Campfire Current Campfire customers can sign in here. Hello, We launched Campfire back in 2006 so teams could easily collaborate online in real-time. However, since we merged Campfire into Basecamp with the launch of Basecamp 3, we haven’t given the standalone version of Campfire much attention. Existing customers will be able to continue using Campfire as they always have. For those new customers who are interested in Campfire, we highly recommend checking out Basecamp 3. Onwards, Jason Fried, Founder & CEO, Basecamp
Google Wave As we announced in August 2010, we are not continuing active development of Google Wave as a stand-alone product. Google Wave will be shut down in April 2012. This page details the implication of the turn down process for Google Wave. Stage 1: Google Wave is read-only -- January 31, 2012 In this stage, you will no longer be able to create or edit waves. Marking a wave as read will also not be saved. Robots that try to write to a wave will stop functioning. During this time, you will continue to be able to export your waves using the existing PDF export feature. If you want to continue using Wave, there is an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature to import all your waves from Google. CCK08: Too Much Openness? One of the questions that came up in Alec Couros's excellent presentation in the Wednesday afternoon Elluminate session was whether there can be too much openness in this kind of networked, massively open teaching and learning environment. It is a good question, and one that gets at some of the aspects of CCK08 that I've found less than cozily enjoyable: the back channel chatter. Although my professor's p.o.v. makes me have a knee-jerk response to shush chatter, I know from my meeting participant's and student's p.o.v. that it is not necessarily disrespectful or off-topic, but can be a way of actively participating and creating connections among the group members (albeit not all members simultaneously). But in Wednesday's session, the text chat was a separate discussion that did not riff off of the audio presentation.
Userplane The Silent Room Tone I didn't actually get to see the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg interview yesterday at SXSW, but having read through about six thousand blog posts about it, I feel as though I've seen it. And, naturally, I have some thoughts about what happened, some of which connect to what happened the day before when I was on the same stage talking with Henry Jenkins. Most accounts of the interview have talked about the role that the Twitter "back channel" played in the event. Clearly it was pivotal, and I think it sheds some interesting light on how face-to-face group events are changing thanks to communication tools like Twitter. I probably did more than fifty public appearances last year in front of crowds -- speeches, conversations, interviews, panel discussions, etc. This can be very hard to gauge, because the information channels that flow back from an audience to a speaker are very narrow ones. This is the main reason that I compulsively make jokes when I'm in front of a crowd.
Nurph Backchannels and Microblogging Streams These two things are really kissing cousins. BackchannelThe backchannel has really become my favorite tool of choice when I'm presenting. I've purchased an inexpensive ad-free chat room at Chatzy that is password protected and use it for my backchannels when I present. I like to find two people to help: one to serve as Google Jockey (a/k/a Link dropper) and another to serve as a moderator -- posing questions to me when I take a breath and ask. Gomeric Hill talked about the backchannel on a blog post. "The WebEx interface they were using to present Vicki’s Flat Classroom project has a chat that was used throughout her presentation as a backchannel discussion. Here was my response: I think this is a great post for several reasons:1) It demonstrates HOW things are happening now. Microblogging streamsThese are RSS feeds or searches enabled by the use of a twitter search engine like Terraminds -- searching on a keyword. Aggregating ourselvesSo, let me pose these questions:
TodaysMeet backchan.nl — a multi-site public backchannel system Digital Natives » Backchannels and Mythbusting: DN at Berkman@10 As the school year winds to a close and the summer hovers ahead, things are about to switch up a bit at the Digital Natives Project. More on that soon, in a series of farewell-for-now posts from myself and the rest of the 2007-2008 interns. But before we switch things up completely, I wanted to spend a moment thinking about the fascinating Digital Natives Mythbusting discussion that took place at the Berkman@10 conference on May 16. Since I ended up running the question tool for the discussion, I got a first-hand peek into how “backchannels” can work in conference settings. The second backchannel was Twitter—a sort of all-purpose, soundbite-based, socially-oriented repository for quick “tweets” about conference proceedings. The third backchannel, though, was to me the most interesting of all. In the Digital Natives Mythbusting discussion, the irony was thick and delightful. The discussion provides a window into an alternate view of DN issues.
backchannel The other backchanneling service I have extensive experience with is Cover It Live. Cover It live is actually considered a live blogging tool, a way to provide live coverage of an event to the masses as events unfold. But the great side feature to this is that the audience of the blog can interact with the person running the live blog, so a classroom teacher can actually use the service as a backchannel. By starting a live blog for an activity, a teacher can post questions to the room, which is going to be made up of students, and the students can respond to the questions and issues presented to them. At the top of the list of great features: the service is currently no cost (FREE!) Moderators are required to register to use the service, which is a quick and easy process, but students are not required to, which makes the service incredible easy to use with a class...no worries about needing an email account! To close out, a couple of technical notes.
Conference 2.0 » home How to Present While People are Twittering | Pistachio This is a guest post from esteemed presentations and speaking expert Olivia Mitchell. People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms. Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. However, a survey of leadership conferences from Weber Shandwick shows that there is a significant increase in blogging and twittering at conferences. So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops. Benefits of the back channel to the audience As a presenter, the idea of presenting while people are talking about you is disconcerting. 1. As a presenter, you might be worried that the back-channel will be distracting. Rachel Happe adds: 2. 3. 4. And what struck me was the dynamic of this meeting. 5. 6. 7.
Higher-Order Thinking: Content Analysis of Cognitive Presence in Chat Sessions