This week we planned and began to engage in webinars. So far, I have attended one Webinar (archived) and participated in our webinar on Creative Commons & Fair Use. (To check out the archived webinar, go here). Both were definite learning experiences for me! As someone who has participated in a lot of professional development sessions in the past, it was great to see an alternative for online development. I like the idea that I can opt-in to the sessions I find most interesting, and it's a great forum for individuals to share their expertise.
Today I listened to Sherry, Chris, and Janeane's session on providing services for patrons recently released from prison, and I learned so much. This is definitely an area that I have no experience in, and I walked away feeling a lot more confident about my ability to serve the community.
One feature I am not so sure about is chat. On the one hand, the chat box is a great way to check for understanding, to take questions, and to engage audience members. On the other hand, it can be a major distraction. In our in-person one shot workshops we had very different norms for sharing the floor, but on chat, participants can talk the whole time. Having a chat monitor assigned in our team was really helpful in minimizing the distraction, but it still got off topic at times. Even as a participant I was sometimes distracted by other people's chatter and couldn't focus on the presentation.
What do you guys think about the chat feature? Love it? Hate it? A necessary evil?
I agree about the chat box. Having just finished my group's webinar it was very hard to follow both the script and the chat. Maybe that is the point of the moderators and maybe as the presenter gets more comfortable they will be able to interact with the chat more.
ReplyDeletethe chat during our webinar was awful! people started a string of emoticons and talking about the picture on one of the slides for almost the entire presentation! i saw similar issues in other webinars but i was really taken aback by how unprofessional everyone was in the chat.
ReplyDeleteI feel exactly the same way about the chat, and that really surprised me. I thought having a forum to talk during the presentation without being intrusive would be great-- but it ended up being that I could focus on either the chat or the presentation, but not both. In multiple webinars I participated in, I had moments where suddenly a slide was gone and I had no idea what the presenters had just talked about because I was only paying attention to the chat. Conversely, sometimes I'd miss interesting conversation in the chat (which by its nature is behind the presentation in terms of content) because I was trying to focus on the presentation. But I think chat's still a helpful thing to have-- "a necessary evil," as you put it. I think maybe the answer is stronger norms around how to use the chat. Not that that's easy, either.
ReplyDeleteThe few webinars I've watched, ours and others', have all had chat digressions, major or minor. I'm sure the fact that we know each other compounded the problem in our webinars, as well as other factors (like being the last in a string of 6 or 7.. I think people were getting a little slap-happy by the time ours rolled around). I think it might be useful to disable chat unless participants are instructed to enter feedback, but the idea of restricting communication feels a little.. paternalistic(?) to me.
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