The latest in the excellent Educause 7 Things You Should Know About… series is Backchannel Communication which is described as:
secondary electronic conversation that takes place at the same time as a conference session, lecture, or instructor-led learning activity
The backchannel at a live ‘event’ is usually informal and takes place on tools such as Twitter with the audience sharing comments, questions and links with each other while continuing to follow the the formal presentation. The 7 Things guide notes that increasingly the backchannel is being brought to the fore as speakers & lecturers positively encourage the audience to participate and then respond to questions posted. In some cases the communication is being displayed on screens within the lecture theatre.
Some institutions in the States have gone as far to create their own backchannel tools, for example Hotseat from Purdue University & the free to use Live Question Tool developed by the Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
There are a number of opportunities & challenges raised by the backchannel and I recommend reading the 7 Things guide in full: 7 Things You Should Know About Backchannel Communication (PDF)
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stanfordedtech/2091114345/
The earliest example I saw of this had a large screen alongside the presenter showing the proceedings from a chatroom where participants posted up their immediate reactions to whatever the presenter had just said. It was awful. Those who were not posting endless jokey comments up on the screen were mostly reading and reacting to the same comments, leaving scant few actually listening properly to the poor presenter.
The more recent Twitter version of the same thing is scarcely less hateful. At least I can easily opt out as an audience member, but as a presenter I am still faced with a room full of people hammering away at their chunks of real-time paraphrasing. (That assumes that I ever say anything worth paraphrasing, of course.)
Is it just me? It usually is.
You’re not alone with regard to the display of the backchannel within the lecture theatre (sometimes known as the frontchannel), I’m not a fan either. But I do find the backchannel useful to see what others are thinking, asking or bookmarking. While it can be easy to get distracted, generally not when it’s a good speaker!
People are always hammering away in presentations whether they are tweeting, emailing or taking notes, it’s just moving from pens to keyboards. As a presenter it’s something we have to live with I guess. I always work on the basis that people are taking copious notes and tweeting “I’m attending this great talk”.
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