Useful Links: Tech blogs, the backchannel

Several Tech Blogs Worth Exploring. Oh Yeah, All by Women at JavaWorld is a good source of information for those looking for female tech bloggers, female conference speakers, and inspiration.

Web Teacher has posted about using the backchannel in the past. An event at HighEdWeb in Milwaukee earlier this month resulted in a backchannel revolt that made news in educational circles and serves as a morality tale for speakers and educators in the future. A few reports about the incident:

In my mind, no one should get in front of an audience these days without someone at their side monitoring the backchannel. If you start to bomb, you need to know it immediately and take steps to salvage the situation. If this presenter had realized what was going on, he could have turned off the projector and engaged the audience in a dialog about the topic. Or something. Anything. But instead, he’s now notorious for being a plodding dinosaur in a fast-paced world.

One thought on “Useful Links: Tech blogs, the backchannel”

  1. Very interesting. I was not convinced by that edu.Guru article though – this quote summed it up for me.

    “In a way, it was less about being snarky towards the speaker, and more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain.”

    My bullshit detector went off – that just shouts “rationalisation”.

    Especially in context with this comment on the article:

    “My concern is the lack of professionalism by the audience. It felt like a modern-day version of throwing tomatoes at him. Twitter is a public forum, its not the same as sitting through the presentation and complaining to each other about it later. I believe we still need a level of etiquette and courtesy, and what happened on Twitter went a bit too far.”
    .-= Masha´s last blog ..Bokkie at the Meeting =-.

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