The Bamboo Project Blog

Virtual Career Fair Lessons Learned: Planning and Preparation

Virtual Career Fair and Job Shadowing Presentation

View more presentations from michelemmartin.

One of the projects I completed earlier this month for a client of mine was an online career fair. It was geared toward middle and high school students, their parents and educators.  Our goal was to expose them to career exploration information and some summer job search tips and techniques.

The event took place over a three-day period, with a "teaser" webinar the week before the career fair to help entice people to attend the sessions during the actual event. We used a wiki, a Ning network and a Twitter account for the bulk of our online outreach and interaction. We also set up a page describing how other individuals and groups could help us promote the career fair that included downloads of flyers and copy and paste info for them to include in emails and on their websites. 

The career fair included a series of live webinars that we then recorded and archived on our wiki for those who weren't able to attend the live events. We also had some pre-recorded webinars that were uploaded at different points throughout the three days.

The group I worked with on this project had worked together previously on other activities, but this was their first time doing something entirely online. They also had varying levels of expertise in using the technologies, so that impacted how they participated and what they contributed to the project.

The first part of the presentation above highlights some of what we learned and the outcomes of the event, but I wanted to highlight a few lessons and include some more here. I'm dividing this into a few posts because there are a lot of lessons. :-)

Lessons Learned in Planning and Preparation

• The planning time was less than it might have otherwise been because we worked with a team who has worked together before. I think we would have had to triple it if we were working with a group who had not developed the levels of trust we had.  I will say that the planning time was  equivalent to what it would have been if we were planning an in-person event, so doing an online event didn't necessarily save us any time in planning.

• It is possible to plan a big event without ever meeting in person. All of our meetings were conducted online and via conference call, which also helped us get comfortable with the technologies and tools for actually delivering the career fair. Since we were physically located in several different counties in the southeastern PA region, being able to do all of our planning without a physical meeting was a definite bonus.

• We used Google Docs for our meeting minutes, which was really helpful. We would log on to our webinar platform and I would type the notes as we talked. Team members who weren't able to attend a particular meeting could easily review what we'd discussed and it also made it easier for people to indicate when they'd completed a particular task or add information. We were also able to do a better job of documenting our process, which will be a big help the next time we do one of these.

• Practice sessions with the presenters were absolutely necessary and really helpful in making sure that everyone was comfortable with the technology. A few of the presenters had actually done webinars before, but most had not, so they very much appreciated the opportunity to try things out before their events. It also allowed me to make sure that the technology was working with each presenter's computer. I will say that for next time, I'm going to get more people to help with these practice sessions, as they took up quite a bit of time.

• Related to the practice sessions, it also worked out well to have a Presenter's Page with guidelines on how to participate in the webinars, suggestions for preparation and links to ideas on how to do effective online presentations. Not only was it helpful for those who had already agreed to participate, it was a useful presenter recruitment tool because it gave them a pretty good idea of what they would be doing.

• As I mentioned, the team I worked with to plan and implement this project had never done something entirely online. They also had varying levels of comfort with the different tools. What was probably the most interesting for them was seeing how we could actually do many of the things that they've traditionally done face-to-face in an online environment and how that actually expanded their reach. I think that next time, though, I would probably push them to actually use the tools themselves more. While a few of them, for example, added directly to the wiki, most would email me materials and information and then I would take care of the updating. It will be easier to do this next time because we all have a better idea of what we're doing, so I can focus more on helping them to use the technologies themselves.

In my next post, I'll talk about some of the lessons we learned during implementation of the actual event. I'd love to hear your ideas and feedback about experiences you've had in putting together online events.

Pixar University on Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age

Great video--some money thoughts:

• If you're looking for innovators, people who are going to create things that have never been created before or solve problems that haven't been solved, you can't look at their resumes and find evidence that they've accomplished what you want them to accomplish. It hasn't been done, so it's not going to be on their resumes.
  

• When you work collaboratively, you take someone's work and say "Here's where I'm starting. How can I 'plus' this? How can I build on it to make the person who gave it to me look good?" It isn't about judging the work, it's about "plussing" it.

• "The core skill of innovation is error recovery, not failure avoidance."

• "Looking for mastery in anything is a really good predictor of mastery in the the thing you want done."

• Look for the "proof of a portfolio, rather than the promise of a resume."

• We need depth AND breadth in people.

• "We want people who are interested, not interesting." Interesting is easy to get. Interested is a skill that's tougher to find. 

• Look for people who "amplify." When you go to them and say "I have a problem," they lean in and want to know more, rather than saying "I have problems too and I'll bet they are more interesting than yours." 

