Though exhausting, SSAW, I thought, was a success on many levels. It was a great warm up for my upcoming residency at EGS which promises to be grueling. I met some nice and incredibly smart people. The SSAW wiki is a good place to start mining for links if you're interested in learning more about some of the work that is going on in this area.
If you're interested in the presentation Seb and I gave, which focused on the experience we've had in introducing Weblogs@UPEI and Weblogs@HollandCollege you can listen to an audio transcript here.
If you're interested in a sound-seeing tour of my brief tour of Los Angeles, you can listen to these audio notes I grabbed as I walked around the city.
As for the workshop itself, well, it will take me a while to process all the ideas we shared. For now a quick brain dump will have to do.....
The backchannel
The folks at USC have been doing a lot of research on the use of backchannels lately. A public IRC channel, basically a chat room, was lively throughout the entire weekend. During presentations our backchannel served to generate textual captions, clarifications, and tangents in a rhyzome of thoughts representing, in a way, the collective subconscious of all participants. It was also the source, at times, of some giggles. Often the text of these channels is projected on a sidewall. Justin Hall, who's been writing on the web since '94, presented his experiences using a backchannel at USC. He and danah Boyd, among others, have been writing on the topic lately. Btw....Justin hosted the party on Friday night. And danah was one of the workshop's hard-working organizers along with Sarah Lohnes and Mimi Ito.
Steno-captioning, I've learned, is a term used to refer to a type of backchannelling where audience members type what they hear. It serves to draw out the more interesting points in the presentation. It's very much like sharing your notes in real time. And it helps you to pay attention.
Justin also spent much of Sunday Google-jockeying, furiously throwing random key words heard during the presentation into google whose results were projected onto the sidewall to add a visual aspect to the discussion and to spark creative thought.
All of these are new forms, new experiments in group interactivity that cause us to think a little differently when sitting down for a presentation. At first it may seem as though these modes subvert and undermine the key messages delivered by a presenter, and they do to some extent. I don't know if I'd rush out and encourage backchannelling in my classes, necessarily. But they do make for a very vibrant, very open form of brainstorming that can turn a static, one-way presentation into an exercise in creativity. If something in the presenter's message is lost in the flurry of these techniques, something is gained in the openness and multiplicity of ideas they generate. Backchannels provide valueable feedback to presenters and they help to provoke a breadth of new insight which, if not fully absorbable at the time, can be followed up on later.
Hanging with Seb
One of the highlights of the weekend, for me, was hanging out with Seb. He has many, many good ideas that he hasn't written about online just yet....and that's saying something. But what impresses me most is his attitude. You don't hear Seb say anything negative. He is an open and inclusive guy. I think he knows that this is the only way important and complex new ideas can be shared. He truly values community. He doesn't look for credit. Rather than dwelling on problems he points out solutions and new opportunities. And he's like this by nature. That's just Seb. The Blogoshpere needs more like him.
Personal Info Cloud
I enjoyed meeting James Vander Wal, a guy with many talents, who, I learned, coined the term folksonomy. He has a lot to say about the future of the Web. I was especially intrigued by his current focus on the model of attraction. When James recognized that navigation was the wrong metaphor for approaching the Web --we shouldn't go to information, generically, information should come to us, specifically-- he set out to build a framework and he's still building. Checkout Personal Info Cloud.
More Smart People
I can't really do justice to all the smart people at SSAW, here. Check out the bio's here. I enjoyed talking with Leonard Lin who's developing campus-wide blogging tools for USC. Leonard and I have agreed to work together sharing lessons from our very similar work. Richard Cameron gave us a quick tour of CiteUlike a free service that uses folksonomies to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. The service has gained enough traction to become a serious intellectual aid. And there were more smart people....who I'll have to neglect in this brain dump in spite of their interesting work and lives.
So what did we talk about?
We talked about a lot of things. We talked a lot about blogging in the classroom, about introducing a campus-wide blogging platform, about the future of the academy in the age of smart social software, about the future of the Web and its effect on society. The backchannel, as I said, was lively throughout the weekend. And it spawned conversation in myriad directions.
A group of us have decided to work together to develop a better framework for sharing research in this area.
Overall it was an exhausting but thoroughly worthwhile weekend. The folks at the Annenburg Center went out of their way to make the weekend a success. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for your hospitality. Thank you all for sharing your work.
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