Lauren ran our second experimental class tonight in There, covering the topic of municipal WiFi and the fact that many cities are trading users’ (residents’) usage information in exchange for discounted or free ISP services. Lauren discussed privacy concerns and why we should care about them.
A few things I noticed about the class this time around:
- Physicality does matter in this space. Until I started rotating the camera around, a lamppost was partially obstructing my view. (So, sometimes less is more).
- Unlike a physical+virtual classroom (or even in WebEx), in which students can chat with each other while the main presentation is going on without (signficantly) disrupting the teacher, in this space the chat bubbles pretty much command attention, and sometimes threw Lauren off. This would obviously lead to a different kind of etiquette — chatting is basically no different than shouting in class — though I guess some might note that even in physical+virtual classrooms, all the incessant typing is disruptive enough as it is. (Perhaps knowing this, our There.com veteran Kaylea didn’t add chat bubbles at all to the mix).
Unfortunately we found that switching to IM mode also cuts voice chatting. That didn’t solve the distraction problem — though opening up a chat history window might. - Maybe the upshot of the chat mechanism made me feel a little like I was shouting for attention. Or maybe it was because David and I were both a lot less shy about chatting away than Lauren was last week?
In the physical+virtual classes I’ve seen, a scribe usually plays the role of monitoring chats and calling the leader’s attention to important or intriguing points. If chats really go nuts, I could see this being helpful — just pick a member of the audience to be scribe for the day.
We decided that I would lead the next class on Thursday at 9:30pm EST, on the topic of web-based education and presumably its application to a MUVE space like There. Hopefully I’ll have some time to pull that together!
