the other side”. By giving the other side a name, it’s easier to convince them of the benefits of giving it a try. Like the old saying goes, “A fish doesn’t understand water until it experiences air.”

I’m curious to know if anyone else has had this type of experience; where you don’t necessarily learn a new concept, but learn a new way to express it that seems to have a lot of resonance. Please comment!

Looking at the “ins” & “cons”

When designing large collaborative sessions with complex topics it is almost always the case that there is a big variance between the few people who know a lot about the topic and a few who have little to no context and everyone else falls somewhere in between. Sponsors are generally very anxious to do a lot of “education” around the project so that everyone gets up to speed. Usually this results in a desire to do a 3 hour PowerPoint presentation. This makes me cringe. (I don’t understand how the same people who complain about sitting through 3 hour presentations end up with a desire to present one.) I try to explain that people don’t learn well this way and the information will not stick. 

I started reading a book recently that has really helped me hammer my argument home. Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams by Mitchel Resnick of MIT talks about the difference between instructional learning and constructional learning. He argues that by telling people what you think they need to know, the results are mediocre at best. By having people create something on their own (or with small groups), the concepts are much more likely to stick. It’s a learn-by-doing approach.

With the type of work that I’m in, this concept wasn’t new to me, but the fact that I can now summarize the concept in a framework that clients really seem to get, was a valuable insight for me. I think most people know this as well, but with a lack of a better tool than PowerPoint to use for “education”, it seems to be the default. Suggesting the “instructional/constructional” framework to clients seems to introduce the contrast between socratic methods and constructional methods. They suddenly see “the other side”. By giving the other side a name, it’s easier to convince them of the benefits of giving it a try. Like the old saying goes, “A fish doesn’t understand water until it experiences air.”

I’m curious to know if anyone else has had this type of experience; where you don’t necessarily learn a new concept, but learn a new way to express it that seems to have a lot of resonance. Please comment!