Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

Reflections on the Social Media Lab Workshop

Packard socialmedia-lab-day 1-module 1

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As part of my work as Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation this year, I have been leading some peer trainings with grantees.   Over the years, I have developed and refined one-day or half-day workshops on social media strategy and tactics for nonprofits.   The curriculum and instructional design included "Principles of Effective Social Media for Nonprofits" and a version of the social media game created with David Wilcox.

Last week, we launched the first session of the "Social Media Lab," a social media peer group training with a small group of grantees from the Children, Families, Communities Program.  I was incredibly lucky to have a fantastic group of participants, all passionate about their work, very knowledgeable, and excited about integrating social media into their work.  I also was honored to work side-by-side with esteemed colleagues Shiree Teng, Cheryl Contee, Ashely Boyd, and Dan Cohen.

Here's some reflections:

Thoughtful, Intentional Experiments  

Thoughtful experimentation is setting up a low-risk experiment with metrics to figure out what is and isn't working is a social media best practice.  If we can be more intentional and disciplined in our experimentation,  that's how we gain insights about effective social media use.  It prevents us from falling prety to shiny objective syndrome.   

It is also a good technique to explore the possibilities of new tools and techniques before investing more time and energy in something that isn't right for our organizations. The add-on to my previous workshops were three "experiment in a box" modules which included Listening, Twitter, and Facebook Fan Pages.  The idea is that participants would learn some of the best practices for these social media tactics and then design and implement an experiment and share their results with one another.

There is one problem with this design:  Many of us  find experimenting difficult. Experiments require short-term losses for long-term gains. With limited time and resources, we are often hesitant to make that trade-off. It seems more direct to pay an expert to tell us what to do, not get a checklist for an experiment.  As a culture, we value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action faster, while asking questions makes us think.  That's hard work, but worth it because good questions and gathering evidence usually guides us to better results. 

 
Gift of Time: Real Time Learning

The problem with one-shot trainings is that you offer a lot of content and information, people get excited, and then they go back to the day-to-day reality of their busy work lives.   Where do you get the time to put some of what you've learned into practice?  And, when do you get the time to put your hands on the keyboard, shoulder to shoulder with a peer?

We included a big chunk of time for participants to work on their experiments while they were in the room.  This is the gift of time.  After each participant selected an experiment, we grouped them together and had them work together on setting it up.  I did floating consults.  This required setting up online curriculum that could step folks through set up and aid their planning and implementation.  I created these for Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, and Listening. 

A New Definition of An Expert:  Your Network

I think this is particularly important to emphasize if you want to nurture any peer learning, but especially around technology skills.   I modeled that I don't know everything.  I didn't have the courage to do that when I was younger, but now I understand the power of knowing what you don't know.   I love not knowing because it encourages me to reach out to my network and find the answer.  I feel strongly that the new definition of a social media expert is someone who has a smart network.   

For example, during the lab session, we got a terrific question about bilingual Fan Pages on Facebook.  I didn't have direct experience to answer it, but I remembered that my colleague, Manny Hernandez, had extensive experience in social media and bilingual approaches did.  So, I demonstrated how to tag a person in a wall post and posted the question:

Manny Hernadez: Should an organization that serves both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking audience (and some only speak one language) have two different Fan Pages in the native language? What are your thoughts? How do you do it?

My tag or shout out also appeared on Manny's wall and it didn't take him long to reply with a link to his post about strategies for bilingual fan pages.  But even better, this question posted on my Fan Page wall generated 14 insightful comments with useful advice, including one from the Facebook developer who worked on some Facebook translation tools!

The short answer: One Fan Page with multiple languages using Facebook Targeting tools. 

Over the Shoulder Learning on Steroids:  Social Learning

Ten years ago, before my son Harry arrived, I volunteered as a mentor for the Computer Club House in Boston.  I wanted to get used to being around kids and what better way to do it than volunteer for a computer after school program.  One thing I immediately noticed, is how the kids huddled around together at the computer screens and quickly shared what they knew with each other or how different discoveries quickly travelled from one kid to the other.  There was a lot of what Nancy White calls "Over the Shoulder Learning." 

We can put shoulder-to-shoulder learning on steriods by integrating the use of social media to support learning.   If two minds are better than one, what about 100?    The wiki and our hashtag helps bring in other people into our learning and enrich it.

Learning Together Over Time

As participants go off and implement their experiments, they will not go alone.  We'll have check-in conference calls as well as use the wiki and hashtag to provide just-in-time learning.  The peer learning will culminate in having each participant present what they learned from their experiment.

Joyful Funerals

One of the participants was Ashley Boyd from Momsrising who has a significant amount of expertise as an early adopter of social media and genersously shared a lot of what they've learned.   Ashely shared a mini case study about their Pacifier Campaign.

Ashley shared a brilliant idea and technique avoid the stigma from failure.  She calls it "joyful funeral" -- that you quickly say this didn't work, reflect on why, and move on.  That way, on the front end, you acknowledge that since you're experimenting not everything is going to work perfectly - and that there is value in learning from those tactics that didn't work!

I anticipate that we'll probably have some joyful funerals as move through this process, including a few of my own.  I hope that we can take the flop out of failure and harness the learning.

Some things I might do differently next time around:

Making the Link To Smart Objective/Audience Identification:  

I used the social media game as a peer assist exercise for the first time.  In all previous versions of this game, I used simulations (a fictional example of an organization or situation that had a smart objective and audience already defined).   Simulations work better because participants can focus on applying the social media principles and picking tools than on defining an objective and identifying an audience. 

Next time, I will use simulations based on participants or if budget and time permits, include one-on-one coaching with participants prior to the first session.   While participants do complete an assessment form, I think participants might benefit from some one-on-one coaching.  It would also be great to have a bank of examples that show an organization's SMART objective, audience identification, and social media strategy.

Social Media Game

I've been using the game now for almost four years in many different versions and reiterations.  Many people have also remixed it.  When I use it with a large group, I do a fair amount of social engineering to ensure there is the right mix of technical experience, communications experience, and meeting facilitators.    Mostly that is done in the room.  I think this is still important for even a smaller group.

I also remixed the game recently to incorporate some of the latest tools such as mobile and location-based social networks.  And, as such, the game was a little bit more advanced than it needed to be.   And while this might have caused some confusion or even stress, I think it is good to expose people to the tools that the early adopters are playing with.  Just so they know the basic concept.

Over the weekend, on the heels of this session, I attended a "Playshop" by game designer Nicole Lazzaro.  I learned about the four keys of fun in game design as well as the role emotion plays in engaging people.  My next task is to begin to integrate this thinking into the game as well as the overall instructional design.  Stay tuned for that!

Growing My Instructional Chops

I've been delivering technology trainings as a one-woman band since 1994 when I facilitated workshops in how to use email or create web pages.   I've worked with a team to do my social media module, but I've never lead a team of training.   I'm learning how to scale when you collaborate with other trainers and how much you need plan or create formal lesson plans. 

Reflections from SexTech Conference

On Saturday, I was delighted to have an opportunity to attend and speak at the SexTech 2010 Conference. If you are wondering what Sextech is, it explores research, policy, education, implementation, and evaluation of public health programs that use new technologies to enhance sexual health of young people.  The conference participants are a mix of people from nonprofits, schools, policy centers, researchers, universities, government, and young people.   I had heard about the conference last year and really wanted to attend.

justgoodtv on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

I participated in a morning keynote with Marc Blinder, Bobby Jones, and Ryan Wilson.  Geoff Livingston, my business partner at Zoetica,  moderated the session which was called "Social Media Rockstars: Widgets, Apps, Contests, and More.  Marc kicked off the presentations sharing some thoughts about best practices for social media infused campaigns,  I talked about effective social media for nonprofits,  Bobby Jones gave a fantastic presentation talking about generations and young people, and Ryan Wilson shared some thoughts about prize Philanthropy. 

Sex::Tech 2010 Presentation

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I was really excited to finally meet Ryan Turner who I have known virtually since 1995, but had never met face-to-face.

I also had the opportunity to finally meet Andre Blackman who I met online while researching a talk on nonprofits, social media, and health care. Andre has a deep knowledge of this space and pointed me to many great examples.

Andrew Blackman was co-presenting with Leslie Ann Bradshaw, JESS3, in a session called "New Media Strategies for Engagement.  Their presentations rocked and I've included them below.

New Media Strategies for Public Health

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How Social Media Might Be Able to Impact the Sex Education Policy Debate

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A couple of reflections. It is always fun to do a panel when the majority of the audience is Gen Y and Gen X - and they are using tools like live streaming and Twitter.   The back channel during the panel was fabulous.  And, I knew this audience pretty well from having worked with organizations and networks that focus on sexual and reproductive health. 

I've been trying to internalize some of the tips and techniques that I have been learning from reading Cliff Atkinson's book on the back channel and teaching trainers.  One technique is to plan what you're going to say as a series of Tweets.  In order to do this, I decided not to use slides and so I could engage more with people in the room.

The other thing I've been practicing lately is not scripting out word for word what I am going to say, but be a little bit more improvisatory.   I read about how Larry David, creator of the show Curb Your Enthusiasm, creates the show.   The scripts aren't scripts, but outlines.  The actors improvise their lines.   I think this is a more engaging way to speak, although to do it well it takes practice and you have to really listen to the audience and adjust.   Having a lively back channel helps you do that.

Taking First Steps With Social Media: California Child Care Resource & Referral Network

Today, I had the pleasure of doing a mini-workshop at the Director's Institute  for the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network in Sacramento.   My co-presenter was the talented Bryce Skolfield,  Director of Communications and Public Policy at the Children's Council of San Francisco.  Together we were able to share a combination of strategy and tactics.

A few insights to share:

I always start with an opportunity to learn a little bit about the audience.   I started with a variation of of the human spectra gram, a technique I learned from colleague Allen Gunn from Aspiration.  Colleague Kaliya Hamlin has this description.    I do agree/disagree to statements like "Social media is a waste of time" or I do a spectra gram based on personal comfort level and whether or not they feel social media is valuable for their agency.   I select what I do based on an online pre-survey. 

