Week 2 Elluminate B

I worked harder to make this week's Elluminate session a little more interactive. A bit more success — it felt much less sterile as compared to the week before.

My TA Amy experimented with uploading a powerpoint of the slides in advance from a PC to see if that worked any better then last week's screen sharing. The slides worked, but the keynote to powerpoint conversion was poor so I had to go back to screen sharing by the end of the session.

The problem with Elluminate screen sharing for me is that I have two large monitors, use Keynote, and make extensive use of Mac OS X's multiple desktop "Spaces" functionality, which Elluminate just doesn't like very much. I tried a laptop but then I couldn't read the chat very well. The compromise was to print my keynote presentation to PDF, display it in the Preview, turn off tools and sidebar, turn on single page view and automatic resize to window. What that allows me to do is make the presentation window much smaller (which incidentally speeds up the screen sharing), and reposition it so I can see the chat.

I had a few too many slides, but in spite of getting dropped offline for a few minutes at the beginning of the session, I was able to get through all of them in an hour and still have the better interactivity I wanted.

This is the second Elluminate session for this course, whereas I believe all of the other courses have had only one. I know I'm rushing the students a bit, but it will make them better prepared for the intensive.

Posted "The Braid" on Life With Alacrity

I was musing about the sterility of the Elluminate session on Monday, when I realized that part of the problem is that our class is in the Judas Number Group Threshold. If the class was smaller we could just all leave on our microphones on, or be more interactive. But given number of people online we could not do that.

This reminded me of The Braid, a process tool I haven't used since I started my blog Life With Alacrity, so I thought it was time to share the Four Table Braid. This idea won't work with Elluminate (though it might be an ideas to experiment someday with the breakout rooms feature), but it might be useful at the Intensive this weekend.

Preparing for Week 2

I'm being challenged this week to try to teach the world of blogging and the blogosphere in a single presentation and a couple of weekdays for the students to read them before the first BGI Intensive begins. There is lots of material all over the internet on blogs, but it is scattered all over the place, and much of it is very dated. Trying to wean it down to essentials for the students, and then figure out what is important that is missing to place elsewhere in the course has been difficult.

Also a challenge that half the students are relatively new to social media, and there are some basic skills that I want to teach. I wasn't happy with any of the existing web pages on good passwords, so I wrote my own on Password Best Practices. Ideally I think these skills, plus skills like Social Bookmarking should be taught early on to first-year MBA students, allowing this class to focus on more advanced skills.

I also need to write an article on on basic username and personal brand name usage, but the students need to have their personal brand strategy figured out first, which is a discussion during the Intensive.

First Elluminate Session

Monday was my first session teaching with the Elluminate eLearning software. I was well prepared for the session with a good concise set of slides introducing the course, my Scan Focus Act approach, Shared Language, and Social Bookmarking, but discovered last minute that my slides were too large to be uploaded to Macintosh version of Elluminate. Ended up showing them in screen sharing mode, which doesn't work great with multiple monitors and Mac OS X's Spaces functionality. However, it seemed to work out OK. Next time I'll try exporting to PowerPoint and have Amy upload it using the PC version of Elluminate.

I've been in quite a few Same-Time Different-Space collaborative environments, but I found Elluminate somewhat sterile. Although most all the students were there there it still felt like I was reading my presentation to a blank screen rather then speaking to an audience. I think it is the lack of continuous audio (you have to "press a button" to speak). I think it made my talk a little stilted, but we'll see. I also need to figure out how to get the students more actively involved — there is a chat backchannel, but it wasn't used extensively.

As I want this course to be open course, another challenge is going to be exporting the Elluminate session as some type of video. There is replay functionality, but it requires Elluminate and a BGI account. I think I may be able to screen record the replay to get the class into a video that I can publish.