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I led a workshop this morning on Being Creative in a Digital World (see pre-workshop post).
Due to the snow, I was unable to get to London, but by the magic of Webex, we were able to continue as planned. Working online did require quite a considerable rework of the workshop design. So we ended up with the following structure:
- Introductions - around the phone conference
- Some activities to get used to the features of the Webex environment (eg. Chat), at the same time as finding out more about the people in the room and what they were hoping to get from the session.
- A structured conversation, that looked at what helps us to be creative. This led onto thinking about Connectivism and our personal creativity and learning networks - ie. the individuals and groups we go to for help in solving problems.
- A walk around my own knowledge management and problem solving tools.
- Three activities away from the conference: Read Harold Jarche's post on Personal Knowledge Management; watch the Meet Jessica Slideshare presentation about knowledge sharing in Pfizer; identify tools that might help them create content, share content, collaborate on content, ask questions and make decisions. We used the C4LPT list as a starting point, and collected the ideas in a shared Google document.
- A plenary session where we shared the tools identified, and discussed issues about using such tools inside a corporate environment.
Lessons learned
- Planning for an online workshop requires much more explicit "getting to know you" activity, and explicit space allowed for raising questions, making comments etc
- Don't try to be too ambitious when asking people to use unfamiliar tools - especially when they require accounts to be set up (ie. Google Docs)
- Webex is really very good - especially when it comes to pulling video and web content into both structured and unstructed presentations. The only thing I miss from other tools is the ability for delegates to offer instant reaction feedback - via polls and visual cues.
- Qik - the mobile phone streaming video tool gets a very strong "Wow!" reaction. Even now, I can't quite believe that it's possible to point my cheap Nokia phone at the snow and get the video to appear instantly in a browser being displayed inside a Webex session!
- Doodle is a fantastic tool to get people started thinking about storing data centrally to make it easier to get things done.
2 comments
Creative thinking at it’s best. The very same thoughts were going through my head this week when it was a distinct possibility that neither tutor nor delegates may be able to get to the same venue for the two day workshop. The course was already part of a blend including online activities and our delegates would have been familiar with WebEx. The challenge would have been burning the midnight oil to decide on the running of the two days virtually. It’s a shame it takes extreme weather conditions for people to think more creatively but it might be the push needed.
It turned out that the plan b wasn’t required but I was secretly disappointed
Thanks for the comment Laura.
To be honest, much of what we do face-to-face could quite easily be done much more cost-effectively using tools like Webex.
We really need to think about what the real benefits of face-to-face are, and then use it for those. I’m thinking about interactivity; immediate, visual feedback; problem-solving - stuff that is much easier to do in a f2f environment.
Hmmm… I can feel another blog post coming on…