For this group, I felt it was important to ask about personal comfort/experience and whether or not they felt social media had any value for their agency.  We had an interesting discussion between those who had comfort and those who did not.   Since the morning keynote was a session on nonprofit leadership by two of the co-authors of Working Across Generations, Frances Kunreuther and Helen Kim, while they were lined up, I did a quick poll by generation.

Not surprising,  generations somewhat correlated with social media experience/comfort level with one exception.   A veterans in the room were in the middle because "we have grandchildren who have helped us understand Facebook."  We also had a conversation about - regardless of their personal comfort level, did they think social media was important for their agency to embrace.   The group, for the most part, was curious.

Next I covered some points about how social media might be valuable to an agency whose mission is referral and discussing points of pain.  For example, how many get excessive emails or phone calls requesting information and how could be reduced by adding a social channel? Next I covered some strategy points related to learning, capacity, and organizational culture.   

Bryce Skofield presented a case study about how their agency was using social media.   He shared some points about their internal use of social media - blogs - as a strategy to get people comfortable.  He then talked about how they were using the various social media channels.   He shared that they have decided to move forward with social strategy even though they also need a web site makeover - and that some of the listening on social channels will guide their redesign.   He shared some great nuggets about easy starter points - for example adding their social media channel addresses to every print publication, business card, and web site.

Bryce shared a great analogy about the importance of a social media policy.  "If you work for a YMCA, there might be a policy about not wearing your YMCA T-Shirt to local bar on a Saturday if you're going drinking off hours.   There could potentially be a bad reflection back to the institution ... "

He shared some great wisdom about the agency's YouTube Channel.   They have used the Flip Camera nonprofit pricing to purchase cameras for staff members, offered a little or not training, and encouraged them to make videos about the agency.  In fact, they did a competition on staff on the lead up to the annual meeting.  As part of his job, he's done staff training on video editing software for those that wanted it.

One of their policy initiatives is called "think families, think a brighter future for California." They've created a campaign for Gilbert for Governor, a puppet, who uses YouTube and Twitter to talk about the agency's policy initiative. 

What are your suggestions for some easy first steps with social media?

The Dance Floor and The Balcony Social Media Training

OSI Workshop

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I just finished doing a training for Open Society Institute media and information coordinators on social media with colleague, David Sasaki, from Global Voices. I've known since 2005 and I realized that the last time I had seen him was in 2007 in Cambodia at the blogging conference and over an interesting dinner served by our hosts.

Our charge was to teach back-to-back simultaneous workshops covering social media strategy for NGOs and social media tools.    It made me think of the metaphor of the Dance Floor and the Balcony a phrase and exercise that I learned from a session that Eric Eugene Kim facilitated.  

The term comes from titled Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading with Marty Linsky and Ron Heifetz which is where Eugene Eric Kim borrowed the metaphor of The Dance Floor and the Balcony of his exercise.

The idea is the "balcony" is the strategic, big picture and the dance floor is when we're in the thick of operations or "in the weeds." Leaders need to shift between the two viewpoints to be effective. 

I used this metaphor to talk about the importance of having both the strategic view of social media as well as the hands-on experience of the tactical and tools.  It is important to shift between the tools and that strategic overview.  As one participant noted in the discussion, a big problem she observes with social media within nonprofits is that the leadership is "divorced" from the social media and tactics are delegated to the "young person on staff" without strategic insight.

I also pointed out the inherent tension we experience between strategy and tactics.  Strategy is analytical, reflective, and thinking - not much action.   Tactics is doing, moving, and acting.  So, the sessions we co-taught were geared to so both these perspectives.  We covered some strategy points, but also had the group tweeting.  

We opened with a plenary session providing an opportunity for participants to introduce themselves and do a couple of icebreakers.   I was also able to share the workshop wiki.  We also used a unique hashtag #OSITango.   (Participants were relieved that our icebreaker did not involve any tango dancing!).

Participants got to introduce themselves with "just three tags," picking three key words that describe them.  Some participants acknowledged that they "Twitter resisters."  We two more exercises to learn about their personal and organizational social media use - a stand up and sit down exercise.  

Next we did a human spectra gram, a technique that colleague Allen Gunn from Aspiration.  Colleague Kaliya Hamlin has this description:

This is an interactive whole group exercise that helps highlight the range of perspectives in a group. There is a tape on the floor with agree at one and disagree at the other:

agree |—————–|—————–| disagree.

The moderator asks a somewhat controversial question and directs participants to take a stand on the spectrum. The moderator then interviews people at different points on the spectrum about the opinions they hold. This process creates a shared experience while demonstrating the range of opinions in a community. It can serve as an anchor for additional conversations.

We asked this question:

Social media is a fad and a waste of time for nonprofit organizations
Social media can enhance fundraising for NGOs.

This generated a good discussion allowing for expression of different points of view.  David Sasaki has a terrific reflection on that here.  But, I'll quote:

I’ll admit, it wasn’t the easiest group to work with at the start (the average introduction was something like “Hi, my name is X and I think Twitter is a waste of time”), but by the end of the day I think we made some converts out of what were initially some pretty harsh critics:

David goes on to make some points about getting people's hands on the tools while also pointing out the strategic options:

But really, this is the thing about Twitter and many similar tools – they don’t make sense until you try them. And for most people they don’t make sense until you try them out for a couple weeks. You have to wait until you come across information that is relevant to you – information that you otherwise wouldn’t have come across – in order to appreciate the advantage of being part of the network.

There is also always an inherent power struggle in teaching networked technologies to people in positions of power. New technologies always take power away from one group and afford it to another. Individuals who are at the top of institutional hierarchies often grow frustrated when they come to understand that it’s increasingly not the position you have but rather the connections you have that lead to information awareness, and to power. Often times the workshops I give are full of people who have been working years – if not decades – to move up the institutional hierarchy to positions of power. They are comfortable being reported to by their team and reporting up to their director. But they are often – and understandably – resistant to enter a network where all that matters is how which connections you have and how well you are able to absorb and parse information.

We then did our respective workshops on strategy and tactics and then reconvened as a whole group to do a little bit of a reflection.  I think this process is important to make the final opening up happen. The last part of the day was focused on answering learning consolidation questions, ending with circle where we went around and shared the answer to:  "What one step can take to incorporate social media into your practice."

As David reflects on how attitudes change:

At the beginning of today’s workshop the majority of those attending were openly skeptical about social media. (Though they obviously had some interest or they wouldn’t have been there in the first place.) But once Beth and I walked them through how the tools actually work and how different activists and organizations have used those tools to their advantage, everyone in the room opened up to the idea of adopting the tools and techniques themselves. Like every other aspect in life, it’s difficult to really accept something until you understand it.

And now comes the challenge of transfer - with a one-day session where we teach to the "ah-ha" moment, share both strategy and actual hands-on activities - and some reflection on the next steps.  This is why I always create a wiki with resources, a leave behind - and be open to answer to any questions, especially on Twitter.

How have you witnessed social skeptics changing their minds?    What do think is required?

How To Make A Back Channel Light Up Like Clark Griswald's House

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to do a Webinar called "Social Media for Trainers: A Bag of Tricks" over at the Engage 365 Online Community site.  I blogged about the content last week.  I had sooo much fun creating and delivering it.  And, in looking over the evaluations and reviews, I think the participants did too.   I got an email from hosts Chris Uschan and Tony Veroeven who shared some numbers, "We had 190 attend and ask 140 questions in a back channel that looked like Clark Griswald's House at Christmas!"

I had to look up the Clark Griswald reference (National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation), but you might be scratching your head wondering what the heck is a back channel?   It's a live chat during a workshop or presentation and these days, it mostly taking place on Twitter.

Cliff Atkinson's new book, The Back Channel is a must read for anyone presenting at conferences or planning trainings in age of social media. In fact, we gave away a couple of free copies.

I've been experimenting with integrating social media into instruction for the past five years, so the webinar was a great opportunity to reflect on practice.  I covered these three topics:

• Why: Social media integrated into instruction - Pass or Fail?
• What: The art of social instructional design
• How: 6 Tools and Tips

If you didn't have a chance to participate, you'll find the slides, resource materials, and an archived recording over at the webinar wiki. But what's even better is that this wasn't an isolated training, it was part of an new online community called Engage365 which runs on a platform called "Conference 2.0"

This online community, Engage365, is a place to network and share knowledge about how to integrate the use of social media for events. It has 400 members.  The community is hosted by  Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish in collaboration with Omnipress

This is a lively community, mostly because of the expertise of people like Maddie, Lindy, and Tony who are skillful community managers.  However, the platform offers some excellent social features.  It integrates online community discussion forums, structured learning like webinars,  content, with participants' social profiles.   I like how it aggregate the social ant trails of the community.  And, how you click on your "friends" profiles and see their social streams. It isn't a walled garden.

Here's some reflections on the Webinar:

• Overcoming the Strawberry Jam Problem With Social Design
  

I emphasized the importance of knowing your audience.  In the presentation,  I showed folks how to easily survey the audience using google forms.   However, some webinar platforms have a real-time polling feature, the virtual equivalent of asking people to raise their hands if ...  The poll revealed that revealed 40% were beginners/novices and 60% intermediate or experts.  We had similar spread for those having experience designing and delivering trainings.

One participant described this as the "strawberry jam" problem that if the training is trying to cover too much content and too many different levels, than it gets spread too thin.   From my experience in doing technology trainings, no matter well you describe levels and content, you always get a range of experience, comfort, and skill. 

I think you can design around it.  How?  By having the whole group understand at the beginning that there are different levels and how they might react to the material.  Then, I encourage beginners to ask their questions and acknowledge that the content may feel fast-paced - and that's why I've included tutorials on the wiki.  For the intermediate users, I put them to work sharing their knowledge.  After all, teaching others improves retention and helps consolidates one's own knowledge.  Otherwise, more advanced people might get bored or start ask more detailed technical questions.  This is where a back channel like Twitter can be really useful.

