CHAPTER 6

In-Person Learning Reimagined

IT’S 11:17 A.M. IN SÃO PAULO, Brazil. A stadium-sized room sports 4,500 pup tents, many settled by entrepreneurs and students, sleeping, finally, after another night innovating until dawn.

Campus Party organizers take over empty warehouses and even aircraft hangers, creating a giant petri dish where innovation thrives. The massive mashup includes fighting robots, beanbag chairs, leading-edge technology, big names in tech and science, and some of the youngest, brightest, most pioneering people in the world.

It’s been described as “Woodstock for young geeks,” focusing on technology, entrepreneurship, creativity, leisure, and the digital culture network.

Mix with that an Ivy-league level education and Outward Bound experience, rolled into one, and you’ll see why tickets are the hottest on the planet. In Spain, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, London, Brazil. Annual and bi-annual events have both a larger-than-life energy and an intimate feel thanks to clusters of activities and widespread use of social media that connect people directly.

As far as the eye can see, future tech leaders—young people in emerging markets, eager to make a difference and a name for themselves along the way—experience collaboration’s power firsthand. By uniting talent, they create the future.

They take learning very seriously, relevant not only to the future of the technology revolution, but also impacting on the future of the entire economy. They ask what new skills are needed and how this will be accomplished so passion can meet achievement. Together industrious people come up with solutions that can become products serving niches or whole industries.

Thanks to the arboretum-size pizza cafe and seemingly endless shower stalls, Campus Party smells sweeter than Woodstock would have on day four of a seven-day event. This is a new day and a new breed of party. Launched 20 years ago, having reached over 220,000 people, and still largely unknown in the English-speaking world, it’s coming to a country near you.

Each event delivers a heady cocktail, frequently provocative, challenging, polarizing, exhilarating, thought provoking, and exhausting—everything that a good conference ought to be (yet few actually deliver). Participants frequently, and in most cases good naturedly, are drawn out of traditional comfort zones to confront the new.

While Campus Party’s sheer size astounds, attitudes and vibrancy in the building take your breath away. In search of what is causing the buzz, you realize it’s not one thing, rather many.

Intentional Encouragement

Imagine yourself standing in line at a busy supermarket, waiting to pay and finally go home. Your mobile phone rings and you confirm you’re heading to Campus Party. You hang up, staring at the powerful device in your hand, wondering why you couldn’t use this same phone to check out and leave.

When you arrive at the event you share this observation. A young woman you’ve never met says she wrote some code that could be used for something like this. An old friend searches the web for news of a similar system he’s heard about. You calculate the percentage you would need to charge. Three more people begin writing other features, talking back and forth at their keyboards.

Within a few days you have a prototype. You pitch your idea to a roomful of leaders in various fields brought in by conference sponsors. They encourage your new team to consider where else this technology could help people get back to their lives. You’re energized as you refine what a few days ago was only the question, “Why not?”

We need to be more radical in asking how we would re-create companies today if we started from scratch, because I think we now have the social, cultural, and technological platforms on which to do a much better job.
—Lee Bryant

Innovation is not something you can directly pursue. At Campus Party innovation rises out of the creative tension and electrified atmosphere that comes from asking “why not,” followed by “how?” Trying, doing, mixing, fixing, then digging in again. It’s born out of circumstance, intersections, and need.

In their book Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breaththrough Growth, Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja introduced the colloquial Hindi word jugaad, which roughly translates to “an innovative fix.” Jugaad is widely practiced in India, Brazil, China, and Kenya, anywhere entrepreneurs pursue growth in challenging climates. Brazilians call this approach gambiarra. The Chinese call it zizhu chuangxin. Kenyans refer to it as jua kali. It’s a gutsy way to respond to adverse conditions, transforming insufficiency into opportunity.¹ Some of the most successful local innovations are simple solutions that address vexing problems fellow citizens face. For example, as part of the Campus Labs Smart Society challenge, technology teams use the FI-WARE platform to develop projects that could improve agricultural yields and protect communities from natural disasters.

One of Campus Party’s sponsors, Telefónica, awards a prize for the most commercially viable plan. The winning team gets a year-long contract with technical, marketing, and legal support so the ideas reach all the people who will benefit. Meeting with some of the teams, you discover each is authentically overjoyed at the opportunity to talk with people about their work. The prize was only a small part of what drove them.

Encouragement taps into an intrinsic well, filled as you turn a nascent idea into something valuable to the community around you. Encouragement amplifies as people celebrate with you because they know that what you can accomplish together is better than what any of you would do alone.

