Good day folks! Our next update on what the SOBCon attendees are up since the conference this past May is from Sheila Scarborough. She is getting a lot done with newcomers to the world of Web 2.0:
Here’s what I’ve started doing (with Connie and some others) since I was inspired by SOBCon08:
We want to reach people who are new to social media/Web 2.0 – they understand that they need to understand it, but they “don’t have time” to understand it! With the Every Dot Connects consortium of communications experts, Sheila Scarborough is teaching a series of entry-level, practical Web 2.0 Tools workshops in the Austin and San Antonio area. We cover the basics of using LinkedIn and Twitter, we talk about Creative Commons on Flickr, we demonstrate shooting video with a Flip camera and uploading it to YouTube, and we are planning a big one-day workshop on blogging.
Lessons learned so far, for others who may wish to parlay their social media knowledge into similar workshops, is that it is easy to be so comfortable with the technology that you forget that your students are not (I confused one student by using the term “widget,” which was new to her.) In the classic teaching conundrum, it is hard to not overshoot some students while simultaneously boring others. We use a brief survey when students register on Eventbrite, to find out what they already know, and then work very hard to calibrate our presentations. Other lessons:
- Learning about LinkedIn is more popular than we thought – it’s seen as the most useful, professional Web 2.0 app.
- People CAN be convinced that Twitter is worth trying if you can explain exactly why you follow certain people and give specific examples of how it’s helped your business or personal life
- Teaching RSS is harder than we thought – there are so many readers available, people often don’t use the orange RSS button on their blogs and there isn’t nearly as much standardization of this feature as you’d think. Our students love Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, which we present as an alternative to RSS.
- Many people have never heard of Creative Commons and excited to know that you CAN find good free photography for blogs and other online content, if you follow some simple CC rules on Flickr
- Students are amazed at the ease of the Flip camera, and the quality of the videos.
Fellow SOBCon-ers are welcome to contact either Sheila [sheila at sheilascarborough dot com]or Connie Reece for more details about how we set up and run these workshops.
Thanks!
Sheila
@Stephen here again, to share with you some of the projects and business development that is happening in and around the SOBCon Community.
On Plurk, a newer microblogging/presence app, we have been having a series of “plurkshops,” an online DIY workshop where we start a topic and discuss it in real time, effectively turning Plurk into a chat room. This has been peer-to-peer knowledge sharing at its best. Some plurkshops have yielded over 600 comments in two hours, with the quality of the information shared being impressive. That’s a firehose of words, of course, so some of the participants have started writing recaps to summarize the discussion and put it into perspective.