• Communication involves translation--if you're a tech trying to talk to an artist, you can't just "emit tech." You have to be able to translate into language the artist understands.

• People who are interested are much more willing to work on communication as a destination, not a source. They're willing to do the translating on their end, to make sure that things are understood by the receiver. Breadth--knowing about a lot of different fields/areas is what fuels that ability.

• On cooperation vs. collaboration--cooperation is simply doing your job and staying out of people's way. That is, it's work that one person could do, given enough time. An assembly line is a good example--several people, each doing their particular function and staying out of each others way.

Collaboration is something different. It means amplification--the amplification you get from "bringing together a bunch of human beings who are interested in each other, listening to each other, bring separate depth to the problem, bring breadth that gives them interest in the entire solution, allows them to communicate on multiple levels and finding the most articulate way to get a high fidelity notion across to a broad range of people so that they can each pull on the right lever."

Deconstructing the Work Literacy Learning Event

The Work Literacy online learning event is over and Harold Jarche has posted some of what he learned from our facilitation of the course. Time for me to share some of my thoughts. .  

Using Ning for the Course

Our first big decision was what platform to use. We ended up going with Ning because it integrated several different tools (blogs, forums, video and photo-sharing, social networking profiles, groups) at the right price (free). We also wanted to use something that would give people a true flavor of Web 2.0 learning. While Moodle would have been a potential choice, it's still a CMS and we wanted to see what would happen with a tool that was set up for social networking rather than for course management. We also considered using a blog platform (like Wordpress) and having people participate via comments and their own blogs, but decided that Ning might give us a fuller experience of using social media tools in a more integrated way.

From my perspective, Ning seemed to work well. It was more chaotic than if we'd used a structured tool like Moodle, and I know that some people struggled a little with feeling that they couldn't quite connect with what was going on. There was less of a step-by-step feel and more of a networked approach that, at first, was disconcerting.  But I also think with Ning we did a better job of helping people to form more social connections. The profile pages gave a good sense of who people were and I felt like I had more of a handle on having specific people involved in the course, rather than a list of names.

One thing that I think was a MAJOR asset of using Ning was the fact that it made it very easy for people to assume responsibility for different aspects of the course. We saw several people start up smaller study and interest groups and various forum threads that really added to the overall learning. Many people seemed to take ownership of the course in a way that wouldn't have happened with a CMS. That was one of the most positive benefits from my perspective of using a social networking platform--it really did a much better job of creating a community of practice/peer-to-peer learning environment. 

Facilitating the Course

In setting up the course, we focused on a topic per week, with different levels of involvement in the assignments--Spectators, Joiners/Collectors and Creators.  One thing we heard repeatedly was that people really liked the idea that they had permission to be spectators, dipping in and out of readings and forums as they wanted to. This kind of "lurking" behavior is the hallmark of any online course, but I think that participants were happy that being a spectator was a more "official" and sanctioned way of participating in the course, rather than a cop-out.

As Harold pointed out, the Ning platform did require us to act as synthesizers and information connectors  because great nuggets of conversation started in various locations (in individual blog posts, on forums, etc.) and they could easily be lost in the discussions. We tried to stay on top of that, though, and to pull those nuggets to the forefront by posting them on the main page, adding them to assignment pages and/or sending out blast emails to the entire group to let them know what was happening.

What was interesting for me as a facilitator was that I found myself paying much more attention to creating a particular kind of environment and trying to facilitate dialogue in ways that it's harder for me to do in a face-to-face setting. When I'm doing stand-up sessions, it's easier for me to fall into the "sage on the stage" kind of behavior, even when I'm actively trying to avoid it. But in an asynchronous, social environment like we had with the Work Literacy course, I couldn't be everywhere at once and I found that many other people stepped up to "teach" to others. I also found myself paying more attention to how I framed questions and assignments so that they encouraged thinking and dialogue. Not that I don't do this in face-to-face, but there was a different quality to my thinking in this setting.

Another interesting aspect was finding the balance between being an "instructor" and being a community facilitator. As an "instructor," I think that there's a tendency to want to comment on every blog and forum post. But in doing that, I'm reinforcing this idea of me as "expert" or "teacher," that I wanted to avoid. I really wanted to try to move out of that more traditional role and into a facilitator/community-builder role. I will say that in a lot of ways it was harder to do than I'd thought. There's a certain level of backing off that's necessary, but overall I think the community is better for it. 

Was the Course a Success?

I wondered before the course ended if we'd been "successful" and this was one of the questions we asked in the final week. We got some excellent feedback from participants on this issue that primarily indicated that people had defined for themselves what success would be and then participated in activities accordingly.

