Thursday 5 June 2014

Back in the ‘speaking saddle’…

… that’s right folks, despite being a dreaded vendor, I have recently spoken at the UCISA Using Social Media For Training event at the kind invitation of the lovely Gillian Fielding.

Bucking Bronco Matt

Gillian and I met several months ago and discussed potential subjects and settling upon me looking at the use of YouTube, whilst other facilitators delved into other areas.

As always, I’d like to share my ‘take aways’ from the sessions that I attended, as well as the content from within my session.

Sue Beckingham - Looking in from the outside: Developing your own windows of opportunity using Social Media.

Sue delivered a great session that I’m sure would have had a HUGE impact on those individuals who were still debating/in the tentative stages of using Social Media. The takeaway for me from this session, wasn’t the content as such, it was the way that Sue delivered that content using Infographics – which Helen Keegan has done a good job of capturing here. Thanks for the inspiration Sue!

Matthew Stephenson – Legal and Policy implications of Social Media

I have to be honest here and say that I didn’t enjoy this session. Whilst I understand that there are implications of using Social Media incorrectly and for that very reason it is important to provide a balanced view during an event such as this, I felt that this particular session involved a lot of scaremongering, which I actually tweeted and which attracted quite a few ReTweets

Some scaremongering taking place here. Suggestions that no1 should push boundaries & should wait for 'top down' direction #UCISASoMe

the notion of not pushing boundaries and waiting for ‘top direction’ seems very ‘old school thinking’ to me and I hope didn’t put any of the attendees off!

Gillian Fielding – Facebook for Facilitating

Gillian took us on a whistlestop journey of a recent ‘QR codes’ course that she had facilitated in Facebook and the successes and challenges that this had brought.

We were then asked to discuss whether the constant changes and updates to Facebook (which, unlike an LMS are obviously out of your control) meant that this platform was unsuitable as a VLE/LMS. Having had some time since the event to reflect upon this question, I feel that as long as the changes/updates haven’t lost any content and still allows the learner to interact with that content then it’s not really a big deal.

Let’s be honest, there will be a few reasons why you are choosing to use Facebook and as long as one of those reasons is because that’s where your learners eyes are then the chances are they have already cottoned onto the changes (as happened with the recent Facebook Timeline changes)

Yours Truly – Using YouTube for Training

Given that it would be somewhat ironic to attempt to do deliver my sessions content without using YouTube coupled with the fact that I only had 30 mins to facilitate my session I decided to record and publish a number of YouTube videos focussing on some ‘less obvious’ uses of YouTube and encourage attendees to view them in advance, interact with them and then use them as a catalyst for conversations during the the f2f session itself – a ‘flipped‘ approach if you will!

My greatest concern over doing this, was that the attendees may not have taken the time to view the content ahead of the session, however of the approx 50 people that attended my session (split over 2 x sessions), only 2 or 3 people had failed to viewed the videos in advance. I’ve no doubt that this was down to the very clear direction provided in the pre-event information.

Here are the videos; I’d recommend clicking through and watching them on YouTube itself, as that way you will be able to read the responses to the videos and more importantly view the video responses that many attendees (and even a few that weren’t attending) took the time to upload.

I even created one on my phone, titled it, tagged it and uploaded it via my phone just prior to my 1st session commencing to show how quickly it can be done, here it is.

Just prior to the event taking place (in fact it was on the train travelling to the event), I discovered a great little trick courtesy of Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers book that I unfortunately didn’t get time to screencast prior to the event, so I ‘walked and talked‘ the attendees through the trick with a promise to screencast it and post it to YouTube…..

…. as promised!

My next step will be to upload my slides to Slideshare, but more importantly (and time consuming) I’ll be adding some audio to the slideshare to create a slidecast.

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