A week of traveling through Tokyo, Koyasan, and Kyoto, compressed into two minutes.

Watching Japan from Juliette Melton on Vimeo.

Audio: hwy chipmusik by x|k

The typical “webinar” that I have experienced thus far involves an instructor speaking on a conference call while she pages through a series of slides that are viewable using screen sharing software such as WebEx. There could be some great webinars out there, but the ones that I’ve been involved with as a participant could be much better, both from pedagogical and user experience perspectives.

In a classroom, the instructor can look around the room to see if the students look confused or bored. This feedback helps her know if she should go back and explain a difficult point in a different way, or maybe tell a good story to wake the audience up. She can also ask poll the students, through a show of hands or more advanced solution, to discern the level of expertise of the group. She can then adjust her presentation as necessary.

A webinar instructor cannot see her audience. She doesn’t know if people are paying attention or falling asleep. She can’t easily poll her audience about their understanding of the material. She slogs through, slide by slide, with no way to easily adjust her delivery of the content or even know that she should adjust it.

Now let’s think about what a website can do, pedagogically. A user can go through material at his own speed, diving deeper into subject matter that he’s interested in or looking up any words that he hasn’t heard before.

The rigid nature of the webinar environment means that participants can’t adapt the experience to meet their learning needs, like they can on a website, and the instructor can’t adapt her presentation delivery like she can with an in-person lecture.

I posit that the webinar could be a much better learning tool by incorporating some of these aspects of in-person and online learning:

• Have the slide deck available for viewing or downloading at the beginning of the presentation. The participants can then go back and look at previous slides if they missed something, or skip ahead if they want to understand where the discussion is going.
• If the screen sharing tool has a chat function, use it. Ask the participants at the beginning of the session to share their level of expertise with the subject matter. You can make this easier by specifying for example that 1=newbie, 2=somewhat familiar, and 3=very familiar, and have them just type that one number. A quick scan will help clarify what kind of audience you have.
• Decide on a Twitter hashtag for the session, and share it at the beginning. Encourage participants to use the hashtag in their tweets. Monitoring the Twitter backchannel is a good way to know if the participants are bored or confused. (They are unlikely to use the screen sharing chat function to do this.)
• Share a list of URLs with the participants where they can get more information about your subject matter. Advanced members of your audience will benefit from being able to go deeper into the topic while listening to the presentation.
• Encourage the participants to use either the screen sharing chat function or Twitter to ask questions during the presentation.

Let me know if you have other tips! Let’s make webinars a better learning experience.

This is the first place I ever lived, in Austin, Texas. I haven’t been back in 26 years. The night was quite dark; I put the camera on the hood of the car, set it for a 10 second exposure, and crossed my fingers that it would work.

Two highlights of SXSW were seeing both Tori Amos and PJ Harvey in concert.

Tori Amos at La Zona Rosa on 2009-03-19. Canon EOS 5D, 70-200 mm lens at 89 mm, f/4

PJ Harvey at Stubbs on 2009-03-21. Canon EOS 5D, 70-200 mm lens at 200 mm, f/4

From a photo shoot for Bouclé SF. Photo by me, post-processing by Laura Brunow Miner, bag by Schauleh Sahba.

A view of Boulder (to the left) and the Flatirons from near the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Canon EOS 5D, EF 16-35mm lens at f/2.8, 16.0 mm

Two months without a post! There have been many better things to do than blog, such as:

• Traveling to hot places
  • Palm Springs and Joshua Tree
  • Orlando and Ocala, with a stop at Disney World
• Participating in SF absurdity
  • Bring Your Own Bigwheel race in Potrero Hill
  • Watching dodgeball games
  • Checking out the robots and mayhem at Maker Faire
• Just hanging around Potrero
  • Shooting portraits of Amy and Liz and climbing trees
  • Playing Scrabble, poorly

Over at linoleumjet.com I’ve posted some examples of my recent concert photography endeavors.

Rollingstone.com just published this photo I took of Ice Cube at his performance at South by Southwest.

Shot from the photo pit moments before Austin’s finest began shooing the photographers out. Settings: F4, 1/50, ISO 1600, 70-200mm lens at 185mm, and using a Canon 20D.

Mark Trammell interviewed Ice Cube today for the SF music blog Attacked by Jackets and I was there to record the moment. (There are more photos over at linoleumjet.com.)

An excerpt from the interview:

I was writing raps on the laptop at one point in my career, you know, earlier in my career. I think it’s always kinda been there. You know, when we started making music, they had one drum machine. It was an Oberheim DMX and that was it. Once all these different samplers came out, you know, that kinda turned us, somewhat, into techies. We had to go get the new drum machine to help us make better music. So, it just started expanding our minds on technology and what we had to do to make it work.