Mike Bogle’s reflection on his presentation skills – http://techticker.net/2009/08/27/self-assessment-of-my-presentation-skills/ – strikes a chord with me. I always unpick my ‘performance’ in detail after a presentation or a course, either online or offline – but I tend not to do it in public as Mike has done. Through a long career which has involved being interviewed, seeking promotion etc., I am still very cautious about who I reveal my weaknesses to. I think they are probably evident enough without having to point them out to people and I’m not as brave as Mike!

But Mike’s post has reminded me that since I have been working almost entirely online for about 5 years now, I find face-to-face work increasingly difficult. I spent many years teaching face-to-face and have done loads of presentations in the past. I used to do them so frequently that I never thought twice about them. These days I scarcely ever do face-to-face presentations, so it could be that I have simply forgotten how to do them – but I don’t think it is that. I think it’s much more that through working online, my whole approach to teaching and learning has changed. Like Mike, I don’t want to be the ‘sage on the stage’. I strongly believe that learners can learn as much from each other as they can from a ‘teacher’ and that part of a teacher’s role is to ‘set the scene’, so that this is possible.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to run a short face-to-face course and decided to try out taking my online approach into the face-to-face environment; it wasn’t 100% successful. I didn’t use any powerpoint, or a whiteboard (i.e. any form of presentation), but structured the session around a series of questions which I used as starting points for discussion. This is how I work online. Whilst the course participants engaged with the discussion that the questions stimulated, it was not the approach they expected and I could see that they weren’t completely comfortable with it. They were expecting something more from me, rather than being expected to create knowledge between us according to the needs of that group at that time.

This might sound as if all I did to prepare for that session was list a few questions. That is not so. I probably did more preparation for the course than I would normally, because I was not sure which direction it would take. But what I found really interesting and a bit unnerving was that it takes more than a short course to change people’s attitudes to what might be expected of a teacher or a course, and that what can work wonderfully well online, might not transfer into the face-to-face situation.

I realise that there are people who seem to be equally effective on and offline, but I wonder if a good face-to-face ‘presenter’ also ‘presents’ when working online, and if a good online ‘facilitator’ is also a ‘facilitator’ rather than a ‘presenter’ when working face-to-face. Of course it won’t be as cut and dried as this, but I do wonder whether there is a tension between these two ways of working.

There must have been some research done on this question.  I will have to dig around. I have started to think about this in response to ‘conversations’ with Mike and Lani on this blog and with John via a Skype call this morning.

Mike has commented that discussion is spread across blog comments, tweets, emails, f2f and wiki articles and that ‘All of these combine t make a really vibrant, indepth discussion, but on their own the comments on blogs may not appear to progress things very far’. I have been wondering about this. Is this true? Personally I feel that the conversations that I have on blogs can progress things equally as far (at least for me) as do conversations in other mediums, sometimes further and sometimes not as far.

For me blogging is a different kind of conversation, but I still have to sort out in my own mind why it is different. I like the ’slowness’ of blogs. The time to reflect. I can relate to a lot of what Lani has said in her comment and in particular to the mixed blessings of having an online voice, when all we might be doing in essence is ‘talking to ourselves in an open space’, but just making this available to others if they are interested.

But then as John pointed out when I spoke to him via Skype this morning, people blog for very different reasons, for example some people blog with the intention of teaching. I suppose people might also blog to reflect, to connect, to learn from others, to share with others, to express themselves, to provide a service, to educate and so on. Why else might people blog and why did people voluntarily blog on the CCK08 course, sometimes in preference to the other forms of communication that Mike mentions? And how do some people manage to find an online voice which is listened to when others don’t? What is distinctive about blogging? And is there anything distinctive about people who feel ‘at home’ in this medium?

Are these questions only new to me or have they already been answered elsewhere?

This is a question that has been asked by Alice  MacGillivray in one of the CPsquare community forums and an interesting discussion is going on there. It seemed to me that this question is very relevant to recent discussions in some people’s blogs about reasons for blogging. Do discussions happen in blogs or is it a different type of communication? Alice’s question was about posts made in any context, e.g, blogs, twitter, discussion forums etc.

In relation to blogging, this question gets at why people might receive comments on their blog.

This was my response to Alice in the CPsquare forum in relation to my work as an online tutor:

Hi Alice – this is a really interesting question. I work online all the time, as an online facilitator for HE courses in the UK, so this question is one I am always asking myself. What will my students find meaningful or valuable?  I think we need to separate out meaningful from valuable and perhaps understand what we mean by these terms.

Thinking about how to answer your question, I have gone to my own experience online. For me, the post has to resonate with my own experience in some way. It has to make a connection, either to my understanding and experience of the subject or in a social capacity. This initial connection makes the post meaningful and makes me read on.

Deciding whether a post is valuable or not is slightly different. I have to relate the post to my own context, experience and needs and determine whether the post will have an effect on any of these.  As a tutor online I try to connect with my student. To do this I try to find out as much as I can about them so that I can connect with them on a personal level and post something that resonates with their experience and is meaningful. I think this initial relationship building can help successive posts to become more meaningful and hopefully valuable.

Whether or not my posts are valuable is more complicated. It depends on my level of experience, knowledge, understanding and expertise compared to theirs and whether or not what I have to say fits their current context of what they need.

This was a quick and  ’off the top of my head’ response to Alice, and there is obviously a lot more to it than this. Definitely worth further thought.

This was a great presentation – very engaging, although my head was physically hurting by the end – and well summarised here by Stephen Downes – http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=136

I think what I liked so much about it was that it was as if we were listening to a series of stories. I could relate to almost all the networks described by Valdis Krebs and illustrated by his slides.

Two particular slides were of particular interest to me:

1. Communities of Practice

Here we have 3 communities, the green, the grey and the blue all internally networked. It is the external consultants (the pink) who connect these separate communities. They are on the peripheries of the communities and yet are likely to have power and influence – or is this an assumption? If it is not simply an assumption, then what is the relationship between power, influence and expertise and the number of connections?

2. Online Networks

I think everyone was interested in this one as it seems to depict exactly what is going on in this course. But supposing the number of people and the people themselves were exactly those currently represented at the centre – would we still then see this network pattern – is it simply a function of its size or is it reflective of the nature of online relationships and working?

I signed up for this course yesterday http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/ - a bit late and am chasing my tail to catch up. I have briefly looked at some of the readings for this week, but none of last weeks yet. I have promised myself that I will not spend more than 2 hours a day on this.

I have spent most of my time struggling to get organised with the technology – setting up this blog (trying out WordPress for the first time), downloading CmapTools (don’t know why since mind mapping and me just don’t go together), bookmarking the readings, adding myself to the map, i.e. spending far too much time on the technology and not enough time on the ideas/concepts.

As for feeling connected: I only know one other person out of the 1900 people enrolled on the course. How’s that for feeling connected?