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2015 06-29--lita--blend it
The ALA Annual Conference 2015, facilitated by Paul Signorelli, focused on utilizing Google Hangouts for creating onsite and online learning spaces. Discussions included challenges and experiences related to online collaboration tools, aiming to enhance community engagement and interaction. The event provided resources for further exploration of collaboration technologies in educational settings.
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2015 06-29--lita--blend it
- 1. ALA Annual Conference2015 San Francisco Facilitated forLITA by Paul Signorelli paul@paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @PaulSignorelli, @TrainersLeaders June 29, 2015 Event Hashtags: #alaac15 #alaleftbehind Blend It: Using Technology to Create Onsite/Online Learning Spaces
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- 4. Google Hangouts: Settingup the Space
- 5. Google Hangouts: Seeing WhatParticipants See
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- 7. Discussion #1: UsingHangouts How might Google Hangouts help you reach yourlocal or extended communities in ways you currently can’t reach them?
- 8. Discussion #1: UsingHangouts How might Google Hangouts help you reach your local or extended communities in ways you currently can’t reach them? What are the biggest challenges you anticipate having to overcome in trying to use Hangouts orencourage others to join you in Hangouts?
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- 10. Practicing With EveryPossible Resource
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- 12. Back-ups: As Manyas Possible
- 13. How Big Isthe Room?
- 14. How Big Isthe Room?
- 15. How Big Isthe Room?
- 16. How Big Isthe Room?
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- 18. Discussion #2: UsingHangouts What tech challenges would you try to overcome when considering the use of online collaboration tools?
- 19. Discussion #2: UsingHangouts What tech challenges would you try to overcome when considering the use of online collaboration tools? What experiences have you had face to face oronline that you can use in yourexploration of online collaboration tools?
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- 28. Discussion #3: OtherCollaboration Tools Whatotheronline collaboration tools might help you betterserve and interact with those you serve?
- 29. Discussion #3: OtherCollaboration Tools Whatother online collaboration tools might help you better serve and interact with those you serve? What will you do in the next weekto experiment with online collaboration tools?
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- 35. Resources Session Resource Sheet: http://paulsignorelli.com/PDFs/NEKLS--Playing_With_Collaboration_Tools_Online--2015-04-29.pdf BuildingCreative Bridges Blog: (Articles about Online Collaborative Tools, Learning, and More) http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/ Michelle Martin, “9 Lessons I Learned From Running My First Webinar”: http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/2008/01/what-i-learned.html
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- 37. Questions & Comments… andEvaluation http://bit.ly/litaevals
- 38. ForMore Information Paul Signorelli& Associates 1032 Irving St., #514 San Francisco, CA 94122 415.681.5224 paul@paulsignorelli.com http://paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.c om
- 39. Credits & Acknowledgments Coffee:Photography by Paul Signorelli Networking Uncommons Hangout Screenshot: From archived Google Hangout on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR2XyaFeA68 Hangout in Networking Uncommons: Photos by Paul Signorelli NEKLS Innovation Day Rehearsal: Photo by Robin Hastings NEKLS Innovation Day—Day of Event: Photo from Johnson County Library (@jocolibrary) Twitter feed Globe: Photo by Paul Signorelli Screenshots from Google Hangout: From archived Google Hangout on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=GR2XyaFeA68 Question Marks: From Valerie Everett’s photostreamat http://www.flickr.com/photos/valeriebb/3006348550/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Editor's Notes
- #2 A funny thing happened on the way to an episode of Maurice Coleman’s T is for Training podcast that was scheduled to be held at the American Library Association 2015 Midwinter Meeting, held in Chicago: Maurice was unable to be onsite. So we decided to bring the conference to him and to other offsite colleagues in the same way that colleagues and I have created other blended (onsite/online) sessions: via a free online conference tool that any of you with a computer or mobile device and decent bandwidth can easily replicate—with a little practice. Let’s quickly define the technology we used: Google Hangouts work well at a variety of levels, including one-on-one synchronous sessions, sessions in which a presenter reaches all members of an audience online, and sessions like those I’ll be describing today, where we interact in a way that creates a blended onsite-online environment. There currently are two variations to Hangouts: Video Hangouts—which is what I frequently use and which can be set up with little or no advance planning Hangouts on Air—which are scheduled in advance, allow varying levels of interaction (some people can only watch, others are included as online panelists), and which automatically produce an archived recording that is posted on the YouTube channel that is attached to your Google account. Hangouts on Air also offer a variety of tools, including the ability to have participants’ names appear onscreen when they are talking.