Inclusive Diversity

Campus Party, the brainchild of Belinda Galiano, Pablo Antón, and Paco Ragageles, was created to spur innovation in communities that have historically relied on the ideas of others. To generate energy and cross-pollinate thinking, they encourage something beyond working together with technology. They also focus on entertainment, geekdom, and #somethingbetter.

“It’s wide and it’s young,” says Galiano. “We unite talent. They create the future.” Young people want to put their creative skills to use for a larger cause. A report conducted by Euro RSCG showed 92 percent of millennials agree the world must change, and 84 percent consider it their duty to drive this change.

The same research showed a majority of millennials believes it is women, not men, who will lead change. Unlike some tech events we’ve all participated in, where men outnumber women five to one and everyone leaves their family back home, Campus Party nurtures a fusion of women, men, and children. While the tented areas are for individuals, some families come for the day, imbuing an even-deeper sense of inspiration, creativity, and energy, grounded in the real world.

This ensures ideas flow in what Steven Johnson calls liquid networks, representing a free-flowing, high-contact medium. Campus Party provides an environment where an eclectic diversity of thoughts collide, people learn faster, and ideas spread widely.

Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is your own.
—Bruce Lee

Writes Ragageles, “The word impossible only lives in the minds of humans who have never loved. Campus Party is about people who, through their love for technology, are making the world a better place and for them nothing is impossible. Habito en el tercer planeta del sistema solar [I live on the third planet in the solar system].”

Impassioned Hearts

At the heart of Campus Party is the human factor. A banner reads, “The Internet is not a network of computers, it’s a network of PEOPLE.”

And they are happy people, participants and sponsors alike. Sponsors get access to a massive pool of tech talent and the vibrant energy that comes along with it. They often hire people from the event and provide yet another value, moving passion toward purpose.

Thought-provoking talks are given on the main stage from Stephen Hawking, physicist Michio Kaku, cyber peace specialist Camille François, writer Chris Anderson, and father of DSL John Cioffi. News zapped quickly around the twitterverse as participants tweeted insights gleaned in real time. The event began showing up in the list of Twitter’s trending topics, and people worldwide joined the conversation. Everyone was using social media’s powerfully magnetic method while asking themselves how their very tools could be made better, more effective so that their full potential is realized. They talked with those around them, onstage, and friends back home about how to blaze trails that will endure into the next generation, perhaps beyond.

Much of the event is captured by a small video crew and posted to the event’s online community. People are connecting everywhere, blogging and typing, talking and reflecting, considering the implications of the experience on the work they do.

Radjou, Prabhu, and Ahuja found in their research that jugaad innovators rely more on heart and intuition than on analysis to successfully navigate a highly complex, uncertain, and unpredictable environment. “They use their gut intelligence and innate empathy for customer needs to innovate breakthroughs that defy conventional wisdom. Their underlying passion acts as the fuel that sustains their efforts to make a difference in the lives of the community they serve.” The fast-paced, volatile environment forces many to think on their feet all the time.

When Tim Berners-Lee set out to develop the web, he envisioned a technology that could serve as “a collaborative medium, a place where we can all play; a place where we can all meet, read, and write.”

That vision plays out each day in unconference-style BarCamps, global online mega-events like IBM Jams, by offline and online hackathons focused by the Management Innovation eXchange on management and Facebook on code.

At Campus Party, where Berners-Lee has spoken several times, he explains that he now sees how the connections the Internet enables encourage people to foster change even when they aren’t online. At this party, young entrepreneurs learn to be themselves, that they’re not alone, and that ideas come in all shapes and sizes.

By finding encouragement, catalysts, and heart, young people locate a fountain they’ll be able to learn from over a lifetime.

Brian Duperreault, president and CEO of the Marsh & McLennan Companies, has said, “There’s now an equal, and maybe greater chance, that innovative ideas will come out of [emerging markets], where the action is, where the need to deliver more for less is even more heightened.”

Campus Party is a global phenomenon leading the way; ensuring young entrepreneurs, women and men alike, are at the forefront of that action.

Growing Together

Coming together to talk, visit, and learn is as old as time. Using in-person opportunities to humanize learning that you’ve begun (and will continue) online adds a modern dimension.

Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory, which hosts communities and dialogues focused on what it takes to create transformative change, describes in-person events as a communal lab for growing connections and insights. “Incubation is spontaneous and palpable. It’s as if there are luminescent tags networking us together. There is an electric feeling of potential and possibility.”²

Why do so many people use the term “enterprise-wide” then? Why not “enterprise-deep”?
—Paula Thornton

At his two-day Business Innovation Factory Summit, held each year in the fall, unscheduled time is built into each day to facilitate what he calls, “Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects” (RCUS, for short). Attendees are encouraged to use the unplanned for serendipitous encounters where learning emerges in the moment.

“It is human nature,” Kaplan says in The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When the World Is Changing, “to surround ourselves with people who are exactly like us. We connect and spend time with people who share a common worldview, look the same, enjoy the same activities, and speak the same language. The most valuable tribe is the tribe of unusual suspects who can challenge your worldview, expose you to new ideas, and teach you something new. A tribe of unusual suspects can change the world if it is connected in purposeful ways.”³

Salima Nathoo, founder of RocktheGlow, says, “If you get a stage to share your knowledge, it is your duty to humankind to influence the way people think, live, believe, and behave—not just talk about yourself. Knowledge is power when it enables others to invite simplicity, ease, and greatness into their lives.”

Every encounter, be it in a physical or virtual classroom, social media or in-person conversation, is a platform whose best use is to make someone’s life and therefore universal existence, better. “It’s what we all want at the end of the day — better sleep, better health, more influence, lower gas prices,” says Nathoo. “We don’t want to climb the hero soapbox and take the caped crusader’s stance. We want to sit around the proverbial campfire to share stories … then take time to figure out what it all means. We don’t want to be like Mike, we want to be Mike or Michaela 4.0.”

Sociologist Ronald Burt has said that people who live in the intersection of social worlds “are at higher risk of having good ideas.”⁴ Ideas, like cold germs, diffuse through the relationships you have with people and the connections they have with others.

As Chris Anderson, who runs the talk-centered global nonprofit TED, points out, “You’re part of the crowd that may be about to ignite the biggest learning cycle in human history.”

By focusing on “ideas worth spreading,” TED stimulates learning and networking through the creation of previously unimaginable physical and conceptual connections. Learning springs from the community, the speakers, the seemingly unrelated videos, and the entertainment at the events that sometimes seems random yet is designed to be provocative.

At its core, TED is an environment that transcends traditional boundaries of time and space, where words like limit and impossible are not even considered. There is a strong belief that sharing ideas globally will catalyze even greater ideas and action from the power of community and the learning that naturally springs from within it.

TED promotes ideas, but those ideas flow from the creative power of an open-minded community, willing to listen and support likeminded thinkers whose collective clarity defines the problems they aim to solve. Anything is possible, and often becomes likely, through the power of collaboration.

To extend and deepen collective and individual opportunity to grow in the connected world, we’ve introduced you to social learning approaches you can use in your organization. People in physical proximity to one another can also use each approach we’ve covered up to this point.

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.
—John Rohn

In this final chapter, we meld the in-person practices we all know with technologies that can enhance the experience in fresh ways. As Soren Kaplan, author of Leapfrogging: Harness the Power of Surprise for Business Breakthroughs, says, “Go outside to stretch the inside.” Although our focus is mostly on conferences, many of these practices can be applied to classes and small ad-hoc and informal gatherings. We will show how the use of social tools can increase their value, making them remarkable and exhilarating.

Events can mash up the physical and the online worlds. Social networks you already belong to can connect you to people at the event who have interests similar to yours.

This chapter assumes you wear many hats. Sometimes you’re a speaker, playing a part akin to a teacher in a classroom, often on a bigger stage. Other times you’re an event attendee, a student of sorts, interested in learning all you can. Occasionally, you’re an event organizer or meeting facilitator, and sometimes you pay the registration fees for your employees, wanting the greatest value for your dollars and their time spent. These events can be conferences put on by professional event producers, corporate events, or gatherings of association members.

“The most valuable tribe is the tribe of unusual suspects who can challenge your worldview, expose you to new ideas, and teach you something new. A tribe of unusual suspects can change the world if it is connected in purposeful ways.”

—Saul Kaplan

In today’s connected world, you are probably also an influencer of the work done by those putting on events and who want your business or seek your counsel. Each role provides opportunities to make informed decisions and offer sound advice.

We address how you can take action in each role and then offer a glimpse of some alternative event formats that are beginning to catch on.

