As I was writing my last post “The Sound of Silence”, I decided to seek a definition of “webinar” as I understand the term. Surprisingly, this proved a difficult task. Most definitions seemed to limit webinars to information conveyence, some made reference to interactivity, and a surprisingly large amount suggested that interactive features be disabled (or not enabled) to limit interruptions and maintain “control”. All this searching for a definition started to make me think… Through all our phases of selling the webinar concept to management, piloting the concept and rolling it out on a larger scale as we are now, I have had to explain what a webinar is. As the concept of webinars meets more and more with the real people in my organisation, I have tried to simplify my explanation to be comparable with already familiar concepts.
At the beginning of each of our sessions, which currently all contain several employees who are new to the technology, the webinar concept is defined as a combination of a teleconference, PowerPoint presentation, eletronic communal whiteboard and instant messenging chat, which when used together can achieve something more powerful than each individual component.
All our current sessions are designed with an introduction to the webinar tools, and participants are guided through each of the tools with practice on all annotation and expression tools. It is made clear to all participants that the session is designed with the intention of allowing them to use the tools on hand to collaborate in the webinar, and that their input in this manner is highly valued.
It is the key principle of our webinar strategy that interactivity is a critical driver of the success of a session. I believe that webinar interactivity needs to start with concept, drive design, define facilitation, and focus on participant engagement.
The focus on collaboration, communicaiton and interaction fits with my beliefs about learning using technology, best summed up in Stephen Downes’ now infamous 2005 article “e-Learning 2.0” where is it stated “Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology”.
Last night I was musing over what is, why it is so, and what could be. This isn’t something out of the ordinary for me - I do it on a regular basis really. But this particular session was about a project I have been undertaking at work lately. We are rolling out a series of interactive webinars to our blue collar workforce as part of a company restructure. This entails some serious efforts on the part of our team. Webinars are new to everyone:
our trainers - as subject matter experts (8 )
our moderators - driving the technology (5)
our learners - geographically dispersed with low digital literacy (2000+)
And everyone has been putting in a truly herculean effort to make this project the success that it is so far (224 sessions across varied subjects in 10 weeks).
Following that, I have been watching the progress of our trainers with much interest. My experience as a moderator, conversations, and observations prior to this project led to me believe that it is more difficult for a face to face trainer to cross the digital divide and train in a virtual space. In some respects the project has reinforced this idea. Why? Because trainers aren’t just learning to teach online, there are preconcevied ideas about teaching and learning that sometimes don’t translate to the online medium. It could even be said there are things which need to be unlearned.
The area my musing focussed upon was dealing with silence. I noticed in the debriefs of many of our trainers first webinars that I was commenting on the potential of the trainers to increase interaction, stating that not doing so results in a mere conveyence of information (Ellen at aLearning Strategies has some musings about why this is a bad idea). How was this potential being left unfullfilled? By asking questions and answering them themselves. By letting only one learner answer a question and not building discussion. By not allowing learners to correct each other. Basically by not taking all the opportunities available to have learners participate. Noticing that this was a pattern amongst first timers, I had to ask “why is this happening?” Two of my theories, based upon conversation and observation is as follows:
Nerves - Silence is uncomfortable. As a face to face trainer, you can supplement silence with body language, silence can be visually meaningful. As an online trainer, interaction and communication supplement body language. So faced with a short silence after asking a question the easiest way for a trainer to break the silence is to speak again. Unfortunately this leads to passive participants, who may be providing silence in a more true sense by not listening to the trainer’s efforts at “non-silence”. It is more brave to use the silence in another way that gets participants talking, when participants interact and join in the conversation, true silence is less likely, even if there are a few pauses for thought.
A shift in power - Trainers are comfortable in and used to a face to face environment. They can wield their power bestowed by their position as a trainer easily in this environment. They stand, they learners sit. The learner is subordinate to them (see Ira Shor’s Siberia). In webinars, the physicality of the trainer is not so present. In our set-up, they are listed on the screen amidst the participants - the equivalent of sitting with the learners in a certain respect. So how can a trainer reclaim their lost physical power? By talking. Lots. By answering your own questions to show that you are indeed the expect. Of course, this proves ineffectual, and once again creates true silence as learners opt to check their emails etc.
