Learning with the Fang

On Monday I ran a workshop entitled ‘Starting your blog’ at CISA’s Connecting Up 2007 conference in Adelaide, South Australia. The purpose of this post is to reflect on the experience and to provide an updated summary of the progress of the 15 new bloggers who emerged from the workshop.

If you are one of those new bloggers, please find a way to provide me with feedback on your experience at the workshop and progress to date - write your own blog post about it and LINK to this post, or leave a comment on this post, or if it is all too hard send me an e/mail (address available from http://mikeseyfang.com.

I was really encouraged by the experience and delighted that every single person who got access to a PC in the workshop managed to create a blog and write their first post.

Aim:

To give as many people as possible the opportunity to create a free blog and post their first entry. Encourage participants to keep posting and to try interacting with each others blogs.

Method:

Combine two one hour break-out slots of the conference timetable into one two hour workshop. Arrange tables in U shape and hire 13 computers with internet access. Conduct a brief poll of people who show up for session to decide on technical level of difficulty and how to share computers if required. Quick 10minute powerpoint introduction. Divide room in two halves (one half will use wordpress.com, the other live.spaces).

Result:

Fifteen people successfully created thier very first blog. I managed to tag twelve of them in delicious (six on wordpress.com, six on live.com).

About 20 people showed up initially and crowded around the U-shape desks, behind computers. Quick poll showed that nearly no-one had a blog, and only a few had used an RSS reader. After announcing we would stick to very basic, the numbers thinned to about 15. Did a quick powerpoint slide show and decided to do a 5minute demonstration of my RSS reader (NetNewsWire on my Mac). Lots of questions so stretched it to 10 minutes.

Through a series of cunning questions we divided the room into two halves - the wordpress.com and spaces.live.com crew, with newbies toward the front (where I stood with my mac and the big screen).

We began by creating new user accounts for those who did not already have a microsoft live id (ie passport or hotmail), using REAL e/mail addresses (so we could get new account verification mail and for future community development). Within about an hour everyone had created their blog and most had done their hello world post.

Allow those who wanted to leave for another scheduled session to do so at the top of the hour.

Brief pause to collect url for each blog (handwritten on paper) and to talk about comments and interaction. Most people experimented with various ways to connect with each other. Some fiddled with themes, customisation and adding photos. Work around the room to make sure each person moved on from where they were. One participant had made their blog private and we had trouble reversing that after a brief group discussion on public blogging and the permenant nature of writing stuff to the read/write web!

Unexpected Challenges:

But it wasn’t all beer and skittles - the hired PC’s arrived too late for me to test, so I snuck into the workshop prior to mine to see if all was going well. All looked well so I went to get a coffee. I sat in on the last part of that session and while fiddling with a vacant PC discovered that it could not connect to the internet! A quick check showed that every PC in the room had the same computer name and were complaining of ‘duplicate name on network’. The kind folks in this workshop hung around during the coffee break to work as a group changing the computer names and re-booting. Then only one PC could connect to the internet - YEP the hotel network was demanding payment and login. Fortunately the organisers had purchased access and produced little stickers for each pc. Unfortunately those stickers were nowhere in sight - a quick call to the organiser solved that in a flash. PHEW - internet access for every PC and only 5 minutes into the scheduled session time.

Couldn’t read all the hand written URL’s and it took a long time for me to tag each blog that I could read (and I got some wrong). Need to devise a more clever way for particpants to paste their blog url;s to a central something.

Feedback from participants:

<<<paste here as it arrives>>>

From the conference programme:

Starting your blog (and potentially podcast / vidcast)

Want to join the crowd and start your own new media empire?
Curious about blogs, podcasts and vidcasts but don’t know where to start?

In response last year’s well received talks on what these things are and why you might want to get involved – we are offering this presentation on how to get started. Mike Seyfang will show at least one way to start a blog and discuss a number of alternatives. The secret link between blogs, podcasts and vidcasts will be revealed, along with practical advice for dealing with the sound and movie files they require. This informal, workshop style presentation will leave plenty of room for interaction with the audience, and if appropriate address some key issues participants are grappling with.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:net2blazers, podblazers, cu07, nptech