- #3 Let’s go back to that T is for Training Google Hangout. As you look around the room we’re in, please try to imagine it with a hangout in progress—just as we were able to imagine the onsite Networking Uncommons at that American Library Association conference as a starting point for an online session. Like any other meeting space, the room we’re in today is adaptable; we wouldn’t have to do much to turn it into the physical setting for this blended onsite-online session. If you’re considering using Google Hangouts for your own online (or blended onsite-online) collaborations, you could start with anything as simple and accessible as your own workplace office, a space in your home, or any other space where you have a reliable Internet connection and some control over the lighting and the noise levels around you.
- #4 Equipment needs are surprisingly minimal: The onsite requirements, as you can see, include a laptop, a projector, a connection to a good sound system, lighting that can be controlled so what is projected onto the wall or a screen isn’t completely lost, and the best onsite tech support you can find.
- #5 Setting up the space is also fairly simple, but there’s a huge caveat to be offered here: leave yourself plenty of time to practice—and, if possible, hold that rehearsal at least a few days before the day of the event. We’ll talk about this a bit more when we discuss the actual mechanics of a rehearsal—and the time involved—but questions to address at this point include: Can everyone in the room see what is on the screen? Can everyone comfortably hear what the onscreen participant is saying? Can the offsite (onscreen) person see and hear what is happening in the room? Are there any problems that need to be addressed in terms of lighting and sound? Is the Internet connection reliable?
- #6 There’s a great deal to be said for making sure that onsite and online participants are seeing the same thing, which includes: A clear image of the presenter and/or any slides or other resources being shared onscreen The chat window that runs down the side of the screen Any screen-sharing you decide to do; this includes sharing your slide deck and pulling up YouTube videos
- #7 Since I’m always big on trying to define and document success, I work with my partners in online collaboration to see if we can create so strong a sense of presence that people in the room forget we are offsite. I’ve now done this several times, and a question we generally ask at the end is “How long did it take you to start feeling as if the person on the screen was here in the room rather than elsewhere?” The answers usually indicate that it takes five minutes or less if all is working well. I think that’s a pretty stunning thing to confirm, and it certainly gives us lots of food for thought as we rethink our ideas about whether online resources always produce results that are inferior to onsite interactions. (Notice I’m not even using terms like “face to face”—what we are seeing and experiencing is that “face-to-face” is a term that is becoming more expansive when onsite groups are able to interact seamlessly with online colleagues.) One other observation: think of this the same way you think about being in a movie theater; our minds work in ways that put the images and sound together to create an engaging experience—one that immerses us in the “reality” of what is happening on the screen rather than making us feel somehow distant from what we are seeing and hearing.
- #8 Let’s see how what we’re discussing applies to you in your own libraries…
- #10 I hope it’s not a surprise to any of you that practice—meaning rehearsal time—is essential to success. It’s a given that even our best-laid plans can and sometimes will go awry, so we might as well stack the deck in our favor by doing the best possible tech check we can. When I’m working in a new environment or with a new client, I’ll generally try to schedule a check of our equipment and connections at least a few days in advance, and I’ll work from the same space I intend to work from for the live session—my home office or a client’s workspace. I’ve even done webinars from hotel rooms when I was traveling, and I’ve done rehearsals from those same rooms whenever possible. We’ll try everything we know we’re going to do—testing the sound, making sure the text and images on slides appear onscreen within the virtual environment just as they appear in the original slide deck, watching for delays if we’re engaged in screen-sharing, testing to see if the use of video streaming negatively affects the quality of the presentation, and a variety of other things: If we can think of it, we test it, and we don’t assume that just because something worked elsewhere, that it will work here. If we’re doing something adventurous—like connecting online and onsite audiences via something along the lines of a Google+ Hangout—we’ll check for placement of the speaker system onsite to be sure the sound is as good as it can be. We’ll check for camera angles from a laptop camera to be sure the offsite presenter has the best available view of the onsite participants. We’ll walk around the room to familiarize ourselves with how attendees will see the images being projected on a screen or wall, and we’ll ask our online colleague(s) to let us know when there are parts of the room from which it’s hard to see or hear onsite participants. This does take a fair amount of time: I can spend far more time in tech checks than I actually spend in live facilitation in extreme cases. The first blended event I did like this—I was onsite with members of an audience, my co-presenter was elsewhere in the United States, connected to us via the Video Hangout—required two different rehearsals, each one lasting between one and two hours so we could identify and resolve problems we were encountering. The bottom line is that I have never once regretted that level of attention or preparation.