Since the engage365 platform is very porous, when I tweeted about the webinar, a lot of colleagues joined.  And they have lots of wisdom to share, so the backchannel transcript had some gems. I was delighted to see that some of my colleagues were excited to try some of these ideas in their trainings and Kivi Leroux Miller suggested that we do a session at NTC this year called "Online Trainings That Don't Suck," so watch out.

• Social Instructional Design
  

I think I made up the term "social instructional design" which is how you integrate social media tools into your workshop AND how you plan for engagement during delivery.  What I wasn't able to find was any research that spoke to the pros and cons, in a scientific way, of integrating social media into instruction.  I was able to find some research and pieces about laptops in the classroom.  Know of any?

My own experience as a learner and teacher is that social tools deepen the learning.   But it is definitely a matter of personal learning styles and treating your participants as adults who can decide how they learn best.  As the instructor, there are clearly benefits - like being able to better read the room, getting really useful insights from participants, and improving your materials. 

• Key Instructional Concepts As Tweets

One piece of advice that I learned from Cliff Atkinson's book was to think about your presentation key points as tweets so people can retweet them.  The book has a cool worksheet to help you plan these out.   It's also good to look at your Twitter transcript so you can see what resonated with participants.  Here's a few points that I picked up that I will integrate into the next time I do this:

• Integrating social media into your instructional practice will change how your teach
• Be prepared to improvise more and drop the script if it isn't working with the audience
• Live in a tool for a month, and experiment with only one tool at time
• Learning the tools is like learning a music instrument, start slowly and work up speed and practice
• Don't hold all your questions until the end, take Twitter breaks and allow for questions

• Understand the art of repurposing your materials to save time

There were a lot of questions along the lines of "how much time does this take?"   Why create a wiki for each workshop.   I remembered some terrific blog posts that Kivi Leroux Miller wrote (here and here) about repurposing content and this definitely applies to instructional materials.  All I can say that if you design for repurposing, it takes less time.

When I design a workshop, I start with a simple framework.  Why, What, How.    The what usually has some sort of grid.  For this workshop, it was thinking about the trainer's tasks before, during, and after - and then how social media tool might enhance those tasks.

• The Place for the Nitty-Gritty How To Questions

There are always nitty gritty what button do I click questions or a specific question about whether a tool can do xyz.  If you are doing a webinar that is why, what, and little bit of how - there is not time for that.  One thing I do is include a list of links to the best how-to and tutorials.  It is also good to have people in the back channel who can answer those questions or do a follow up session.

For follow up sessions, these are best designed as "Ask the Expert" or get your questions answers.  I love the way NTEN does these sessions.  They're done on the phone and chat.  An NTEN staff person interviews the expert on a conference call line, while people listen and post questions in the back channel.  And then an NTEN moderator in the chat answers the questions or asks them outloud, selecting the questions in a logical order.

I could imagine a two-part session.   The why, what, and how and then a second ask the expert session.

Here's a few questions that were posted in the chat during the Webinar:

• What is Beth's delicious user name? (http://delicious.com/kanter)
• Can we get the full site for the twitter statistics?  (Yes check here)
• Can you add audio with slideshare? (yes)
• Are the three wiki tools listed free? (yes, pbwiki, wikispaces, and wetpaint have free versions)
• For webinars - do you have a favorite webinar tool? (I use what the host uses.  I like webinar software that facilitates learning between participants)
• How do you install the delicious tool to google chrome? (look here)
• Any advice about using Google Wave? (here's info about using it as backchannel)
• Have you ever used a wiki during webinar for interactivity? (once and it was disaster, best to use to supplement discussion in between phone calls)

• Extending the learning

I always ask reflective questions at the end of each training - these are 1)  What's one idea you'll put into practice?  2) What's one resource you need to move forward?   This is useful to ask just as the training is over, but even richer if you can ask again the next morning after everyone has had a good night's sleep.  

Learning gets richer when they marinate.   Unfortunately, we don't often have a whole day and half to connect with people we are training.   So, here is where social media -- tools like Twitter can help you connect again with your learners.

What are your thoughts about integrating social media into your trainings?  What have you learned that works or doesn't work?

Playing the Social Media Game with 100 Bay Area Nonprofits

Compasspoint Workshop Slides - Beta

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Last week, I had the opportunity facilitate a "Social Media Strategy Map" workshop for over 100 Bay Area nonprofits. The workshop was hosted by Compasspoint, with support from the Lucile and David Packard Foundation.  

I don't get an opportunity to do this workshop with a large group, so this was fabulous learning experience to work out some techniques to make it scale.   And they worked!    I wanted to capture a couple of reflections on the process as well as content learnings by way of this post.

 

Ant Trails As Learning Opportunities

One of the things that is essential to good instruction (or presentation) is knowing your audience.   Every time I present or facilitate a workshop, I review the web sites and social media ant trails (social media properties) of participants.  

This takes a lot of time because I'm not just browsing, but I'm doing a pattern analysis for best practices that I can incorporate into a presentation about social media principles and nonprofits.   I think people are more likely to pay attention if they know that they might in the presentation.  Also, it allows for a more interactive discussion because participants can share their knowledge.  It's a shift from sage on the stage instruction to honoring the learners for what they know.

A couple things I discovered by following participants' ant trails:

• The Bay Versus the Bay: This was an excellent example of how social media strategy can support behavior change or action.   Some really good design points.  For example, note their call to action right on the YouTube video.  They were able to share some insights about how they track the success of this effort.

• ACLU-Northern California:  They are recruiting for a social media intern on Facebook. They used "tagging" on Facebook to make people aware of the note.   The note itself is an excellent job description for a social media intern.   This prompted a thoughtful discussion about to effectively manage social media interns.

• The Valley Medical Foundation:   This organization provided an example of the personal versus organizational voice issue that social media often brings up.  They shared how they worked through this internally.

Robot Voice Disguiser for Large Group Facilitation

I was lucky enough to be working with good folks at Compasspoint (Nelson Layag, Sue Bennett, and Sierra Catcott) who are experienced facilitators and workshop leaders.  They brought along their chimes which are a great tool for getting people's attention when they are working in pairs or small groups.   My son lent me his Robot Voice Disguiser which was good for an opening laugh, but the chimes were preferable.   It makes me wonder about the various techniques for getting people to shift attention from small group to large group.

Photo by Nelson Layag

Social Engineering the Small Groups

I've done this game enough times to know that one key to success is making sure the small groups have people with knowledge of communications plans, hands-on experience with the tools, someone who can facilitate the discussion, and people with hands-on experience using the tools.   I've used a couple of techniques to accomplish this and they worked.

Using a google form,  I sent a pre-survey that asked detailed questions about social media experience, communications planning, budget size, and job role.  On the name tags, we indicated people with social media experience with a "T" and those with communications planning experience a "C."    We made sure that these folks were not all seated at the same table - having them spread their experience through the room so there was a C and T at each table.

I also created a stand up, sit down exercise.   One part included having people stand if they had a formal or informal communications plan/strategy (half the room) -and then had them sit down in waves to determine formal communications, Internet strategy, and social strategy.  There were only a handful of people who had a formal communications plan with a social media strategy. 

Next, to ensure that all the people who very comfortable with social media aren't seated at the same table, we did the spectra gram.  I learned this technique from Allen Gunn who uses it during Penguin Day.  I have people line up from "very comfortable" to "not so comfortable" and facilitate a conversation.   Then, had them count off by table numbers.

Integrating Social Media Into Instruction

Over the past four years, I've been incorporating the use of social media as an instructional aid for workshops and presentations.  (See the interview I did for Arrive Magazine, pages 34-37).  Some techniques I'm using for workshops that have become standard for me:

• Wikitation:  A wikitation  (word coined by Allan Levine, Cogdog Blog) is a wiki that you use to share you presentation slides and links.  I used the wiki to take notes and add resources on the fly that come up during Q/A.   The wiki becomes an electronic flip chart and resource collector.   What's nice is that allows you save paper and be a little bit green, although you do need a couple of key paper handouts (instructions/cards).   The wikitation for this workshop is here.
• What's the Hash Tag?  With more and more people tweeting, I announce at the beginning what the hashtag is and encourage workshop tweeting.  I've be using a tool called "What the Hash Tag"  that easily aggregates tweets into a transcript.  Monitoring the tag stream during the workshop provides a backchannel for people in the room and allows for remote participation.

Revising the Cards/Game Aspect

As my own learning and thinking about social media and nonprofits has evolved, so have the principles and strategies.  This has had an impact on the design of the cards, game instructions, etc.  I spent a lot of time last week tweaking the point system on the tool cards to guide better strategy decisions.  It worked, but the strategy framework itself needs to be rethought.  

The first iteration of the strategy cards consisted only of online approaches and was scaled based on amount of time (listening, participate, share story, generate buzz, and online community building).  The tools aligned to the components.   I've evolved this to engage/listen, social content, spreading buzz, movement building, and offline impact and more fluidity in choice of tools, also adding new ones.  A concept framework for strategy could be tweaked further and I have some ideas.

We had enough time so we could use the "life happens" cards where groups lose or win points based on a real life situation.  You know, resistance, staff turnover, lack of resources, etc.   The groups were thrilled to win points.  So, it is making me think that I need to revise the "life happens" to win points if they solve the problem in their strategy.

Report Out Technique

With such a large group, I thought ten reports using the same scenario would be deadly boring.  So, we had three scenarios and 3-4 tables working on each scenario.  I did the reports out for each scenario which worked really well.   People really got into the making up the context part.  For example, one of the organizations all of sudden had a famous rap star alumni who made YouTube videos for the organization's campaign.

I asked each to report out and I listened for three things: 

• What was a best practice or innovative idea and acknowledge it?
• Ask a strategy question about something that was missing? 
• What specific how to resource would be useful to know about?
• Is there a tactical tip to share?

We ended with a reflection about what they will take back to the organizations and, of course, I brought along some extra books I've been sent to do a big social media book giveaway (shared myself some postage costs!)

