Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Book chapter and presentation

Earlier this month Patricia Delich, Paul Stacey, and I presented our chapter for the upcoming book Education for a Digital World - Edition 2.0. (more details in earlier post) The presentation itself was a bit of a challenge -- an overview of a chapter in 30 minutes, giving enough of a context so it made sense to people who haven't read the chapter, and allowing enough time for questions. This is where collaboration really shines. Patricia was ACE at managing the preliminary planning for this. She prepared the presentation, offered several options for how to structure it, and guided us about how much time we should spend on each portion and what to emphasize. Best of all, she started EARLY with the whole process. Paul is the ultimate web conference facilitator, but he stepped back so that I could get some practice. Like Patricia, Paul emphasizes the importance of planning ahead. That involves writing a script, rehearsing, identifying roles, and arriving early to upload files, test audio, and so on. There's a lot more to this than people realize! I've learned so much from participating in live sessions with Paul, but I have a long way to go!

For our session we introduced ourselves, each talked briefly about our communities, then highlighted some recommendations based on our experiences with each community. Then we zoned in on common themes that emerged for us in the final analysis of our case studies. In keeping with the 30-minute time frame we held off on responding to questions until the end, but encouraged participants to post questions in the text chat as they came to mind.

Here is the latest draft of our chapter: Cultivating communities of practice: Analysis of 3 cases studies using the 7 principles and the Elluminate recording of our presentation.

As a side note, at CPSquare we've started a practice of rehearsals as a way to get feedback from community members on upcoming presentations. A nice idea, and it's proving to be very worthwhile!

1 comment:

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