- #11 Rehearsals themselves really are great exercises in trouble-shooting and rehearsals. In preparing for the session we’re looking at here—for a Northeast Kansas Library System (NEKLS) session that Maurice and I did in April 2015 from offsite, we tried several things: When our sound wasn’t initially working, I called our onsite contacts—including Patti Poe, David Lee King, and Robin Hastings—on on my cell phone so all of us were at least able to hear each other. We also used the typed chat function within Google Hangouts and other video-conferencing tools to exchange thoughts about how to resolve the problems we initially faced. When I was trying to get a good idea of what people onsite would see, Robin very creatively a) used her smartphone to photograph the rehearsal in progress, uploaded the photo to an email, sent the email (with photograph) to me, and had Patti (in the lower right-hand corner of the photograph) alert me by phone that the photograph was waiting for me in my email inbox. And let’s not ignore one other great learning opportunity here: rather than cropping that photograph in a way that only showed the room, I’ve used an image here that includes enough to remind you that email was a vital part of our toolbox for the rehearsal. When we play in the world of collaborative tools, no tool—not event antiquated cell phones—need to be left behind.
- #12 The result of all this effort is that the event, under the best of circumstances, plays out as planned, as you can see here. And let’s not forget that we often are in less than the best of circumstances, so we have to be ready for anything we can anticipate, and be ready to improvise when things are not going particularly well.
- #13 I’ll be the first to admit that I’m nearly obsessive about having back-ups in place: My slide deck—if I’m using one—is on my hard drive, on my laptop, a thumb drive, on Slide Share, (sometimes) on my website, in the hands of my producer, and in the hands of any co-presenters I have. I have a printed copy of the slides and speaker notes (using the Notes Page format) that I have marked up with a highlighter and pen. I have a sheet that includes the log-in and password information for the session, and also have my producer’s phone number and email address on that same sheet in case we need to reach each other outside of the online space we’re using.
- #14 For the T is for Training Hangouts on Air and the NEKLS sessions—and for many other Hangouts I’ve helped facilitate—we made a point well worth repeating today: The room is far bigger than we initially imagine. As you look around—which I would encourage you to do at this point—think about the physical dimensions defining that space you’re using. Perhaps it’s 20 feet wide by 60 feet deep. But that’s not your entire learning space. When we acknowledge that I was in San Francisco and our NEKLS colleagues were in Kansas, we realized that the room was actually far bigger than the space you’re seeing: our room was about 1,800 miles wide. And when we tossed in the idea that Maurice was joining us from Maryland, we were suddenly in a room that was more than 2,800 miles wide—quite literally the distance from coast to coast here in the United States.
- #15 Additional thoughts on the size and the make-up of the room: When Maurice joined that Hangout on Air that originated from the conference center for the ALA 2015 Midwinter Meeting in Chicago, he initially came in via a mobile device he was using while his wife was driving us from his workplace to his home. That created some interesting visuals as the device caught parts of his face and, at one point, the top of the cab of his truck.
- #16 When Jill Hurst-Wahl joined us from her home in New York, she extended that particular blended onsite-online room even more. It’s worth noting that the reach of the session potentially is even greater since the Hangout on Air produced an archived recording. If we consider the fact that the T is for Training Hangout is still being viewed, we can see that it is no longer tethered to a specific time; that room is really open whenever someone wants to return to the recording and is even more open if viewers catching the recording continue the conversation by reaching out to any of us via email, Twitter, or any other online means of communication. So, we’re back to the question a the top of this screen…
- #17 …and the obvious answer is: the room is very big—the entire world, if we create a Hangout that includes participants from a variety of countries and continents. That’s something to keep in mind as your own audiences expand from the people in your immediate community to include anyone who is attracted to your library by the resources you offer through the online sites you maintain.
- #18 Jumping back to a conference setting—the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia (January 2014)—we see yet another wonderful example of minimal set-up creating fantastic learning opportunities that could, if extended, combine onsite and online participants. The space here is the conference Networking Uncommons—a place with chairs, tables, abundant power cords, good wifi connections—and, most importantly, a standing invitation (from ALA staff to conference attendees) to use the space as a place to meet and talk and engage. The “learners” in this setting are members of ALA’s Library and Information Technology Association who agreed to meet in the Uncommons for an informal conversation; when that conversation turned to a question about whether anyone was using Google Glass yet, and it became clear that one of the LITA members actually had his Glass with him, they quickly transformed the conversation into a learning opportunity centered on their attempts to conduct a conversation via a Google Hangout connecting them via the Glass, other participants’ mobile devices, and a laptop. A great reminder here for all of us: what at first might have appeared to be a very bizarre example of a bunch of people sitting together but more engaged with tech than with each other actually shows how “blending” an experience through a combination of face-to-face and online interactions can produce a wonderful and unique learning opportunity. All that limits us in this particular case is our imagination and willingness to explore—and we could easily have taken it outside the room…as we’re going to do now with an experiment. [participants to try setting up a Google Hangout from mobile devices and reach out to offsite colleagues who might be online]
- #21 Let’s build on the last idea we explored before the discussions we just completed… Twitter, as you know, is a very popular form of micro-blogging that, in theory and in fact, can put you in touch with people all over the world—that global room we’ve been considering. If, in fact, others see tweets using the dual #alaac15 and #ALALeftBehind hashtags we are using for today’s event, our room is even bigger than we’ve already acknowledged. The fact that people might be seeing and responding to tweets while we’re together for this live version, and that others may see the tweets later and join the conversation through retweeting or through comments means today’s room and today’s event can be bigger and much longer-lasting than we imagined it would be.