All in all - I can say that I learned a lot and hope participants did too!

Monica Hamburg's Remix of the Social Media Game

Game On: An Interactive Session On Social Media

View more Microsoft Word documents from Monica Hamburg.

I love seeing how people remix the social media game.  That's one of the key benefits of working wikily - that if you get stuck in your own thoughts or way of doing something, someone else can add their creativity and inspire you.

Monica Hamburg created the above remix.   This game focuses on a small number of tools.  After a presentation about what, why, and examples of the nonprofit uses of the tools.  Each group gets to enter their discussion into this online google form.   I'm supposing that the audience for this workshop is fairly technology comfortable.  I wonder if all the groups had the time to discuss and review each of the tool cards? 

Check out some of her other presentations on her blog, including this comprehensive introduction to Twitter called "How Tweet It Is."

WeAreMedia Live Workshop: Reflections

Flickr Photo: Illustration of Participant's Learning Questions

Earlier this month, we piloted the first two-day workshop on social media strategy and tools for NTEN's WeAreMedia project.  I was pleased with workshop, even though it was the first time and that is always difficult because instruction improves with feedback from learners. 

Co-instructors included Holly Ross, Nina Simon, Rachel Weidinger, Britt Bravo, David Cohn, and John Kenyon.  In addition, we had expert knowledge in the room from JD Lasica, Paul Lamb 
JD Lasica, and Laura Novig.

This was workshop was based on the knowledge shared on the WeAreMedia wiki over the past year using Dave Cormier's Community as the Curriculum approach.

The content on the wiki has now organized into an instructional format as a two-day face-to-face workshop.  The next step is to see how people remix, improve, and share back the material (with attribution of course) - that is the true power of working wikily. 

My debrief of the two-day workshop.

We had a lot of content to cover in two days.  I wonder whether face-to-face workshop delivery is the best approach for ultimately helping people put a social media strategy into practice.   Therefore, the learning goals be more aligned with the base of Bloom's Taxonomy - more about exposure, understanding, and knowledge.   Being able to make decisions and evaluate are more appropriate for a learning experience delivered over time such as a semester long course or at least having some time and space in between sessions.

The learning objectives were:

• make decisions about how to effectively integrate social media into organization's overall web communications plan
• understand how to design and implement a social media experiment that enables listening, participation, content creation, or community building and is appropriate and realistic
• evaluate the results of your social media experiment and use the information to improve your next social media strategy experiment
• experience a variety of web tools that are essential in listening, participation, content creation, generating buzz, and community building tactical approaches

Participants were asked to set up blogs as their workshop notebooks. This was useful for the introduction and pre-workshop activity, homework, and reflections.  Many of the participants lived blogged the sessions and the notes created are good content for the wiki. 

On the evaluation survey, we asked people to identify their "aha magic learning moment."  Here's what participants said was most useful:

"There were so many good things I got from the We Are Media Workshop that it's hard to distill it down to just one magical moment, but I think sitting in the conference room and seeing how many of us were inspired to *listen* to our constituents and connectors was really powerful. Your workshop encouraged us to devise a strategy for using social media, and to tease out what these tools could really mean to our mission, vision, and constituencies -- rather than just, "hurry up and get your org up on Twitter!"

"Having the strategic planning for social media broken out into 5 steps and identifying what tools went with each section."

"Being in one space with over 50 people all coming together to learn about why/how they can each use different social media strategies to help their organization."

"The hands-on education on actually using tools was most helpful."

I'm always overly critical about instructional delivery, and rely on evaluations to help hone and refine it. One of the instructional design flaws was that we assumed that all participants would be ready to write a draft social strategy as homework for the first night.  A few participants completed the assignment as you can see from the workshop blog notebooks here, here, here,  here, here, here, and here.   Thinking through a strategy requires more reflection and discussion within the organization and some level of experience with the tools.  However, on our follow up survey, 71% of respondents said the workshop will help them craft a strategy in the future.

That threw off the morning of the second day which was going to focus on participants sharing their ideas and giving feedback on their strategies.    I think after the first day's focus on strategy, people were very much interested in getting into the techniques, tactics, and tools. We could have allocated more time for the hands-on tactical small groups.  The cross pollination would have worked better sharing tips and tactics learned from the tool breakout sessions.  One person noted, "Perhaps each tactical session could be slightly more condensed or focused so that there was time (and mental energy!) to take in two of the technical topics."

For the next version of a two-day workshop, I'd deliver the break out tactical and tool sessions on the afternoon of the first day and repeat them again in the morning the second day.  This way people could attend two.  I'd also allow some time for people to share what they learned as a group or in small groups before selecting the second session.  As one respondent on our survey noted, "I would have liked to be able to go to more than one tactical breakout, and then have an opportunity to talk to people who went to the other sessions to find out what they learned."

I'd use the social media game as culminating activity.  From reading the participant blogs, there were a lot of insights generated from the strategy game like this one.  I'd include the implementation/metrics at the end or as an extension of the game.

In addition to a by the numbers survey, I always do a reflection survey where I ask what people learned, what they will put into practice, what is still unclear, and remaining questions.   While some of the  questions were about the how to implement tactics, a number were focused on the challenge of transfer.

• What of all this “stuff” is truly relevant for me and my organization?
• Will having a good social media strategy make my organization more successful or just more busy?
• What kind of a time investment does it take, how can I frame/align/justify that investment relative to other expenditures and needed areas of focus?
• How do we avoid “shiny object” syndrome?
• When will social media pay off for us?
• How to sell executive director on a smaller, more informal pilot?
• How do you balance where the organization is today with the potential of social media?

Some tangible first steps that people plan to put into practice are:

• Listening strategy
• Setting up a blog
• Use the smart chart to get communications strategy in place first
• Finish the social media strategy map
• Refine strategy based on listening first
• Set up a Facebook Page
• Experiment with StumbleUpon
• Finish plan, get more expertise to help with implementation
• Set up RSS Reader, Start Commenting on blogs

Does Immersion In Social Media Change Our Brain Functions? This Is Your Brain On Social Media

Flickr Photo by JTLowery

The title of this post is play on the famous PSA "Brain on Drugs" from 1987 to raise attention to the harmful effects of drugs .  The memorable tagline:  This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?

I'm not saying that social media is harmful to your brain or an addiction.   (Well, maybe for those people who Twitter on their mobile phones while on the toilet).   I've been immersed in working online since 1990 and I've had a nagging question in the back of my mind, "How does being immersed in using Internet, Web, or more recently Social Media change the way our brains function, the way we think or our capacity to absorb information?"

Many people have asked me how I can review so many resources and look at so much information.   I used to joke that my brain has evolved because I've been doing it for so long - that I've been exercising my brain's synthesis muscle for many years.   Maybe there's some grain of truth in that?

In 1997, David Shenk, author of Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, argued that humans have only so much capacity to absorb information before they feel the effects of information anxiety.  He says the reason is that "Silicon circuits evolve much more quickly than human genes."   In his book, he devotes an entire chapter to reviewing and summarizing thirty years of psychological research that looks at the (bad) effects of too much information and stimulus overload (like what is caused from our use of the Internet, Web, or Social Media.)

The idea came from a quote from psychologist Robert Cialdini

"Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural capacity to process information is likely to be increasingly inadequate to handle the surfeit of change, choice, and challenge that is characteristic of modern life."

This chapter and the subsequent advice in the book about going on data/information fasts always left me with a lingering question.  Can immersion in online information consumption -- interacting on the web - change our brains and ability to absorb information?  Does growing up digital evolve young people's brains?  What if it was a good thing?

We have put this in perspective.  The research and book is over ten years old.  We probably know a lot more about the impact of the Internet on our brains.   I wonder if there is any brain research that shows MRIs over time of people who spend x hours online.  Maybe it might show something like an improved ability to process information, see patterns, fire up neurons, improve IQ or whatever.  I have found posts where brain researchers equate the how the brain functions to social networks.  For example, Carol Torgan, Ph.D, in her post "Your Brain on Facebook"

Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut are all popular and powerful social networking sites. But the granddaddy of all social networking sites — by a long shot — is your brain.

Online social networks are used by millions of people each day as they "friend" and connect to hundreds and even thousands of other members. That's impressive. Until you realize your brain has 100 billion neurons with various levels and degrees of connection. As you connect to others online, the same social networking is going on inside your head.

I've been reading Don Tapscott's "Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World." The Net Generation are defined as individuals under 30 who have literally grown up digital and they're part of a global cultural phenomenon that's here to stay.   There's a whole chapter on the Net Generation Brain.   He summarizes and discusses recent brain research that suggests immersion in digital online environment (e.g. using social networks, living online, video games, etc) has a positive impact.

Everything we do leaves a physical imprint on the brain.  The brain is particularly adaptable to outside influence in the first three years of life and then during teenage and early adult years, which is just when most Net Geners are immersing themselves in interactive digital technology 20 to 30 hours per week.   Net Gen folks have more highly developed spatial skills, are quicker at switching tasks, and that although the research is in the early stages, Net Gens appears to have flexible, adaptable, and multimedia savvy brains.  

There were a few insights in this chapter that were very valuable, particularly the impact of Internet screen immersion and how it affects the way Net Geners absorb information.  Tapscott asks, "What is the overall effect of spending so much time in front of a screen, not a passive TV screen, but an interactive experience?"

Our Brains Process Information Differently Depending on the Media

He points to some research undertaken by Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University - where they did brain scans of people processing information in different media.  There was another study that looked at the differences between linear and non-linear listening where researchers played the same newscast in four different ways (traditional radio broadcast, played as one click, as an interactive webcast where you clicked to get different items, and a webcast with links for details.)  They tested comprehension and found that younger people remembered less from traditional newscasts versus the interactive versions.

Babyboomers are more likely to process in a linear way, Net Geners have hypertext minds

He goes on to make the point that Babyboomers are more likely to process information in a linear way, from beginning to end - whether its writing an essay, watching TV, or reading instructions before working the remote control.  That's because that's how boomers grew up.  Net Geners, on the other hand, do not operate sequentially.   They use keywords, hypertext, and clicking to organize the information for themselves.  In other words,  Net Geners have "hypertext minds," and as Marc Prensky suggests they think differently.