To the credit of our trainers, they have acted upon the feedback provided to them and continue to move from strength to strength - there is alot less “talking at” and alot more “talking with” going on these days. They are a credit to our organisation and an example of what good e-Learning can achieve. They have moved beyond “The Sound of Silence” Simon and Garfunkel sang in reference to our focus on ourselves and lack of communicatin and have translated their focus on the learner in the classroom to the online environment.
I am always surprised by the amount of “web 2.0 bashing” by learning and development practitioners. My most recent experience was during a class about educational theory where a guest speaker had come along to tell us about web 2.0 as applied to learning. Basically - e-Learning 2.0 as defined by Stephen Downes. What I have found to be typical and skeptical response to the presentation was asked…
“it would be great for work, but it’s no good in the real world. Too social. Too many people you don’t know talking”
I feel compelled to address this briefly as it seems to me to be a contradiction. Web 2.0 is a social tool, it is used socially, that is how it emerged, unlike the classroom, educators do not “own” this domain.
Web 2.0 is designed for collaboration and communication, which presents a conflict with the banking model of education. In a classroom, we seem to face the teacher, who plops information into us while we sit there passively, in web 2.0 environments, those “chairs” form a circle, where everyone’s input is valid and people feed from each other, not just the teacher.
We do not naturally learn by passively sitting in a classroom accepting information, we have been conditioned into this as a result of the industrial revolution because mass production meant that the kiddies needed to be out of the factory and it seems the same mass production was applied to humans and machines. Prior to this, people learned from those around them in social situations it seems. Consequently web 2.0 presents an opportunity (and a conflict) to return to social learning, where people learn by collaborating and communicating because that it how we use it already. We expect to be able to comment, contribute and collaborate using these technologies!
The conflict presents itself when people go online expecting to have information banked into their heads because the method is at odds with web 2.0’s “circle of chairs”. Power relations are different. The conflict needs to be resolved, and this means the application of social learning theories. The banking teacher is replaced with someone who is more of a guide, asking questions, setting e-Tivities to build confidence and creating the necessary cohesion, cofidence and collaboration. Gilly Salmon’s model explains this process really well.
Banking information into people’s heads using web 2.0 has been tried time and time again. It has failed time and time again, and often when it does, practitioners look to blame the technology. Web 2.0 is just an instrument we can use as educators, a good one with lots of potential, but ultimately an instrument. As such it is important to use it because there is an identified need which is fitting with sound pedagogical principles. When you look at it this way, of course using web 2.0 to bank information into people’s heads would fail - because the requirement of banking is at odds with the social requirements of web 2.0. You can try it, it might work for a very short time, but it is destined to fail because the two concepts are fundamentally incompatible.
I have recently been downloading and saving alot of research articles from secure sources where my del.icio.us account just ain’t gonna cut it and it occurred to me (with some frustration I must admit). I can only call something one name, I cannot tag it, and there are no pictures to help me identify it fast. What if I want to save something in multiple places without creating version issues on my PC?
I mean, I have a thousand stoopid articles in a list on my computer, just something, anything to help Mr Microsoft. Maybe there is something out there I don’t know about, I am by far the Microsoft expert. Is there? I’d love to hear about it. In the meantime, let me “play” online - Flickr, del.icio.us, they’re way more fun than Microsoft Office B-)
I am guilty. I have sinned using PowerPoint. I have made boring presentations. Partially out of ignorance, sometimes out of boredom. But not any more, not for a while anyway. I thought that using some picutres and sticking to the seven brief bullet points per slide was ok. Until I had a look outside my own world…
It’s not that I don’t know how to use PowerPoint. I know how to use it very well, and I create regular “pieces” at work which look nothing like the “normal” PowerPoint on a regular basis. But… when it came to actual presentations, which are rare for me… I have blindly followed “the rules” not thinking of what could be. It is embarassing to admit that while I don’t think I am guilty of “crazy long text everywhere overload”, I am very guilty of “list the key points down the screen and use a little image in a corner to illustrate”. *blush*.
While looking on slideshare last night for assignment ideas I came across a great presentation which has a brilliant quote applied to PowerPoint “Bullets don’t kill people. People kill people” Yes! How true! Don’t bore us with your words - inspire us with your ideas.