Speaker, Teacher, Audience, Student

If you speak often at events, meetings, or classes, you know firsthand that audiences no longer sit quietly absorbing your words and the images you show, waiting to ask a question or make a comment. Technology-enabled societal shifts have started moving the ground under your feet, says Joel Foner, a project manager, process consultant, and blogger, who has engaged large hyper-connected audiences for years.⁵

The new social learning, with its emphasis on people learning from one another, plays up the fact that both speakers and attendees have something valuable to share.

“What if you forked out thousands of dollars to attend an industry event—flight, hotel, Town Car, expensive sushi, fancy socks, designer suit to sit in the front row in a middle seat, listening to a person who enjoys the sound of their own voice and took pride in the chaos of mismatched colors and the unskillfully animated collision of Comic Sans, Calibri, and Times New Roman Bold fonts in the name of learning?” asks Salima Nathoo.

More importantly, what if this is a key part of “your own hustle for happiness. What makes you different, lining up with your branded boxed lunch and vendor swag, than the assembly line workers with their faded jumpsuits, hair nets, and lunch pails? What makes you different is capacity to engage. What really makes you different: Nothing, until you consciously click.”⁶

The benefits of collaboration are many and have not changed over the last 20 years.
—David Coleman

Olivia Mitchell, a presentation trainer who writes the Speaking About Presenting Blog and is considered the leader in tackling thorny issues about presenting in the digital age, says, “There has been a shift in power from the speaker to the audience. The best speakers don’t care about themselves, they care about their audience, and they care passionately, working hard to ensure everyone is getting value from their time together.”⁷

Through global communication technologies, people now have so much access to each other and to information that they’ve “grown accustomed to the idea that they can and should be able to discuss, rate, rank, prioritize, link, and converse in text with anyone, at any time,” says Foner. “They comment on and rate websites, blog posts, music, videos, books, vendors, manufacturers—and you and me. Social media everywhere has made this hyper connectedness part of everyday life.”

Robert Scoble, a technology evangelist, author, and popular blogger, reminds us that, “We’re used to living a two-way life online and expect it with an audience, too. Our expectations of speakers and people on stage have changed, for better or for worse.”⁸

Instead of looking across a sea of faces, you may be speaking to an ocean of heads looking down at their laptops and smartphones, or watching you from behind smartphones with video connected to people in other rooms and around the world.

When audience members using Twitter add an event hashtag (#) to their tweets, they open the conversation to anyone on Twitter who’s interested in the event, including those in the room specifically following that tag. For example, #SXSW is the hashtag used each year for the South by Southwest conferences, #CES is used for the Consumer Electronics Show, and #ATDyyyy is for the ATD International Conference & Exposition. Anyone can run a Twitter search to find all the backchannel tweets (which will likely include links, photos, and videos) related to that event.

Tools like Storify allow people to assemble related elements from various social media platforms, creating a coherent and annotated “story” from those elements. You can search on a particular hashtag and pick out the most relevant posts, all while eliminating duplications, which happen frequently when people are tweeting at conferences.

The back channel is increasingly a factor in any type of education where Wi-Fi connections allow people to chitchat, check facts, rate sessions, and evaluate their experiences. Continuous improvement in smartphones has also increased the number of pictures and videos that are becoming part of the backchannel.

Presenting while people are talking about you can be disconcerting and distracting. In the past, you may have used eye contact with your audience to measure their engagement. Now when you say something brilliant, instead of nods of appreciation, there may be a flurry of thumb tapping. This kind of communication can be terrifying to a speaker because everybody in the room and around the globe participating virtually can now rate you, share their thoughts, comment on your work for better or worse, and point out mistakes—or what they think are mistakes—in the middle of your sentences. For some people, that is “scary beyond measure,” adds Foner.

Mitchell says, “To balance that shift, there are huge benefits to individual members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting. Most of all, it shows people are interested in what you’re saying—so interested they want to capture it and share it with others.”

In-the-Flow Participation

The backchannel blurs the line between the presenter and the audience and even between those physically in attendance and those participating from afar. Now everyone can participate and share information.