When I read this,  I started to reflect on the different groups that I typically get in training workshops and the need for differentiated instruction.  It's also something to keep in mind if you are having a cross-generational discussion in your organization about the value of social media.

NetGeners Look at the Screen Differently

This section pointed to eye movement studies and differences between Net Geners and Babyboomers in hour they moved their eyes around the screen.  I've seen this first hand when I've done any shoulder to shoulder coaching.   Boomers are trained to read from left to right, from top to bottem, while net geners will look for visual clues first.  This has some implications for the way you design your home base or web site - may explain why some boomers find social networking sites design distracting.

Visual Experts

Tapscott explains that digital immersion may have altered Net Gener's visual processing systems, especially the speed - as well as how they take information and what they remember.  He also talks about how NetGener's visual skills have made them excellent scanners.

The rest of the chapter discusses multi-tasking or swtiching attention, technology and critical thinking and potential capacity to process or absorb information.   There is quote from researchers Stan and Matthew Kutcher

"There is emerging evidence suggesting that exposure to new technologies may push the Net Gen brain past conventional capacity limitations.  They argue the Net Gen brain may be able to execute certain perceptual tasks more rapidly, and may maintain more items in working memory."

Distributed Cognition

Digital immersion may enocurage a new form of intelligence, according to Henry Jenkins.  He's talking about sharing content and interacting with others that heightens intelligence through collaboration with other people and with machines.

Memory is not fading, just Google It

Tapscott points to some research that suggests that memory of specific facts may no longer be as important now you can just F*** Google It.  Why spend hours memorizing historical facts when you look them up in an instant?  Why keep clutter in the brain?

The flip side to this is a loss of concentration - as noted in a article by Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The rest of the chapter talks about the need for focus, deeper thinking, and taking mental breaks (from technology).

He ends with some advice to create a sharper mind (intended for babyboomers, I think)

1. Work in your wiring - learn a new skill.  Lifelong neuro plasticity is on your side.
2. Get fluent in technology by immersing yourself in it.
3. Multitask wisely - don't answer every email instantly, check it in chunks.
4. Know when it's best to concentrate on just one task.  Deep thought, reflection, critical thinking, innovation, and creativity are fostered best by using a single task focus.
5. Get into the rhythm of serial focusing.  Know your peak times, give your brain a break, and cool down before ramping up again.
6. Practice scanning.  Don't read all the words, word for word, but look for keywords to see if it is worth a quick read.
7. Understand how you learn best and customize your learning and potential.

This has a some implications for those of who work in nonprofits, particularly if you are planning any trainings or dealing with resistance. 

Review of Don Tapscott Book

Reflections from Center for Nonprofit Excellence Annual Conference, Louisville, KY

Today I facilitated a couple of workshops as part of the Social Media track for annual conference for the Center for Nonprofit Excellence in Louisville, KY.  

The conference was fun because I finally got a chance to meet Rosetta Thurman face-to-face!  We were part of the closing town meeting with the other session leaders.  At the end of the conference, I interviewed Rosetta along with Ashely Cecil, Erin McMahon, and Diana Church -- all young nonprofit professionals.

I'm feeling good about the workshop because I feel that I'm finally closer to mastering differentiated instruction with social media and nonprofits.  

Let me explain.  Not matter what, there are always two types of participants.  The first group consists of people who may have many years of experience in a nonprofit, may be in a senior management position with a nonprofit, but are new to social media.  The second group (typically younger, but not always) have first-hand experience and have been implementing social media for their nonprofits.  The first group wants to wrap their brains around it and gets overwhelmed quickly.  The second group wants to know how to do it better and has many questions and learning to share.

Sometimes that first group isn't quite ready to play the game yes they could, but they need to see the tools in action to better understand.  Rather than the game, what they want is the five easy steps.  They've never seen an RSS reader or been on Twitter and they need to be walked through these tools slowly. The second group is ready to brainstorm a strategy, select tools, or has lots of nitty gritty question about implementation. 

It's always hard to accommodate the needs of both groups at the same time or in full group discussion. If you spent an 30-40 minutes with the full group walking them through the tools, the second group would be bored.  If you had the first group work on the simulation exercise, they'd be uncomfortable.

So, for this workshop, I did it a little bit differently.  The first session was the overview - interactive lecture.   Then for the social media game, I offered the option of either doing the simulation game or do a Social Media 101 with me.  Luckily,  I had experienced social media practitioners in the room like Ashely Cecil, Erin McMahon, and Mary Katherine who agreed to be small group leaders for the game simulation. 

It was a little nerve racking for me to be multi-tasking - facilitating a group while time keeping time for the game simulation.   We only had an hour for the exercise which is tight, so I simplified and had all the groups do the same simulation. This saved a lot of time during the report out on reflections and learning.

Some learnings from the simulation:

• It's good to set limits in choosing the tools and the point system helped.   Thinking about it in terms of your time is a good way to impose limits.
• Some participants who had already implement social networking presence realized that they needed to take a step back and focus on listening steps.

Bill Toliver, The Matale Line

The keynote was from Bill Toliver called "It's nice to be nice to the nice."  Some key takeaways:

Your nonprofit can't continue to do a good job of doing an average job of doing too many things. Nonprofits have a moral obligation to the highest quality work.

There's lots of competition and if you want to stand out, you need excellence

Change your concept of what a campaign means.   Is there a better way forward?  You need to blend the best practices of marketing and social movement building?

Understand the difference between a database and a base of support.

Build a community around your nonprofit brand:

• We must stop putting our tireless values above emotion-of-the-month or campaign-of-the-year.
• We must build a database of committed marathon runners, rather than emotional sprinters
• We must help people see beyond the what and start looking at the why
• Are you raiser of funds or agents of change?

Let's look at how social change happens

• Social change only happens only way - Nothing ever changes until somebody motivates a critical mass of the right people to commit to that change.
• Are you that somebody or are you looking to the right people or are you just doing the same old thing?
• How many people do you need to reach a tipping point?  What sort of commitment do you need?  How to motivate people to sustain the level of commitment?

What must we do to be the catalyst?

• Don't hide behind your elevator pitch
• Understand your constituents belief system
• Put yourself in the heads of the donors
• Is there a solution to it?
• What will you do with my money?

Social Media Game: Kentucky Derby Remix for CNPE Conference

Center for Nonprofit Excellent Workshop

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: nptech nonprofits)

On the road again for the next couple of weeks, including a trip to Romania. I'm facilitating a couple of workshops as part of the Social Media track for annual conference for the Center for Nonprofit Excellence in Louisville, KY.

I'm doing two workshops.   The first is 90 minutes that is an introduction to strategic social media for nonprofits.   It will look at the what, why, and what to think about before jumping in.   The second session is the Kentucky Derby version of the Social Media Game. 

The value of this game is in the reiteration, remixing, and of course sharing. The social media game is based on workshop game that David Wilcox created for a workshop we did in Birmingham for LASA two years ago based on those Drew Mackie and David had developed over the past 10 years. (You can find David's training games here.)  

David has reiterated this game over and over for different audiences and circumstances and I've remixed the game for filmmakers, took it to Cambodia and more recently to Hawaii.   On the long plane ride back to the mainland, reflected on what work and what didn't in Hawaii.  My thoughts are here.

Sometimes I wish that I simply did the same slide show, talk, and workshop again and again and again.  But, what fun would that be?  I'd bore myself.   Every time I do a training - and most are on the same set of topics, I try something new.

For this workshop and version of the game, since I only have 2.5 hours in two sections - I simplified the game.   I will have all the groups work on the same scenario so once the first group reports - the others can shorten their report outs.   The one scenario I came up - is a little fanciful - so we don't get stuck in the rut of "we tried that and it didn't work," but real enough to get value from the simulation experience.

In Hawaii, each small group had a social media expert to facilitate the discussion - so the mix of beginners with advanced was okay.  I'm lucky thought that a few people from nonprofits who have experience implementing social media strategies will be in the room. 

I set up a wiki where I've collected links to others who have remixed and was hoping to create some templates and source material for people to remix it.

After Louisville, I go to Minneapolis where I am doing a version of the workshop at the Search Institute.   This group will most likely be beginners or just getting started and I have created a "Let's Get Started" version of the game and will share later.   In Romania, the version I'll create will be for blogging strategies.

Slides from Kellogg Action Lab: College of Consultants - Making Sense and Success with Social Media

College of Consultants Presentation - Kellogg Action Lab

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: nonprofits socialmedia)

Last week I facilitated a workshop at the Kellogg Action Lab's College of Consultants Convening.  Kudos to Ron McKinley, Tim Brostrom, and Mai Neng Moua for doing such an excellent job of hosting and organizing this event.  I wish I could have attended the other workshops that were taking place at the same time as mine - from David La Piana on Strategic Planning and Dione Alexander from the Nonprofit Finance Fund.

My slides and other resources are on the wiki.   It was a great opportunity to hear from consultants the questions, concerns, and challenges of their clients face related to social media in a strategic planning context.   These folks are experts in strategic planning, financial management, facilitation, board development, fundraising - virtually all levels of nonprofit operation and capacity building.   I learned a tremendous amount from the participants comments and questions.

It was also wonderful to see some familiar faces like Thom Clark from Community Media Workshop - an organization that has done so much to inspire and help nonprofits leverage the power for social media.  (Thom was kind enough to do an interview with me about their ning use that I will publish in the next few days).  I also reconnected with some colleagues I haven't seen in years - like Julia Fabris and Carol Coren.

I really appreciated the post "People in the Real World"  that Chris Brogan had today about being a social media translator and the fact that "that even though it seems like lots of us are deeply passionate about this space, most folks don’t exactly understand what we’re talking about."   As I said to those in the workshops who were new to social media,  I appreciate the power of newbies.