- #22 When we think about Twitter as an online collaboration tool, we have plenty of models: People onsite at conferences collaborate with offsite colleagues via Twitter. People in webinars collaborate with their co-learners via Twitter. And many of us use Twitter as a learning tool by participating in tweet chats: extended conversations that are centered around the use of a specific hashtag (like #lrnchat). #lrnchat is a great example of a community of learning in action: the collaborations take place in the form of hour-long conversations, on specific topics, at a regularly-scheduled time each week (Thursdays, 8:30-9:30 pm ET). https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/etmooc-and-lrnchat-when-communities-of-learning-discuss-community-and-produce-results/
- #23 Let’s take it outside the room again. Using #alaac#15 #ALALeftBehind again, please tweet out something you think our “Left Behind” colleagues would appreciate knowing about what is happening or has happened at the conference, and let us know if you receive responses to your tweets.
- #24 The opportunities to collaborate via Twitter are really only limited by our own imaginations, as we see in this example: Betty Turpin, one of the learners in an ALA Editions Social Media Basics course I taught online, eventually hit upon the idea of using Twitter to orient a group of library-school students from the University of North Texas who were going to be completing a project onsite in Stuttgart, where Betty was serving as a librarian. Her orientation via Twitter was incredibly engaging: she sent out a couple of tweets each week to introduce the incoming UNT students to the library, the staff, and the city. And she very creatively included pictures that brought the information to life. (My favorite was the picture introducing her staff colleagues to the students: staff members were decked out in their Halloween costumes. https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/learning-social-media-with-our-learners-revisited-tweetorientations/
- #25 Facebook, although many of us see it primarily as a social tool, also provides magnificent opportunities for collaboration—particularly if you use the private group function to create a collaborate workspace or use the chat function or newly-developed video function to draw colleagues into levels of engagement you might previously have overlooked.
- #26 Combining the private-group and chat functions, for example, Social Media Basics earners and I were able to conduct live weekly online office hours within Facebook. The structure was very simple: participants knew when I would be actively monitoring the private group and responding via chat; they were able to pose questions about the coursework we were covering together so I could facilitate their explorations of the topic; they were able to interact with each other just as they would have interacted if we were in a physical rather than virtual office space; and we posted the transcript of the chats so those who were unable to participate synchronously could join the conversation asynchronously later either within Facebook or within the course bulletin boards we were using in our learning management system. https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/learning-social-media-with-our-learners-pt-2-office-hours-in-facebook/
- #27 Storify—that free online social media tool that allows you to collect, curate, and post collections of tweets that share a single hashtag—is something we don’t normally see as a collaboration tool, but it actually provides collaborative opportunities at a variety of levels. If you have been engaged in a dynamic tweet chat, you can capture the collaborative nature of that chat via your Storify document. If you want to build upon the tweet chat collaboration further, you can actually annotate the tweets a bit. And published Storify documents can become part of a larger set of collaborations by being shared among members of the group engaged in collaboration.
- #28 Here’s an example: Attending an onsite conference session, I captured some of the content via Twitter. Returning to Storify later, I collected the Tweets into a document that included additional information I developed before posting the Storify document. Blogging about the process of creating that particular document in Storify, I created links that connected the blog piece to the Storify document, and shared both with colleagues. We—and you—could easily build upon the content of the blog posting, the Storify document, and any additional exchanges we have if we want to make it part of our collaboration toolkit. https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/connected-learning-mobile-learning-moocs-and-storify/
- #31 Our online collaborations begin when we identify an unmet need. It could be the desire to bring an offsite colleague into an onsite conversation, as we saw in the T is for Training session. It could be the desire to bring offsite presenters into sessions like the one we are about to conclude. It could easily be a chance for you to conduct a meeting or facilitate a learning session with a colleague in your library system.
- #32 We realized that our equipment needs are surprisingly modest.
- #33 We saw that adequate time for rehearsal and trouble-shooting is essential.
- #34 And we saw that our online collaboration tools tremendously expand the size of our learning spaces—we can, in many ways, see the entire world becoming our collaborative learning space if that’s where we are needed.
- #35 And we ultimately saw that the size of our collaborative learning space can be global if the population we serve is global—something that becomes more likely every day as our resources online reach and serve a global audience.
- #36 Several resources to explore…