Gary Koelling, founder of Best Buy’s BlueShirt Nation, said of a Twitter-fueled meeting, “What struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. It was participatory. No one was talking out loud except the guy presenting. But the conversation was roaring through the room via Twitter. It was exploding. People were asking questions. Pointing out problems. Replying to each other all while the PowerPoint was progressing along its unwaveringly linear path. The contrast couldn’t have been more striking. Here are two tools that couldn’t be more at odds with each other; the linear, planned, predictable progression of slides versus the raucous, organic free-for-all of Twitter. I wanted the Twitterfeed to actually change the presentation—to update it, edit it, extend it, pull it into areas it wasn’t exploring.”⁹

Graham Brown-Martin, author of Learning {Re}imagined and founder of Learning Without Frontiers, is passionate about learning, innovation, technology, music, and people. His greatest skill, however, has been in spotting trends early and connecting the dots. Although he’s put on dozens of events across the world, he doesn’t consider himself an event organizer as much as someone who brings together “happenings” that he would like to attend on topics he is passionate about and believes in. He brings about change by using social media to create a platform to see, hear, and engage with those doing remarkable work. He says, “It’s the only way to do it. Social media is the perfect way to connect with the right people, almost like osmosis, creating a venue—and opportunity—where we each can be more.”

In-the-Flow Focus

“Prior to the technology advancements, I backchanneled with myself,” notes Dean Shareski, a digital learning consultant. “That is, I processed by thinking or taking notes. I would ask questions and answer them myself. The more engaging a speaker, the less I backchannel. That said, some less engaging speakers who understand and permit back channeling can create as powerful a learning experience as the most dynamic speaker. The more the presentation relies on the backchannel, the more I focus. Knowing that my comments are going to be seen by the presenter or live participants seems to make me pay more attention. The more I’m allowed to interact and play with the content, the more I’m engaged and ultimately the more I learn.”¹⁰

People collaborate only when there’s a need to. The problems need to be complex enough to demand more than one head.
—Sumeet Moghe

Online community maven Rachel Happe likes that Twitter enables her to participate in presentations without disrupting them. Happe says, “Twitter allows me to add my perspective to what is being presented and that keeps me more engaged than just sitting and listening—even if no one reads it.”

Brown-Martin tells a story of being focused on real-time like no other. His youngest daughter, lovingly referred to as “Handheld Learning Girl,” was born several days before he was scheduled to launch an inaugural conference in 2005 on mobile learning. He delivered his daughter himself, at home with the aid of instructions on his smartphone because the midwife had not yet arrived. His daughter’s development as a person and the technology advancements in those same years offer a timely glimpse of social tool evolution.

In-the-Flow Innovation

As your presentation sparks ideas, audience members can tweet them and build on one another’s thoughts. They can build and share their own insight into what’s being discussed.

As a speaker, if you monitor the backchannel, you can innovate along with the audience. Jeffrey Veen, designer, author, and entrepreneur, was moderating a panel at a conference and monitoring the backchannel through his smartphone. “As the conversation on stage continued, the stream of questions and comments from the audience intensified. I changed my tactics based on what I saw. I asked questions the audience was asking, and I immediately felt the tenor of the room shift in my favor. It felt a bit like cheating on an exam.”¹¹

In-the-Flow Contribution

People tweeting during presentations add explanations, elaborations, and useful links related to the content. “My ‘take-away content’ from the backchannel equaled or surpassed what I got from presentations directly,” said Liz Lawley, professor, interactive games and media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “I can already see that there’s more I want to go back to and digest, discuss, and extend.”¹²

Instead of asking your neighbor, “What did she mean by that?” you can post your question to the group, and someone will respond. Social media maven Laura Fitton recounts a time when some of her colleagues, who’d helped with the presentation, were following the event virtually and were answering questions asked by those in the audience as she gave her talk.¹³

Remote or on stage, Bryan Mason, co-founder of Typekit, calls this person an “ombudsman for the audience.” At an event he and Jeff Veen hosted, they put a desk on stage and had a friend sit right there keeping tabs on Twitter, an instant message tool, and email, listening to what people were talking about. She synthesized the questions and sprinkled them into the conversation in real time.¹⁴

William Deyamport III, district instructional technologist for Hattiesburg Mississippi Public School District, focused his doctoral degree in social learning because he could see there was no excuse for teachers, administrators, or schools—like a job site or a concert—to be disconnected. He taught teachers how to develop a personal learning network through Twitter, a bookmarking site, where teachers themselves can pick what they wanted to learn, and who they want to learn from.

Social learning has proved to be the most powerful pedagogical tool we have.
—Henry Mintzberg

A private community was created for the district, designed to serve as a hub for teachers to post lesson plans, resources, and insights, providing them a space to ask one another, “Have you seen this video,” or “what do you think about this program?” This allows educators from across the district to pull and learn from each other’s talents and insights, even though they rarely have time to come together to collaborate face-to-face.

