Do You Backchannel?

In apophenia: I want my cyborg life blogger zephoria (aka Danah Boyd) talks about a culture gap she experienced using the backchannel at a recent conference. One of the conference speakers pointed her out as “not paying attention” because she was using the backchannel.

My frustration at the anti-computer attitude goes beyond the generational gap of an academic conference. I’ve found that this same attitude tends to be present in many workplace environments. Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we’re talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process.

A bit later in the article, zephoria asks,

What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement.

Do you see the backchannel a distraction, or as an integral part of the experience?

I, for one, will be using the backchannel extensively at the upcoming BlogHer conference. Are the speakers who see me busily thumbing my iPhone going to be offended? I hope not, because what I’ll actually be doing is sending out quotes of their brilliant remarks, looking up their blogs, Googling their names, watching what other people at the conference are saying on Twitter by searching on hashtags like #BlogHer09, and paying attention. Adding the backchannel to an event actually makes me hyper-attentive. It demands all my concentration to listen to the speaker while filling in the spaces with my own inquiries about the topic and pondering the thoughts of others via social media interactions.

At Technically Women, in Why Social Software Matters, Rachel Happe wrote,

Social software encourages the formation of networks, not hierarchies. With networks, the more effort an individual puts in, the more the individual is rewarded if s/he is adding value. This subverts hierarchical filtering of information and gives more influence to the contributors adding the most value. In healthy, well-functioning organizations, this will be seen as a great thing because it speeds the flow of information, discovery, and expert identification – and increases the productivity of the organization as a whole.

Rachel was talking about social software in general, but I think those statements apply to the backchannel equally well.

Backchannels are being used in classrooms more and more commonly. Last March, at SXSW, I attended a panel called Blackboards or Backchannels: The Techno-Induced Classroom of Tomorrow. One of the panelists, Diana Kimball, talked about the backchannel in education.

The Internet accelerates serendipity. The more people thinking about the same thing at the same time, serendipity happens. She runs a question tool for the class where she’s TA. It’s the backchannel for the class. She said it gets very lively and that she learns a lot from being in the backchannel. The backchannel chatter shows that people are intentionally engaged.

Intentionally engaged. In other words, paying attention.

At the University of Texas in Dallas, Monica Rankin offers Some general comments on the “Twitter Experiment”.

Overall, I think the twitter experiment was successful primarily because it encouraged students to engage who otherwise would not. Even in smaller classes, only a small number of students actively participate in class discussions. Students knew that their class participation grade would be partially determined by their involvement in these discussions and most of them seemed comfortable with using the technology to engage with the reading materials.

The backchannel in education points out

For the entire conference, the back channel chat, ‘chatzy’ had been used where both staff and students who physically and virtually attended the conference. I discovered that even parents of my students, back in Australia, were in the backchannel.

Olivia Mitchell pointed out 8 benefits of the backchannel to the audience in How to Present While People are Twittering and suggests

The typing means you’re provoking interest

Don’t ignore the backchannel if you are up in front of the audience. If you are on a panel, one member of the panel should watch Twitter (or whatever backchannel is used by most) throughout the talk for questions and comments that the panelists should address immediately. If you are speaking solo, especially to a big crowd, you need a friend who is appointed to watch the backchannel and alert you to what’s happening or to mention any questions that you should address.

Cross posted at BlogHer.

Useful Links: HTML 5, titles

Survivor: W3C is creative and funny and powerful and sarcastic from Burningbird.

HTML 5 is a mess. Now what? from Zeldman. A level-headed man, that Zeldman. Where’s my blue beanie? I should wear it all day today.

HTML 5 & XHTML 5: MIME is the answer from Molly reflects my own struggle with the specs.

HTML5 Tips: structural elements, Doctype and ARIA from iheni is a good review of the structural elements. No controversy, just a good resource.

To change the subject to something less contentious . . .

Your page title matters more than you think from All Access Blogging talks about titles and special characters in titles as interpreted by screen readers.

Useful Links: Open Web Tools, HTML 5 nav, CSS 3 Cheat Sheet

The Open Web Tools Directory lists the best available tools for Design, Code, Test, Debug, Deploy and Docs in a very cool HTML 5 display using the canvas element.

HTML 5: nav ambiguity resolved at zeldman.com is interesting because The Zeldman has the same problem I have with the HTML 5 specs, and also because the discussion that follows is fascinating. Don’t just read the article—read the comments, too.

