Speed Social Softwaring

I feel like I just finished a double marathon.

Kind of like the trendy “speed dating” events (no first hand experience here), I spent two hours this morning doing demos at Rio Salado College, the Maricopa college that specializes in online learning.

Inspired by a session at the EDUCAUSE ELI 2006 Conference where presenters used Blogger and an online survey, Rio’s VP of Academic Affairs, created a survey for their faculty (using SurveyMonkey) and asked for comments via a blogger site, to gauge their faculty’s awareness and use of many of the current technologies she saw and heard about at the conference. The results indicated a moderate general awareness of all of the technologies listed, but not a great amount of expertise in any one.

They made a grouping into four categories:

1. Informational/Relational: Skype, MySpace, Friendster
2. Journaling/Publishing: Blogging, YouTube, Flickr
3. Syndication/Resource Management: RSS, Tags, Social Bookmarking
4. Synchronous Communication: Breeze, Elluminate

I was asked to do a demo on number 3. It was set up so we had 4 demos going in in a room at the same time, and we had 30 minutes for our topic to 5-10 people, and then they all rotated, so I had to cover RSS and Social Bookmarking in less than 30 minutes.. and do it 4 times over. And since I had zero prep time, the demo was really me holding up my laptop to show stuff, and having pre-loaded sites available (thank you FireFox for loading a folder of bookmarks in tabs).

In a way it was kind of fun, and I told them it was ludicrous and stupid to try and explain both in that frame of time. Each topic is a half day workshop in itself. So it was more like, this is how I use it, this is how it works, this is how perhaps an instructor might use it, and slap in their hands a handout with a few URLs. Next!

But the point was just to plant seeds of ideas how this X.0 stuff is out there and what it offers. This was a high tech using audience, and there was no basic questions we had to cover, and they were doing good head nodding.

Please, don’t make me do this again, it is grueling.

FWIW, my handout of references (created 15 minutes prior)

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