One posts a comment, another responds, and yet another adds their understanding. Together they’re learning in real time.

With this sort of approach, bringing in-person delivery and online connection, they can also be learning though their mobile phone under a dryer at the hair salon, at the dentist, or in line at Costco. Wherever people are, thinking “I’m going to be here for a while,” they can now also recognize, “Let me see what I can learn.” No matter where they are, they can tap into their local district’s brain share and the global community that surrounds us. Now there’s no limit to what you learn and how you learn. Deyamport adds, “For me, it’s everything.”¹⁵

In-the-Flow Connections

Being at a conference where you don’t know anyone can be intimidating. People who know each other cluster together, and you can feel out of the action. But if you participate in the backchannel, you get to know people virtually and can then introduce yourself in person at the next break.

Because of Twitter and Google+, Deyamport has had people at conferences engage with him for the first time as if they’ve met in person before. Those tools change the barriers people have between them in a way that makes them feel safe and invited to learn together right way.

He also knows firsthand that educators and leaders, even those responsible for large groups of students, feel isolated when they’re not connected with their peers. It’s harder for them to learn or network, or go beyond what their organizations give them.

He used to have to wait for leaders in his school district to formally request training. Then a colleague added a simple reservation system where teachers and administrators can request what Deyamport calls “personalized social trainings,” so he can stop by their classroom and show them more about Google apps, for instance. During a planning period or after school, teachers can get individualized instruction rather than “drive by training,” the old norm.

Other times, someone sees the requests of a colleague and asks if they can join in or, he says with some thrill in his voice, “they ask one another to teach something” without getting him involved. They form relationships around learning.

Moving to a connected model, they’ve transformed learning to a coaching process, where people think to themselves, “Where do I want to be in six weeks and nine weeks.” My job, says Deyamport is to “get educators excited again about what they’re doing. I’m there to support them, either by fixing a problem or helping them work together, reimagine their classrooms, connected.”

In-the-Flow Evaluation

With a backchannel you get immediate feedback when you search the event’s #hashtag and the speaker’s name and presentation keywords.

Paul Gillin, author of Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business! and The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media, still can recall years ago waiting six months to get audience evaluations, so the immediacy of tweeted feedback has been wonderful for him. He’s also used it to get a quick read on the tech savviness of his audience and adjusted accordingly.¹⁶

When reflecting on all the events he’s run in his career, Graham Brown-Martin recalls how he would know an event was working well when he received ample feedback, even when people sniped about the coffee or the price of London beer. He reposted all comments to an online community. It was part of the personality of his organization to encourage and publish commentary, even if it was outrageously negative. Asked why, he responds, “Because they can be so funny!” He adds that feedback can be helpful in seeing situations from others’ vantage points.¹⁷

The ability to build virtual relations and work with a myriad range of individuals from different cultures and countries will be increasingly critical in the coming years.
—Sahana Chattopadhyay

In-the-Flow Burning

Nicole Radziwill and Morgan Benton, associate professors at James Madison University, began thinking differently about in-person events after they were inspired by the culture and ethos of Burning Man, an annual gathering of approximately 70,000 people in the desert of northwestern Nevada.

Participants create anew each year Black Rock City, dedicated to community, art, and self-expression, based on 10 principles underlying the culture’s value system:

1. radical inclusion

2. gifting

3. decommodification

4. radical self-reliance

5. radical self-expression

6. communal effort

7. civic responsibility

8. leaving no trace

9. participation

10. immediacy.

With these values come a “rich, naturally social learning environment,” says Radziwill. No one is obligated to conform to the identities they have in the rest of the world. Benton adds, “The culture natively seeks to drive out the fear associated with new experiences and taking on new perspectives. Learning becomes more like breathing: everyone is doing it all the time, but no one really notices.” That’s how they both wanted their classes to be—and that’s what they are working toward creating in all of their work, their research, and the community.

The culture and community that have emerged around the Burning Man model create a “hyper-socialized” experience based on co-creating value across boundaries: the usual boundaries of experts and novices, the boundaries of time, and those of space. If everyone shows up with their best ideas and the openness to listen to the spirit of what others are saying, they can generate together new and stronger ideas that can spur on real change.

Events can provide a microcosm for studying idea generation, team formation, emergent leadership, new product development, and the full product development cycle compressed into a short time span. Gatherings organized in the spirit of Burning Man have a history spanning almost 30 years, involving groups ranging in size from just a few participants to tens of thousands, providing proof this sort of culture can work on many different scales.