Chris ends his post with some inspiration for all of us who are bridges to social media in our organization, industry, or field:

Teach. Connect. Bridge. Humanize. Human-size. Make it about the people who carry the fire down from the mountain, not the fire itself.

What are the key questions nonprofits should ask about social media training?

 

Photo by Topeka Library

Netsquared has another Think-Tank coming up later this month. The question is related to social media training:

What are the key questions nonprofit organizations should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning?

Before we get into the nitty gritty of learning a particular social media skill, you need to make sure that you have identified a social media strategy.  And, as part of the strategy development you asked this question first:

• Our social media strategy is designed to accomplish x.   Is that a priority for staff time and training investment?  Why?
• Professional development and training budgets are not unlimited in nonprofits.   The cost of training is time - time for the initial learning and the time to put the skills into practice or what we call the "challenge of transfer."    Given all the professional needs your organization might have, what is the value of this investment compared to other training investments?

So, let's say that as part of your social media strategy - you've hashed out those questions and you've been green lighted for a social media training.   What's the most effective way to do it?

Yes, training seminars, workshops, or taking a class can be helpful to get a good introduction and overview for a social media strategy and execution, but where the rubber meets the road is putting what has been learned into practice.   This requires ongoing professional development and the skill or knowledge required should be part of the job description.

People need time to reflect on their technology use, share what they’ve learned, and experiment with various technology tools so they can easily incorporate them into their daily working life.    If your technology plan will have long-term sustainability, you must include many strategies for technology professional development.

• What is the best way to deliver this social media training so that we build our organizational capacity?
• Does the delivery match our organization's culture for learning?
• Who will be hands-on?  Who needs the overview?
• How will you take into account different learning styles for individuals and generational differences?
• How will staff make the time to put what they've learned into practice?  Time to experiment?

Some tips for training:

• Integrate the learning with experimentation: We've heard time and time again that one of the first steps is to experiment with social media and reiterative over and over again - learn what worked and what didn't.    The training should be meshed with the pilot/experiment and time for reflection at the end for the team to discuss what worked and what didn't.

• Use the tools as part of your learning process:  A blog can be an excellent professional development journal - a place to record and share learnings.  If you organization is considering setting up an organizational blog, why not do a group blog behind the firewall to practice blogging and record what you're learning about the blogging process?  If you're just starting on Twitter, get everyone on Twitter and start having a conversation. 

• Make it Fun:  Training doesn't have be boring.  It doesn't have go on for days and days.  Why do some Brown Bag lunches -or "Facebook Fridays" -- informal trainings where that people on staff take turns organizing and where learning can be shared informally.

• Reverse Mentoring:   Do you have a younger person in your nonprofit who is already an expert on using web 2.0 tools?   Why not have them lead a session?

• Don't Forget Reflection Time:  This is the secret sauce to success with technology training.  Time to reflect on what you've learned.

What are your best tips for social media trainings?

Social Media Basic Literacy Skills In the Nonprofit Workplace

Source:  Pew Internet and America Life Project: "Networked Workers" Study

 

Michele Martin and Tony Karer have been blogging at the Work Literacy blog for several months now.  Work Literacy is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.  The topics they look at are what I might call social media literacy skills.

When I get out into the real world and come in contact with people who are no early adopters of Web 2.0 tools,  I find that there are still many people who haven't heard of many of these tools - blogging, tagging, RSS,  etc, let alone have incorporated them into their daily professional work practice.   Mostly they are aware,  but haven't experienced it.   

Fast forward ten years from now, and the nonprofit workplace - maybe it is only five years from now - but will social media basic literacy be on the list of basic job skills?

Marshall Kirkpatrick at the Read/Write Web has two recent posts, one that analyzes some research and a second providing some great tips for incorporating social media into your work life in a productive way that can enhance your work.

 

Survey: Most Workplace Internet Use Remains Rudimentary:  Marshall gives a good summary of what he thinks the implications are from this research.  I'll just quote him here:

The gist of the analysis is that people who use the internet at work also use it to do work at home; it makes them more efficient but also increases the demands on their time. Any of us who live that kind of life could have told you that - but what we find more interesting is the surprisingly low number of people who say they use certain technologies at work.

Greg Sterling at the excellent blog SearchEngineLand pulls out some of the most salient data points from the survey and we'll excerpt further from his post below. We question both the definition of "networked worker" in the survey and Sterling's perspective on it, though.

Reading Blogs at Work: How and Why You Should Do It:

This is a fantastic post that gives us the why - first mover advantage, something that Chris Brogan has talked about.  Marshall's tips for reading are all about listening. There's a few more strategy/tool ideas tools that I think are definitely worth incorporating into the WeAreMedia Listening for Nonprofits section.  And, it has given me some inspiration for social media listening step-by-steps projects.

When do you think social media basic literacy skills  -- reading blogs in an RSS reader and listening to what people are saying - will be come a standard part of the nonprofit job description - at least for someone doing marketing for the organization. 

Arts Summit 2008: The Alliance of New York State Arts Organizations - Reflections

I just got back from doing a plenary session at the Arts Summit organized by the Alliance of New York State Arts Organizations.  It's gathering of arts leader from throughout New York State.   I spoke about social media and future leadership in the arts - and also did a workshop.   I had the pleasure of sharing the podium with Susan Chun who spoke about the Steve project.  (Since we shared my laptop, she kindly gave me permission to upload her slides)

I have a long history with the arts community in New York.  For 12 years, I worked on arts and technology projects with the New York Foundation for the Arts, beginning with its Arts Wire program in 1992.   I've worked with Judith Weiner at the Alliance in many different capacities since 1994 - I built their first web site. I was a circuit rider for their Rurals Program where I drove all over New York state working with Rural Arts administrators - teaching them anything and everything from how to set up an excel spreadsheet to using email to powerpoint - to plugging in modems.  (I don't crawl under desks anymore, I'm too old).   As Phil Morris noted in his blog, it feels like home to be with this crowd.)

It was great to see many familiar faces - many folks who I haven't seen in at least five years, including Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, an artist and the director of the Arts Council in Queens,  Andrew Salgado who runs Reader's Theatre Workshop, Phil Morris (the visionary behind Proctor's Theatre where the conference took place), Martha Strodel, Rural Arts Director, Robert Zuckerman from NYSCA, Elaine Giguere,  Anne Ackerson, Caroline Thompson, Kay Stamer, Judith Levine, and many others.  Some of my creative work in technology training was done during my decade plus two years working with the New York Arts community.  Many, many memories ..

The plenary and workshop took place in the black box theatre with a huge projection screen.  See the photos here.   I took a few minutes to check out the gorgeous mainstage theatre, a historic theater renovated to perfect. 

 

 

There was some excellent questions during the plenary from this very smart crowd.   One that stuck with me was: "I'm an older babyboomer.  I'm comfortable with computers and the Internet.  But, I just haven't paid much attention to the Web 2.0 stuff.   I realize that I should get my hands on it to understand it better - so I can manage my staff better. My head is spinning (in a good way) but where and how should I get started. "

I have to caution people that when I share the results of my experiments and learnings - that it is a culmination of 6 plus years of daily exploration of Web 2.0.    That's not where I began my learning journey.  I tell folks that my recent experiences are like playing a Paganini Violin piece.  But, I started with Twinkle, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star Suziki lessons 5-6 years ago. 

When my son, Harry, was three years old.  He used to watch the Mark Morris and Yo Yo Ma Failing Down Stairs dance video. He really wanted to play the cello.  So, we rented a 1/10 size cello and started on some lessons.  He sawed, sawed away at all.  But after a week, he said, "I don't want to play the cello anymore!"  I asked him why. "Because it doesn't sound like Yo Yo Ma!"  I had to explain to him that Yo Yo Ma didn't sound that way after he had played for week either - and that it takes practice.

So back to the question ... I offered some places to start and told her to live in that one thing for a couple of months.  Once you master it, take on the next thing.  I suggested a sequence of steps.

I had planned to do the social media game workshop, but after using a spectragraph to see if we had newcomers to social media and hear their burning questions, I decided to do some q/a and show them some basic getting started steps.  (Similar to what I've done here - except adding a live Twitter demo)

One of the most important things you need to do as a trainer - is to listen and adjust on the spot.  You have to be willing to toss out the lesson plan too -- ramp up or ramp down - and watch out if you're speaking in jargon.   I've been keeping an inner ear for that and when I spew jargon - I mock myself in front of the group and translate.  It gets a good laugh.

You can find the slides and resources at my Arts and Social Media wiki. 

Social Media Trainings: How do you use pre-workshop data about your participants effectively to shape effective instruction?

I'm preparing for a Social Media workshop next month called "Making Sense of and Success with Social Media" where the audience will be consultants who work with nonprofits in other areas (not technology).  It will be more of high level overview given that it is only 90 minutes long.   I don't always get a chance to do pre-workshop surveys, but in this case I had the opportunity to add two questions onto the registration form. 

I wanted to know whether participants had actual experience with social media.  I also wanted to get a sense of what content to include, so I asked for burning questions   I usually do that as an icebreaker in the room, so this will save some time.   I have a chance to reflect now on the data I've collected and think about the instructional design.

Comfort Levels

In the United States, I've noticed that over the past 2-3 years, there is a growing divide in participants experience/knowledge gap.   

Typically, I have two groups of participants and as the chart above indicates, this group is no different - except that I probably have a greater number of people in Group 2.   

(1) Already Doing It, Want To Do It Better:  The first group know the definitions of the tools and understands how social media has changed the dynamics between audience and organization.  They've done some amount of experimentation.  This may include some personal exploration like setting up their profile on social networking site or even a blog.   They are now ready to start bringing their knowledge back to the organization and begin an organizational strategy.  Some may already be doing that and want to do it better.  They are looking for take-aways to spread social media behind the firewall and get around resistance from others within the organization.    (Gordon Meyer has good reflection on the Community Media Workshop Blog).

(2) Need A Basic Introduction:  This group is new to social media, has not experienced directly but wants to get started using it strategically.  They want to know what works and what does not and what the value is.  They want to understand what they should do first, second, and third - small steps.   Sometimes, people in this group are overwhelmed by the technology.

