An Outstanding Webinar Experience

26/2/2020

From time to time, over the years, I sign up to attend a webinar. One was called "The Non-Lecture Lecture." There was a speaker (lecturing) and a chat going on simultaneously. It involved multi-tasking reading the chat, answering the chat, listening to the speaker as he chuckled reading the comments. I lasted five minutes as a participant. But it was such a phenomenon that I watched to the end as the many participants finally clicked on an icon that gave the speaker a virtual round of applause.

As a person conditioned to watching talking heads on TV, I always found these webinars lacking personalities and production value. But today was different. I think Education Week has hit on a format that allows for REAL audience participation in REAL Time. The topic for the discussion is above. The conversation was divided up into six areas with a virtual "booth" in the virtual "lobby." There was a different question to chat about in each booth. That meant I could enter a chat room, click on the green "chat" button, read what others were saying and add my two cents where I felt I could make a contribution or add support. This allowed me to find people who were saying things that interested me.

At the end, there was a live-streamed video discussion from each editor who headed up a virtual booth. One of them actually quoted something I had written! How 'bout that! It also allows the conversations to hang around in their archives, which you can refer to later.

Of course the skills you need to do this well are reading and writing. I do that every day so participating was easy for me. I think that this format is a real innovation. It allows individuals to fully have their say in real time but also in their own time and according to their own interests.

If these coming webinar summits interest you, check out the new Education Week. It is really exciting to see a novel use of technology coming from an educational source where individual voices can be captured and heard.

Jan Adkins link

27/2/2020 10:06:09 am

I read through this several times, Vicki. I'm now sure I don't understand what went on. There was a webinar, okay. You watched a speaker discuss education or literature or how students read, but at the same time you were chatting with other webinees, while self-announced wise folk crouched in virtual booths, the webinist chuckled at comments, backchat was recorded for later analysis, and the green grass grew all around, all around.

I believe the web's FaceTime and Skype functions are immensely powerful. In some ways they dismiss distance. I've had lively, laughing conversations with a classroom of tribal kids up on the frozen shore of Hudson Bay, discussing my book Moving Heavy Things in relation to their task of hauling a dead whale across the ice. Just this week I spent an hour comforting a friend face to face after he'd found the body of our mutual pal, victim of a sudden brain aneurism. I visit classroom all over the country to talk about their adventures in seeing. I concoct outrageous lies for my grandchildren, face to face: "Adkins, you're just kidding, right?" I say hello and goodbye to old friends. A doubtless power has been given to us, to see and hear others far away. Surely, this power will enhance and affect better education.

But your webinar confuses more than comforts. Webinees were listening but also chatting (with the webinist and other participants, perhaps with insurance agents), while the virtual booths were open for whatever business they were offering. One little wonders that 5 minutes was your limit. It sounds more like a small-arms bazaar in the Afghan Hills than a lecture, even a "non lecture lecture."

It also sounds like institutionalized discourtesy, like balancing your chequebook during a church sermon or writing a love letter in a physics class. Perhaps it was a statement of being: we are the adept, our attention can't be given to just one talking head, so we chat and bank and knit and comment simultaneously, because Attention Deficit Disorder is a blessing, not a debility.

So, no thank you. I will not be giving a webinar on writing nonfiction for a ghostly audience who are otherwise involved. I will sit under a Greek tree and discuss reality, or at a big round table at Cypress & Grove Brewing Company and talk about work and achievement with fellow-writers. If they begin to balance their chequebooks, I'll leave, or suggest that they leave, proposing a destination.

But I'm an old guy, antediluvian, accustomed to mono-tasking and doing my best with what attention span I have left. You're a cooler, with-it webinee, Vicki, and you can manage all six reins of a Cumberland Coach without dropping a stitch.

Vicki Cobb

27/2/2020 10:24:19 am

Thanks for your treatise and your long, reflective comment. Actually, in this format no one was talking. Everyone was in a chat room typing comments in conversations. There were six choices, each on a different topic. I went into three of them. It was easy to scan and see where a comment would fit in. Some people had good information to share. I can also access that session in the archive and see who responded to met at a later time.

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