My number one goal for the weekend was to be more interactive — the Elluminate sessions, the reading, the activities are far too much of a one-way brain dump for my tastes, in particular compared to my style of coaching. Yet with 21 students, with a broad mix of extroversion/introversion, and huge range in comfort with online skills, I wasn't sure that a traditional class discussion would work. Thus I brushed off an old tool of mine The Braid to see if it could help.
My goals for Saturday were to recap my core lessons from the previous weeks: Shared Language, Scan-Focus-Act, Delicious, and I wanted to do a live demonstration of Google Reader. I also had a couple of students who had not really completed their assignments, so I wanted to make sure they knew their commitments.
Then I had some new Shared Language to attempt to introduce: the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model, and the Time Place Model, and their intersection and how it applied to when and how to use online tools. Then I wanted to start of the discussion of Privacy by introducing the Four Kinds of Privacy: defensive privacy, human-rights privacy, personal privacy, and contextual privacy.
After those basics I really wanted to get out of the way early any fear issues that might keep students from fully participating in the social web. Sunday I was more confident about focusing on Personal Brand and doing a tagging exercise that I've found useful, but I wasn't quite sure how to make Saturday more interactive. There were three issues:
- Our Shared Language process so far was still more of a brain dump and I to be more fully involved.
- I needed to create a supportive environment so that students could talk about their fears.
- I was worried that starting on a negative note, even with the Sunday "fun" stuff coming later starting negative might not be a good start.
We started Thursday with the Opening Circle, and there was a piece of paper circulating around about how with this number of people everyone only had 50 seconds at best. I thought this was a perfect example of the importance of knowing your Personal Brand.
I was quite pleased with interactive experiences in the CRL (Creativity & Right Livelihood) and LPD (Leadership & Personal Development), so I wanted to do at least as well with my exercises.
Also at CRL was some discussion about Community Agreements, and I realized that this would be a great way to address solving the problem of a supportive environment, to be interactive, and address the difficulties of online etiquette. So I decided to have the first two rounds of The Braid in my session to be on this topic.
At the Marketing session there was a frank discussion about the missing element of iteration in the model for The Modern Marking Process. This is a classic example of a Shared Language development, and I wished for the opportunity to create a new Shared Artifact that would reflect the group's ideas.
At the LPD class students opened letters they wrote to themselves a year ago. I realized this dovetailed perfectly with my ideas about Personal Brand being about the "Future You". I realized that almost every student here was in a transition, either between being a student and a future manager or some other major life change. So I decided to retarget my slides to match this fit.
I didn't hear any of the actual letters to self, but could hear some of the tears and positive support that the students were giving each other. This made me a lot more confident about Sunday's Personal Branding exercise, as I could feel confident that the students would be able to help each other in a constructive fashion.
I also got some advice from other faculty about how to phrase the questions in the last two rounds of The Braid where there would need to be some frank discussion about privacy concerns, and got some good feedback on how to better get positive results from "what is blocking you from" rather then my original phrasing. I also had fun doing my improv game "Amnesia Therapy" with Peggy Taylor and Simon Goland.
I also had some great conversations with my students. Carol Schreitmueller gave me the phrase "The Firehose" which I used repeatedly. Bonnie Wallace and I talked about interactivity and theatre.
By Friday night I realized a major rewrite was in order for my slides, so I didn't drum and didn't get as much sleep as I wanted, but the slides and exercises for Saturday were worth it.
Saturday evening after the dance and games, I realized that I my Personal Brand slides needed more work then I thought. I was confident about the exercise, but I realized my slides were oriented toward my corporate coaching clients, which tend to be more male oriented, or geared towards women having to live in a male-dominant culture. A lot of my slides were about understanding competition, which was less relevant to my students. So another major rewrite and even less sleep, but I was happy with the results.
We didn't quite get to the last couple of slides I wanted to show in the session on choosing keywords for yourself, but I was quite happy with the results of the Sunday session, and I got a lot of feedback from the students that they were happy too. I even got nicely upstaged:
I was also quite happy about the enthusiasm that a number of non-students had for my class. Caleb Bushner is a recent alumni TAing for Marketing, and he has offered to help Amy Hillman TA for my class. Dal Lamagna, the longtime BGI supporter who these elective courses are named after, Gifford Pinchot, the Founder for BGI, and Justin Tilson, a 3-year MBA student who took DLM last year, are all joining my class. I really appreciate their interest, energy and enthusiasm.
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