What surprises newcomers to Burning Man, who have only learned about it online, is that there’s very little cell service in the dusty dessert. The digerati must use their authentic social skills to interact with one another … and only occasionally send pictures back home. 

Takeaway

We’ve all been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best intentions, things lose steam after the event is over and nothing much gets done. Can we—should we—really rely on just our brains and notes to gain value from events?

Twitter drags you out of your own head.
—Laura Fitton

Even the best presentations have limited value if you can’t revisit their best content as you reflect on what you experienced. New digital tools can support such access.

These include just-in-time book publishing, live blogging, and live video blogging.

Publish a Book

Just-in-time book publishing is a way for anyone to create and publish a book. Event organizers can produce such books compiled from content created by speakers and attendees. Pepper the book with observations from people walking the event, doing interviews, taking polls, and snapping photos.

The books can be sold online and delivered in hard copy. Events including PopTech, Maker Faire, and Web 2.0 Conference create their own books, sometimes from the main stage, giving participants a different medium to learn from over time.

Live Blogging

Live bloggers transcribe or create commentary about an event as it unfolds. The blogs (sometimes just a sharable document) capture the essence of the event and quote speakers taking the stage. These shared online spaces unite the offline and online character of events and bridge the voices of people in various places around topics that matter to them. Other participants in the room, people who are at the event but in another room, or people participating virtually can dialogue together around the blog, spurring on conversation, which can be brought back into the event to build even more ideas and perspectives.

Bloggers use conventional blog tools, shared document apps, wikis, or, for large-scale events involving many writers, may opt for tools specifically designed for live blogging so that it’s easy to cross reference between posts. Some of these tools even provide the ability to integrate images, audio files, video clips, presentation slide decks, and other multimedia content, enabling feedback and participation with the blog stream.

Noah Flower, strategy consultant and director of Knowledge Management at Monitor Institute, finds himself live blogging the events he attends as a way to reinforce for himself what he’s learning and also to provide careful notes for colleagues around the globe.

Live Video Blogging

Taking live blogging a step further, live video blogging enables bloggers to send real-time video streams to the web during events. With live video blogging, web viewers can see and hear the event as it happens, and those at the event can have a record of everything that happened.

Today, a handheld video camera, a webcam attached to a notebook computer connected to an application such as Google Hangouts on Air, or even just a smartphone that supports live video streaming can show thousands of people across the world the event as it happens and go viral with the event’s tweets and blog posts.

Because the stream can be recorded, after the event it can also be indexed and made part of a media-sharing site or online community along with videos captured but not streamed by event participants. Together these videos can convey a message and generate conversation that can lead to more learning and change.

Respond to Critics

As with all new and atypical ideas, there will be resisters. Here are the most common objections we hear and ways we believe you can address them.

Social learning needs community, blogging encourages it.
—Megan Bowe

People Aren’t Paying Attention

People who appear to be fully engaged with their smartphones and laptops may still be paying attention to you—even more so than if they are looking at you. But if you think you’ll do a better job if people are looking at you, consider opening your presentation this way: “I notice many of you are using your phones and laptops. I’m absolutely fine with that. But I also know that I can do a better job if you are engaging with me and looking at me. So when you’re not using your phones and laptops I’d love it if you can look up.”

Scott Berkun in his book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, describes an approach he’s taken. He says to his audience, “Here’s a deal. I’d like you to give me your undivided attention for five minutes. If after five minutes you’re bored, you think I’m an idiot, or you’d rather browse the web than listen, you’re free to do so. In fact, I won’t mind if you get up and leave after five minutes. But for the first 300 seconds, please give me your undivided attention.”¹⁸ Most people close their laptops and put their smartphones away.

Another approach is to put your Twitter ID on your first slide and then ask who in the room is currently on Twitter, a social networking site, or is live blogging. When you see their hands you know who is probably writing about you and not ignoring you.

People Cannot Learn From Me and Social Media Simultaneously

Many people still assume that someone who appears to be doing something other than listening to a presenter cannot be learning what the presenter is covering. This assumption, however, is not supported by evidence.

Many people use secondary tasks to help them stay engaged and focused. In an experiment reported in Applied Cognitive Psychology, doodlers were able to recall 29 percent more details from a phone conversation than non-doodlers, for instance.¹⁹

Researchers believe that by using slightly more mental resources, doodling helps prevent the mind from wandering. This study is part of an emerging recognition in psychology that secondary tasks aren’t always a distraction from primary tasks but can sometimes actually be beneficial.

