There are ‘workshops’ and ‘workshops’, aren’t there? Some involve just listening, sometimes there is some token group discussion,  sometimes feedback on flipcharts. Occasionally, participants get to actually do things, and these are usually the best workshops. A few weeks ago, for example, I found myself as part of a group which was collectively balancing a thin plastic rod on its fingers; harder than it sounds, and surprisingly instructive.

I have sometimes found it difficult to translate intense and creative workshop activity into the online environment, and to judge by how rarely people try this, I suspect that others may feel the same way. A workshop at  JISC’s online conference (#jiscel11) given by Simon Bates and Judy Hardy of Edinburgh University, really broke this particular mould. Simon and Judy introduced us to the Peerwise system – developed and hosted at the University of Auckland – which enables students to write multiple choice questions, and to answer, comment and rate the questions posed by their peers. I think this is a brilliantly innovative idea, which I plan to write about elsewhere. However, the other aspect which interested me was the genuine interaction between participants which arose from the hands on nature of the activity. The whole experience was every bit as good as having the presenters in the same room. Completely from scratch, I acquired all the experience I needed to start using the system; including writing questions and answering, commenting and rating the questions of other partipants. Following that, we were able to come back and discuss how the experience had been, and how we could apply this to our own contexts. In other words, it was a complete workshop experience, except that it was entirely online. It has certainly cured me of the illusion that ‘interactivity’ in webcasting systems is limited to polling tools.

You can find out more about the Peerwise here: http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/. It is free and easy to use: everyone managed it online without too much guidance.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.