24 April 2009: Views from the Chair - Childlike wonder

Every gathering of individuals represents a diversity of learning styles, experiences, and understanding of the topic at hand.  This fact has become an essential understanding over the years as I’ve worked with learners of all ages. This week exemplified that range of learners through the 26 sessions offered and attended by 729 separate logins (Note: this latter number does not reflect 729 different users, but individual logins across sessions.)   An analysis of these numbers reveals an average attendance of 28 participants per session with individual session attendance ranging from 10 to 99 participants.

Normally, I would focus my attention on these participants, the audience of the conference. While I am curious about who they are and how they have reacted to each session, I’d like to focus here on the presenters of those sessions.   What was their experience this week?

In the absence of any formal data, I can only share my observations of what occurred this week vis-à-vis our session presenters.  Prior to the conference, I had no knowledge of the experience of each presenter with respect to web conferencing and webinars.  Note that I’m not talking about the Virtual Conference per se, but the experience of using web conferencing software like Elluminate to conduct a presentation/discussion online.  Clearly, some of our presenters have conducted web conferences since they explicitly mentioned them during their session.  Even still, some of them may not have used Elluminate, which is similar, yet different from other platforms.

Prior to the conference, more than 70 different presenters and co-presenters attended one of the two Presenter Orientation sessions contributing to a 95% participation rate.   These sessions included not only an orientation to Elluminate, but also a look at best practices in web conferencing.   Of note, we emphasized the web conferencing perspective over that of a webinar to foster participation in each session.

My fascination over the week has come from thinking of our presenters as learners.  I was delighted to see that while they are all experts (or fast becoming experts) on the topics they discussed, they manifested a sense of child-like wonder and curiosity over the environment, tools, and techniques used to deliver their sessions.   I’m not talking about the Elluminate experts here.  After all, they didn’t really need to attend the Presenter Orientations.  My delight comes from observing those experts who embraced their duality as teachers and learners.   They demonstrated the utmost professionalism and patience while embracing an experience that may have been slightly outside of their comfort zone.

The most gratifying moment during the week occurred for me during one of the sessions.  I knew that the presenter had been in communication with the Session Moderator to collaborate in the presentation.  I had seen at least one of the email correspondences between them.  Frankly, with limited knowledge of the session topic, I was curious as to how the session would work.  The session began well and continued to flow smoothly, with occasional supports from the session moderator.  Then, as if the presenter had forgotten that the microphone was still on, we heard an enthusiastic  “This is very cool!” accompanied by a small chuckle, interrupting the flow of audio from the speaker.   This utterance occurred as the presenter was displaying the results of a poll just conducted using the polling feature of Elluminate.  The remark was an audible light bulb, reflecting the enjoyment of the presenter at learning something new.  Together with the chuckle that followed, the message seemed to convey not only an appreciation of what the web conferencing environment has to offer, but as important, the delight in the realization that, “ I just learned something new, and it was fun!”

These are the experiences we yearn to witness as educators.  These are the moments we hope to capture and replicate in our classes.  Perhaps one strategy for doing so is to place ourselves outside of our comfort zones where we too can have the opportunity to experience those moments.  By embracing our dual role as teachers and learners, only then can we truly empathize with what it means to be a learner, both online, and on-ground.

Bobby Hobgood, Ed.D.
NCDLA 2009 Conference Chair
ncdlaonline@gmail.com