Edie Eckman, fiber arts educator, author of How to Knit Socks: Three Methods Made Easy and The Crochet Answer Book: Solutions to Every Problem You’ll Ever Face; Answers to Every Question You’ll Ever Ask points out that when she speaks to people who are comfortable crocheting and knitting while listening, she sees laser-like focus. It’s as if the handwork allows them to connect with other people far better than if they were empty-handed.²⁰

The secondary tasks we use to stay focused are now often high tech. People can take notes on their smartphones and laptops, or they may have a game on their phone equivalent to doodling. Seeing a tweet can reinforce what’s going on in the session or introduce peripheral topics that will expand the attendees’ thinking. Taking notes in an online community can offer useful detail to others back at the office and provide a springboard for further conversation when returning to work.

Recommendations

We opened the chapter with a quote from Graham Brown-Martin because he has created dozens of events across the globe, combining the benefits of technology and the joy we get from connecting with people in person in real time.

As we spoke with Brown-Martin and others who are spurring on the new social learning at in-person events, we found the following themes.

Don’t Go Unless There’s Time to Share a Meal

People may open up more when sharing a good meal. If you only have time for one short day of people talking at you, consider ways you can learn from them online instead. So far, there’s no way to duplicate online that emotional connection—the joie de vivre, the juice—we share in person.

Trust One Another

To attend an event involves sacrifice. People come together because they are committed to getting something valuable from the event. When organizers trust attendees and speakers to determine for themselves what patterns are relevant, what connections are valuable, and which stories are most energizing, events are more likely to be memorable. Although it seems basic, our nature is to be prescriptive, to tell people what they are supposed to get out of an event, what conclusions they are supposed to reach, with whom they should collaborate, and what they should work on. If you trust the audience to create the insights and connections that make sense to them and you provide an environment that is conducive to connecting, the magic will happen.

Prepare Yourself

If you choose to go to an in-person event, prepare yourself beforehand by learning as much as you can about what the event offers. Kaliya Hamlin, at the forefront of the unconference movement, encourages people to identify questions you want to ask and topics you want to learn more about.²¹ Here are more suggestions for preparing:

• To prepare to visit trade show booths, type keywords about your industry niche into your favorite search engine and see what suppliers come up. Visit the websites of the companies that will be demonstrating their wares. Figure out which suppliers you want to meet and talk with.

• To prepare for the content of the event, read papers and articles posted to the event’s website before you go. See if speakers have posted slide decks from previous conferences and look through them.

• To get a sense of speakers’ styles, whenever you can, see if you can find videos they’ve shared and watch them.

• Get a sense of who will be there by reading the blogs and viewing different social streams of speakers and anyone you know will be attending.

Face time with other people is valuable, rare, and expensive. Have meaningful conversations, get advice from peers, and tackle challenging issues in ways that you don’t feel you could do online.

Get Twitter-Ready

If the conference doesn’t provide it, give your presentation a Twitter hashtag. Make it as short as possible so people can include it on every tweet. Make it unique so people outside your audience don’t accidentally use it. Consider firing up an app like Storify to collect, aggregate, and show the story that those tweets tell.

Encourage people to get the conversation going ahead of time by using the hashtag that you developed. Their questions may reveal themes you will want to cover in the presentation.

Stream and display the Twitter backchannel on a screen behind you that everyone (including you) can see and ask people to tweet their questions and comments. Spend time at the beginning of your presentation explaining how you will respond to the Twitter stream, and you’ll find audience members will be more likely to use it responsibly rather than tweet things like “Hi Mom.”

Ask a colleague or a volunteer from the audience to monitor the feed and interrupt you if any questions or comments need to be addressed right away. If you can’t find someone to take on this role, take regular breaks to check Twitter. You can combine this with asking the audience for “out-loud” questions, too.

Invite people to use the hashtag after the session, posing additional questions and tapping into the collective experience of others who participated in person or virtually.

Set a Mood

Consider all of the conditions that enhance a social atmosphere: time to talk with people, comfortable seating and lighting, and even good music. People tweeted, downloaded files from the website, ordered CDs, and talked to those around them while they listened. This created an energetic vibe that said, “Get ready for something great.” As a speaker, consider adding music to your presentation, providing time for people to talk with one another, and thinking about the environment you’re creating where people are excited to learn.