CSS 3 Cheat Sheet (PDF) is another freebie from Smashing Magazine that is just begging to be used as a class handout. Match that up with the HTML 5 Cheat Sheet from SM that I mentioned a few days ago.

8 Great HTML 5 Resources

Here are my top 8 HTML 5 resources.

HTML5: The section element

This article is one in a series of brief discussions about the proposed specifications for HTML 5. View the Working Draft for HTML 5 at the W3C.

The section element is a new semantic element. It groups related content. This might be a part or chapter in a book, a section in a chapter, or anything that had its own heading in HTML 4. Each section may include other new semantic elements such as header and footer, and well as various kinds of HTML elements such as images, paragraphs, list, etc.

The section element essentially replaces the generic container div element, which in past practice has been identified with an id or class attribute for styling purposes. The div element carries no structural meta information with it, however. Presumably, one would now assign ids or classes to sections of the page for styling purposes. As you’ll see in the next example, a page can now have more than one header and footer element, so the old habit of identifying these parts of a page with an id may be less useful than using class designations or descendant selectors based on the ID of an individual article.

A page could have a number of sections, each with header and footer elements.

Here’s some W3C example code showing how an article (another new semantic element in HTML5) could include some section elements. The code:

<article> <header> <h1>Apples</h1> <p>Tasty, delicious fruit!</p> </header> <p>The apple is the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree.</p> <section> <h1>Red Delicious</h1> <p>These bright red apples are the most common found in many supermarkets.</p> </section> <section> <h1>Granny Smith</h1> <p>These juicy, green apples and make a great filling for apple pies.</p> </section> </article>

Here’s how that displays, unstyled:

Apples

Tasty, delicious fruit!

The apple is the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree.

Red Delicious

These bright red apples are the most common found in many
supermarkets.

Granny Smith

These juicy, green apples and make a great filling for
apple pies.

The Opera browser, Safari, Firefox, and, to a more limited extent Internet Explorer, support some or most of the HTML5 specifications, including the section element.

One section element can be nested inside another section, in a similar manner to the way div elements are now nested. Or, using the chapter analogy, one section of a chapter might have several nested sections, each with its own header and possibly footer.

HTML5: The nav element

This article is one in a series of brief discussions about the proposed specifications for HTML 5. View the Working Draft for HTML 5 at the W3C.

The nav element is a new semantic element. It is meant for navigation or a table of contents. Each nav may include other HTML elements, particularly lists of links. The nav element is meant for blocks of links, not for individual links mentioned in textual content or for links in the footer area of a section or article.

It replaces the concept of a <div id=”nav”> element with a semantic element meant specifically as a navigation area.

As with other new semantic elements in HTML5, there may be more than one nav element on a page. Perhaps global site navigation and secondary level navigation blocks for subsections of a site. They can be styled with hooks like individual id or class attributes, or using descendant selectors based on where they are nested on the page. The HTML5 replacement for what we have commonly thought of as a sidebar is the new aside element, which is meant to hold content such as the nav element.

Here is sample HTML for a nav element:

<nav><h1>The Navigation</h1><ul> <li><a href="/">Home</a></li> <li><a href="/software">Software</a></li> <li><a href="/support">Support</a></li> <li><a href="/about">About</a></li> </ul> </nav>

The Opera browser, Safari, Firefox, and, to a more limited extent Internet Explorer, support some or most of the HTML5 specifications, including the nav element.

HTML5: The DOCTYPE Declaration

This article is the first in a series of brief discussions about the proposed specifications for HTML 5. View the Working Draft for HTML 5 at the W3C.

The DOCTYPE declaration for HTML5 is very simple.
<!DOCTYPE html>

This DOCTYPE declaration can be used for documents that use either HTML and XHTML syntax. It is not case sensitive.

The proposal currently includes “legacy” DOCTYPES for software that expect a DOCTYPE to include either a PUBLIC or SYSTEM identifier, and is unable to omit them. That is,
<!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "about:legacy-compat">

In this example, the about:legacy-compat must be in lowercase. It can be use with either single or double quotes.

The W3C states that no DOCTYPE is needed with XHTML, however, if you use one it must be in a form like the second example given.

The Opera browser, Safari, Firefox, and, to a more limited extent Internet Explorer, support some or most of the HTML5 specifications, including the simplified DOCTYPE declaration.