I repent my PowerPoint sins of the past. I have seen the light. Never again will you find me murdering my audience via bullet points by creating uninspring, boring presentations.
This is “thecroackers” presentation from slideshare which illustrates so many points so well.
I have to admit. I am biased. Probably by my generation, probably by what I’ve been taught, probably by my learning style. I don’t really like boring self paced “click next here and read these words” kinda stuff. I mean those robotic recorded presentations which aren’t conducive to dialogue. There’s noone to talk to. I get a bit lonely when I have to learn this way. I go a bit nuts and talk with my monitor sometimes, but it never talks back. Like the content, it doesn’t care what I’m doing
Ultimately I like interaction with others. I tend to believe that humans are social beings, and as such a level of interaction and dialogue will help learning. So if I am going to have a message “banked” into my head non-interactively, like you’re dropping a coin in there without my consent, you’ve got about one and a half minutes to do it. How did I figure this out? Well, I’d read some of the literature saying similar stuff about keeping things short a while back and gone “yeah, yeah, yeah ok”, but being the pragmatic learner that I am, it was thoroughly reinforced when I was checking out some stuff on YouTube to make some “bytes” to reinforce our systems updates. Introductions over about fifteen seconds had me frustrated, and if I hadn’t gotten the point by the ninety second mark the time was up. Harsh? Yes. Although, it did back up the literature… and I can’t be the only one out there. The literature came from somewhere afterall.
Coincidentally, while I was cruising YouTube I found a short video called “This is not e-Learning” which sums it up perfectly. Thanks Dukados1!
So please, if you’re going to give me a brain dump, do it quickly, my monitor isn’t a talkative type.
A dilemma I came across recently was that of the transactional trainer in an e-Learning 2.0 environment. Do transactional trainers fit in this landscape? My answer after being subjected to an online lecture is, well, no not really. Can a “banking” concept of learning fit in what is essentially a collaborative environment? I believe that a change of mindset is required, otherwise we are behaving as “the sage on the stage” but in an online environment, and I don’t think our learners will put up with that. We have to raise the bar. Our audiences are not captive when they are online, we need to engage our learners rather than just dumping information on them.
So how do I go about changing a transactional trainer’s mindset when hosting a webinar? I certainly don’t have a solid (or wobbly for that matter) answer, and I can’t seem to find any cheap easy tricks for now. The key, I think lies within educating the transactional trainers about social e-Learning theory, but how? I know that I am pretty attached to my personal theories about how people learn, and I would be devaluing these trainers to suggest that they hold any less conviction about their beliefs than me. If the trainers are not familiar with technology, maybe it is a matter of immersing them in the environment, and running sequential short online webinars about how to teach using technology. I think that getting them to run some five minute recorded practice sessions, which they watch back and reflect on with the group may help. This could be done several times, with their progressive efforts compared to their previous ones to show development. If they are already operating in the environment, maybe we could surreptitiously compare some “happy sheet” scores from the “presented” versus “facilitated” webinars and take discussion from there? Or if all else fails, maybe I can treat them to one really long didactic webinar about the importance of interaction with all annotation and chat functionality turned off and they can get a taste of “death by webinar”
Although I am on the cusp of what is considered Generation Y, I have never really identified myself too closely with the term. I like playing with new technology, I am often found on Facebook, but that I thought, was the limit of things… I mean, I don’t identify with alot of the other words used for Gen Y’s. I didn’t grow up around technology and couldn’t type until I left high school, I have a truly ancient mobile phone that does nothing except send and receive text messages and make and receive phone calls. But then I had an eye opening experience today that made me think… maybe I am not looking at myself closely enough…
I had to participate in a teleconference, as opposed to a webinar today. I didn’t like it. Nothing to do with my hands. Nothing to see on my screen. No screen to scribble on in the boring bits… so I put my phone on mute and checked my emails in one account, and chatted with a friend in another account. I felt I understood and participated in the teleconference too.
This prompted me to think about the way that I spend my spare time. I am known to Google everything and anything. I am often found doing 500 things on my computer all at the same time, usually instead of watching TV (TV can’t talk back, and I can only watch one thing). Although I know I can’t USE things from wikipedia on my uni assignments, I find myself looking on it to clarify difficult concepts. And why would I buy a newspaper when I can just read it online?