This split seems to run along generational lines, but not always.

I'm doing the workshop twice and I toyed with the idea of actually doing two totally different sessions, but I do not have an equal split - and I think there is value to having mixed levels in the group - if, you as the instructor, can make sure there is differential instruction.   Given the numbers, it seems like most of the people fall into group 2 and having people in group 1 in the room opens the door for a perspective from a peer.

I did a content analysis of the burning questions and a lot have to do with strategic use and understanding the benefits.  Also, some new types of questions about training and education approaches for nonprofits and specific tips for under-resourced nonprofits.

This is a short workshop and will be mostly delivered as an interactive lecture/demo style - with audience interaction.  It's 90 minute workshop and there's a content to cover.  Also, the seating is fixed.  I wondered about a creative way to use already collected burning questions without taking up instructional time to rehash them again through an icebreaker.   

I pinged Dave Cormier and he suggested that I consider handing out the questions in paper and have people take notes or follow along "with a 'lets see if we can tease out the answer to these questions."   This reminded of the Thiagi's Interactive Lecture techniques.  So, need to re-order the questions to match the flow of the interactive presentation - and build in points for people to work pairs or threes to review the questions.

Any trainers out there have a suggestion or ideas for ways to use content-related questions from participants collected in advance to help facilitate learning in the room? 

UPDATE

Some advice from Twitter

A Crash Course in Social Media for Arts People in Philadelphia

Yesterday, I presented a workshop called "A Crash Course in Social Media for Arts People" hosted by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.  The workshop was part of a professional development series organized by the very capable Kendra Lawton, with help from Melissa Cooper.  I also got a chance to spend some time with Thomas Taylor, the Alliance's nonprofit technology in-house guru and social media whiz who turned me to twitpic.

Crash Course: Social Media for Arts People

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: arts)

This workshop was advertised as a crash course and I think packed enough content in there for 3 full days. Immersion for a day is a good thing, although people will naturally feel a little overwhelmed by the end of the day.  That's why I incorporated a number of reflection techniques throughout the day - to help with the digestion and application.  I also tested out a couple of instructional techniques for the first time and learned something myself.  I have also fully integrated the use of a wiki as "electronic flip chart," and leave behind resource as well as use of networked learning (Skype and twitter open to shoot out questions to people I could get richer answers to)

The morning agenda was the full group - presentation and demonstration with lots of opportunity for discussion.   The first half hour was spent in introduction and teasing out burning questions.  Right away, I introduce them to Twitter as a resource - the collaborative brain.  Then I tell the essence of using twitter is to learn the art of being succinct.  Next, I asked them to work in pairs to come up with their burning questions in 140 characters or less.  You have to emphasize to people not to get hung up on the 140 character limit, but to more to boil  down their learning question.   

Then, I asked people to report out the burning questions and add them to the wiki page set up for this.  This gives the you -as the trainer an idea of how well the content matches people's questions and to let people know.  With using a wiki, you can add resources or answers to the questions throughout the day - so people feel like they got their question answered without taking up too much time in the whole room discussion or getting to far off track in the agenda.

The topics covered included:

• Should Your Organization Embrace Social Media or Not?
• Why It is Important
• Cute Dog Theory: Thinking Strategically about Social Media

I do the interactive lecture technique - and invite other voices into the mix as much as possible and encourage questions.  Also, don't answer all the questions and ask for others to answer it. 

In between sections, I asked people to do a standing poll.  First you ask people to stand up.  Then ask people to sit down if they got an answer to their burning question.  Next, ask them to sit down if they learned something new that will be useful.   Then you ask them to write it down.   I also encouraged people to tell me during the break if the pace was too fast or too slow - or level was too advanced or basic.  (I would have addressed this with some differentiated instruction in the small groups in the afternoon.)

I did a full-room reflection exercise before the break in the morning called "Let's Walk the Line."  I used a ribbon asked for a volunteer to hold it at one end of the room who felt their organization was ready for social media - no question about it.  Then asked for another volunteer felt their organization was not ready for social media - and also told that if they know that it was a good thing - not a bad thing.   Each volunteer held the ribbon at opposites end of the room.  Then I asked people to line up according to how ready they felt their organization was to implement a social media project.  Then I asked people to share why -- first from the extremes and then from the middle.

After a break, we had a full-room session looking at the tools in the context of strategy and amount of time.  This is time slot before when the energy starts to drop, but you have get through some content. There were about 40 cultural organizations from Philadelphia that participated, from large established institutions to smaller groups and all with different levels of experience using social media.   So, I made the audience a part of the curriculum.  Here's how.

I spent quite a bit of preparation time visiting each organization's web presence and searching for any social media presence.  Here's the research I did.  Next,  I added screen captures of their social media presence or tactic in the slide show.   I told them before I started that I done this and hope that if the person was in the room they would share a little bit about their work.    When I got to an example where the person was in the room or if I asked how many of you use google alerts,  I let them share.  I also asked them questions to get at experiential learning.   

While it required a significant amount of preparation work, I think it worked out.  The workshop participants with experience shared a lot of valuable wisdom. 

The afternoon was spent playing the social media game. I need to scaffold the process better and have it connect to different groups of cards. I tried to incorporate the concept of POST - but need to use the same labels on the cards.  I also need written instructions for the steps.  I got some ideas while observing the groups at work and try to implement for next time I use the cards.   During the report out, I showed some additional resources or techniques and asked for advice in the room.

At the end of the day, I had participants quietly fill out a reflection form:

• One thing I learned
• One thing I will put into practice
• Questions I still have
• What still isn't clear

I also handed out 3x5 cards and asked people to give email address and one thing they make a habit in the next month.  I also asked for ideas for future blog posts.

I have some tweaking to do - and of course this helps inform the WeAreMedia face workshop syllabus.

Liz Strauss Asks - Are Crayons Social Media?

What does the Internet look like?

Liz Strauss asks if crayons qualify as social media.

It made remember the workshops I taught way back in 1993 for arts people about Internet literacy - the web was just getting started.   I handed them crayons and paper and asked them to draw a picture of the Internet and then share with someone else.   Here's some of the drawing from the thousands that I had in my collection (scanned the best ones).   

It's funny looking at these - because they are all about connections, people, transportation metaphors, networks, global, etc.   Maybe if you were ask someone to draw pictures of social media or web 2.0 you would get similar images.

So that leads me to the NTEN's Be The Media Project (name to change soon) and Module 1 that we're building together and talking about this week.

For today, we'll be working on the specific learning objective:

To understand the basic concepts and principles of social media

I spent a bit of time searching through slide shows on Slideshare for a good primer.  I think this slide show by Lee White is one of the best ever!  It's a stellar example of good visual presentation and use of creative commons licensing.

What would you change, add, or remove if you were to remix this slide show for a nonprofit audience? What do you think are the best of the best resources that cover the basic ideas of social media? If you were doing a workshop, what icebreaker would you design to help people understand these basic concepts?

Leave a comment or drop your feedback on the NTEN wiki here.

Excellent Collection of Social Media How To Screencasts

How To Download YouTube Videos

VideoJug - Life Explained on Film is an excellent site for instructional videos and screencasts on a wide range of topics, including some fantastic how-to content for social networks and other tools.   The example above is one that plucked from the socialnetworking tagged videos.  This site is going to be an excellent resource for hunting and gathering of resources as part of the BeTheMedia project ...

Kentucky Nonprofit Workshop on Web 2.0: Slides, Reflections, and Notes

That's a video blog post I did to demonstrate how a simple technique for creating effective videos using your cell phone or digital camera and placing it one the web, in this example, on YouTube.  (While the workshop wasn't a handson video workshop, I did something along those lines in Cambodia - the curriculum is here.)

Danielle really expresses the dilemma that I find myself in more and more - how do you straddle the line between an advocate for nonprofits to incorporate social media and throwing some cold water ...  That is, it takes more than just throwing up a blog or myspace profile or start twittering to make this work.  Also, there may be other priorities to focus on rather than incorporating social media.

Many folks at the workshop wanted access to copies of the slides.  They are here and you can download the pdf.   What I am finding is that workshop participants need slides with information that can help explain all this to their executive directors and help initiative a conversation.     I have a Facebook album with lots of screen captures that might be useful or my social media snack facts screen captures in Flickr.

The report out notes from the small group work is here.

Kentucky Nonprofit Workshop on Web 2.0

Kentucky Nonprofit Workshop on Web 2.0
Originally uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg.

This is a demo of how you can blog from flickr.  What is more important though is to check out the comments on the photo.  After I posted the photo, I put out a tweet asking my followers to put a comment on the photo. It was to demo the immediacy of twitter and generate some discussion about how or if this could be applied to nonprofits. 

Thanks to everyone who responded!

Reflections on the Meyer Memorial Trust Workshop

 

 

I'm happy that my new laptop has an extended battery life so I am writing some reflections on the plane en route to Boston.  What I most enjoy about doing face-to-face training workshops is the right after reflection questions:  How could this learning experience been improved?  What worked? What didn't?   Then, I match this against participant feedback/evaluations.   What I'm after are ways to tweak the design to improve learning and to improve instructional practice.   

Working with the team at the Meyer Trust - Marie, Amy, Aaron, and everyone was fantastic.  The venue, the IRDC, was wonderful place.   The director of the Center has been there since 1977 and is originally from Cambodia.  We had a lot to talk about and I had remembered to bring in a CD of Khmer OpenSource!

The workshop was an all day workshop, with an opening presentation followed by small group exercise. 

I don't always present the same material everywhere I go.  I always try to incorporate new learnings and observations that I've discovered from the many interviews I do on my blog, resources discovered, and stories.  I also like to practice my storytelling skills.   And, while I practice before I present, many times - I have some parts that are new.   There's nothing like having an audience to see where you got inside your own head too much ...

The presentation delivery went okay, except we got started 10 minutes late and I was still a little ruffled from having written down the wrong address and having to scramble to get there from a cab across town.    While I was presenting, I was thinking what ten-minute chunk to cut or where I should skip through some slides.  I also didn't facilitate the whole room discussion around the slides which I usually do because I worried about going over time.   Lesson (RE) learned, always budget in that ten minutes late start and print out the location from an email don't transcribe (dang, was trying to save paper)  Also, keep a few slides after the end that may explain a commonly asked question. 

Before I went on Twittered.  My colleagues in the audience like Marshall Kirkpatrick and Holly Ross were twittering ..

Aaron who is the tech person at Meyer Memorial Trust tipped me off to something that I didn't know existed in powerpoint and I must explore it.  He told me there were presenter tools - so you could present your slides on the screen, see your notes, and see the whole slide deck.  I must also memorize how to skip around in powerpoint without flipping through slides.

I also didn't focus on some of the techniques I learned from She's So Geeky speaker training - the eye contact and the verb.  I lapsed too much into my nature rally style and I have to work on toning that down.   But jet lag and three lattes makes that difficult.

The workshop was the first time I had used the game with fleshed out scenarios for the small groups to work and an assignment to have a discussion around planning questions:

• What's the goal?
• What's the outcome?
• What's the key metric?  How might you measure it?
• What's your strategy map?
• What might be a first step, low risk experiment?

During the morning and early afternoon session, I felt that some tables were having difficult conversations.  Should have given more emphasis to this or warned about it - or emphasized that their goal was not to produce a plan or product, but the process of discussion was most important. 

• Some tables got very focused on some philosophical issues related to goals and stuck.  Didn't have enough time to focus on applying the tools.  This could have been how to the scenarios were written.  Also, I feel we should have hit a gong after the first 10 minutes and told people they had ten minutes to discuss goal and then move on.  I think the parts where stuck happens is with the goals and strategies.

• I heard people express uneasiness about investing the time without having guarantee of a pay off.  I think that is where the small proof of concept or low risk experiment comes in - but there is still some resistance to investing in experiments that are low risk.   I saw a bullet point in Owyang presentations that said "Experimentation leads to understanding."  I wonder what advice or what you need to communicate so you don't encounter resistance to experimentation.  What lies beneath this?  I suspect the issue of social networking - just say no without feeling pushed.

• Speaking with an authentic voice on behalf of your organization - where is the line between personal/professional networking and being a spokesperson for your organization on a social networking site.

• The nature of your contact with your network or friends and how you build it - transactional versus relationship building?  There is concern in investing high-touch time without a guarantee of a pay off.    I need more experiential case studies of this from nonprofits.  (My NTC panel on social media metrics, measurement, and roi will include a case study slam - so stay tuned)

The report out was amazing.  After each group reported out, I asked some high level questions and gave some observations.  It was a little nerve wracking to do that off the top of my head because when I listen  I have to process by writing down.  My problem now is that I don't do a lot of processing with a pen or marker/flip chart anymore -- but I was standing up there, so I jotted some notes down on my moleskin.  I should have thought more about using my laptop and the projector .... 

Observations

• Some strategies for offline/online engagement were discussed.  One of the scenarios focused on how to use social networking/media for a campaign around childhood obesity.   One strategy was to bring the kids together face-to-face to create content online about healthy foods and place on youtube, socnets.  But at the same time, this would also reach their parents who are decision-makers about food purchase/lifestyle.   What parent is not going to look at something their created?  The other brilliant idea was to use twitter and have kids report "What are you eating?" or food they eat can not an ingredient list longer than 180 characters.  This speaks to another "c" for social media besides community and conversation - creativity.  I'm not sure if creativity is unique to the success of social media or not, but I do think it is important.

• One group look at the metrics in terms of the ladder of engagement - both short term and long term effects.   I need to find a nonprofit that has created a socnet strategy based on an activism ladder of engagement and set up metrics for each stage.   Anyone reading this have that and willing to share with me via an interview?

• Tags as a metric.  Can you use the number of photos tagged as a metric for something on say, flickr.

• Getting buy-in from other people in the organization.  One group mapped out a strategy for how they would present this plan and map to others on staff to involve them in the implementation of the strategy - individuals using the profiles.

• All the groups shared some of their thoughtful questions about audience - is our audience on this social network?  How they look at their existing audiences by target group and thinking deeply as to whether a social network is the right approach.

• One scenario involved volunteer recruitment and one group came up with a strategy for using facebook group.  That the group would be small, but it would be a place where people would say good things to new people wanting to volunteer. So, how to encourage or identify evangelists for your organization in a socnet?

• Privacy issues came up as especially related to young people's projects.   

At every workshop, if possible, I ask people to write down on the back of an index card their name/email and one small thing they want to try in the next month.  I also ask if they have questions.  In the old days
of training workshops, I would ask participants to do this, but share their address.  Then, in 3 months I would put their index card in an envelope and drop it in the mail.    So, I hope to follow up via
email.

I will do one thing, I'm working on a content analysis of the action steps and learnings and am going to devote blog posts to those topics.  Some excellent ideas here.

Update:  Here's Amy's thoughts on the event.

Over the Shoulder Learning

 

Nancy has a post about "Over the Shoulder Learning"

I always try and promote the people and process stuff, but the reality is that tools are often the "door opener" to the process conversations because they are more tangible. So being able to "look over the shoulder" as someone uses the tools in a social context would be really useful.

I'm thinking about what we used to call "Shoulder to shoulder" learning in the old circuit rider days.  It is informal knowledge transfer around using the tools.  So, this is the network effect of that model.   And, I wonder how that can be facilitated by the Internet and Technology .... via screencasts, something along the lines of the design of jingproject. Anyway, more to ponder here.

 

Here's a ten-minute audio of her talk from LearnOnline

• The fact is that we don't know very much, but collectively we know a lot because people have different knowledge.   There are amazing things that can happen when we look over each other's shoulders.
• There is a long tradition of over the shoulder.  "Cheating."    We are peering over our parents as they cook and we learn how cook.  We watch people and learn.
• The observation is not enough, conversation.
• Leaning over someone's shoulder to see how someone does it.  Example from Twitter.  Group based IM tool that allows you send a message to a group.  What are you doing right in 140 characters.   People thought it was trivial.  She's been watching edubloggers ask questions.  "How do I convince school leaders that I should Twitter."   Someone answered.  Put it out on a wiki and asked for stories.  Using it in ways that I had never imagined.   It changed my perception of the tool.  It balanced my interruptive nature twitter versus productive nature of the tool.
• Productive way to learn how to use tools.
• Del.icio.us - a peer way to collect information. Not one person has to do it. Looking over their shoulder around a certain topic.
• It is hard to do it by yourself.  There's so much out there.   When I look over someone's shoulder, I organize my learning.  It's the context of someone's practice that makes the light blubs go off.
• This is a great if you're face-to-face, but if you're not.  Desktop sharing in conferencing apps.
• Another way is a screencast.  There are ways that technology allows us to look over each other's shoulder
• Formal ways include a peer assist.  A formal way to for others to help you.  These are done mostly face-to-face, but can be done online.
• Blogging.  Graham Wenger put it up - blogging allows to share what we're doing and allows us to look over each other's shoulders.  Connect with people who can advance our learning.
• Benefits for the person looking and be observed.
• Her dream: unconference.  What we had unconference with over your shoulder and worked in pairs.  Can you imagine the density of learning.

Teaching Tagging Online and Offline

Photo by Chris Heur I just finished the first part of a Webinar series on tagging for Extension.   What I have really enjoyed about teaching (and learning) with Extension professionals is their willingness to experiment.

A few weeks back Nancy White, Steve Song, and I traded some emails about workshop curriculum to teach tagging nonprofit and development professionals.  Some notes are on the KM4Dev Wiki.   So, its been on my mind how to translate some of the off activities to an online environment in light of the Webinar.

When doing the icebreaker face-to-face, I ask people to “tag themselves” with actual tags and then walk around the room and find someone they want to have a conversation with based on their tag.   So, I wanted to port this online.  The Extension initiative using Adobe Breeze with has a chat function that is has private chat.   I had about 20 people on the call.  Here were the instructions:

• Pick three words or tags that describe your work focus that you are most passionate about    
• Something you would love to have a conversation about it    
• Type those three words into the chat    
• Take a minute to scan the chat transcript (full screen of that window)    
• Find someone based on their keyword to have a private chat
• Have a conversation    
• Ask them to share an important web resources on that topic

In the physical room or face-to-face, people can see whether or not someone is talking with another person.  So, I was a little afraid that some people would get pinged by two others.   I got some questions about how to use the private chat and I was able to guide them through that.   What I didn't realize was that Breeze has color coding for the chat that indicates whether your chat is being shared with the group or another person.

As the instructor, in the physical space,  I say three minutes, but it may be slightly shorter or longer because I use the noise level in the room to determine when to stop and debrief.   With the chat, I had not idea whether people were engaged in a meaningful chat or not.    If I had everyone chat to one another at once, that might have been too chaotic.

The point of the exercise was to be able to say:

Tagging allows you to connect with other people who are interested in the topics you  care about – to share or discover resources.

We didn't get a chance to verbally debrief or via chat - what was the experience like.  So, I'm hoping some of the participants will offer that in the comments.

One of the questions that came up was "How do get a tagging community - does it start on its own or is there some guidance or facilitation?"  A little bit of both.

With the reflection exercise - I decided to create it by pointing to exciting instructional materials - both videos and text instructions. 

Now, I have figure out jabber ...

 

Tips for Dealing with Technology Meltdowns for Webinar or Conference Presenters

 

In Kevin's take on my session earlier this week, he suggests I develop a new seminar called "Tips for Dealing with Technology Meltdowns for Webinar or Conference Presenters."    I'll start off with a few based on my reflections from this week's Webinar and some from the distant past:

• A sense of humor helps.  Have a few jokes in your back pocket.
• Bring chocolate or your favorite candy and eat some if something goes wrong.  You'll start wishing more technical glitches

Others?  Leave them in the comments.   Looking for some tips, read Lindsay Bealko's excellent article on TechSoup about doing online trainings.