One big aspect of thinking about this was the level of participation. We saw a drop-off in the number of people contributing to forums, blog posts, etc. as the weeks went by, so we naturally had to wonder what this meant. I'm still not sure (Harold wonders if the course lasted too long, something I've asked too), but I'm not sure that participation is really the true measure of success anyway. Or at least it's not the only measure we could use.

What I do think we managed to do was create and foster a community of practice that, for a period of time, brought together a large group of people who wanted to work together on learning about using Web 2.0 tools for learning. Through this network of connections and discussion, we also created an excellent resource that will be available to other people who may want to explore these tools on their own, at their leisure.

I know that for myself, I "met" and had an opportunity to engage with the thinking and ideas of some really smart, interesting people--and even had an outstanding lunch with one of the participants, Catherine Lombardozzi, who happens to live in the Philadelphia area. So for me, at least, this was definitely a successful and enriching experience.

What Would I Do Next Time?

• I say this every time I do an online learning event, but I think that I'd shorten the course. If you're doing activities every day (like we did for the Comment Challenge), I think it needs to last only a week, maybe two. If we're doing one topic a week, I'm thinking that it shouldn't go longer than a month. More chunking and some breathing time in between might keep energy levels up.

• I would definitely do the three levels of activities again, at least in circumstances where that's possible. I think that explicit permission and encouragement for lurking really helps people. At the same time, I have to then be prepared for the fact that they WILL lurk.

• I will be more consistent with some of the structural aspects of the course. One strategy we used was to set up a forum to ask people what they wanted to learn about the next week's topic, but we didn't do that every week. I was trying to fit in the course around work stuff and some weeks were better than others for keeping up with different components. I need to be a little more planful on some of these pieces the next time around. There's only so much "building the plane while you're flying it" that I should do.

• I would definitely use Ning again for a project like this. Overall there was a lot of flexibilty and functionality that we were able to access and I do think that it encouraged more group ownership than we might have had using a blog or CMS platform.

• Related to the group ownership idea, I will be more explicit next time about inviting group ownership and suggesting that people feel free to take the learning in directions where they'd like. Paul Lowe volunteered to run a webinar (which was excellent), but he volunteered on his own. Next time I'd have explicit invitations for people from the outset and provide ideas and instructions to encouraget that thinking. (Although is there an advantage to waiting for things to evolve organically?) 

Overall, this was an excellent experience. I will say that I'm ready for a break though. :-)

How Do You Create a Culture of Sharing?

Yesterday I shared a couple of videos on real-life, online communities of practice. In comments, LaDonna Coy asks an excellent question:

I really appreciate this post. I've been looking for some good examples of communities of practice and here's two that are spot on. Thank you. I'm particularly taken by the sharing culture concept that Dave talks about and Rio Tinto does in practice. In my line of work we'd call it a collaborative culture.

There's a lot of organizations that simply do not have such a culture for a variety of reasons whether silo boundaries, competitiveness or perhaps simply the habit of working locally (co-located) but not connecting beyond in this sharing culture kind of way. I'm wondering if you have examples of companies or organizations that shifted the culture to one of sharing and how they may have seeded the shift?

By coincidence (or perhaps serendipity), Stewart Mader blogged today about an article I had bookmarked awhile ago on how to create a "know-it-all" company. In addition to some excellent real-life examples, it has a few tips that get at LaDonna's question: 

• Show personal ROI--how will knowledge-sharing help people do a better job or build their own skills?  Communicate this to people, even in the most competitive environments, and they're more likely to start sharing.

• Hire the right people--look for staff that want to share and that understand the sharing culture. Find people who talk about "we" instead of "I" and who tell stories about shared accomplishments rather than what they alone achieved. Probe specifically for examples of collaboration and knowledge-sharing that wasn't mandated.

• "Keep it real"--Related to point number 1, the article recommends focusing on nurturing communities around business needs. I would add, though, that there's much to be gained from allowing people to form their own communities based on their interests, etc. Although I think that organizations can certainly provide tools and guidance, if they hold people only to forming communities around "business needs," they're going to miss out on communities that might foster other kinds of relationships or future innovation.

• Recognize contributors--the most powerful incentive to sharing and creating a community is peer recognition. Find ways to acknowledge the contributions of those who share.

• Use a range of strategies, including face-to-face--technology is obviously a fabulous tool for nurturing communities of practice, so look at ways you can tie together different tools. How can you use blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, Twitter, forums, social networks, etc. to provide people with a variety of ways to share. But don't forget the power of face-to-face. Find ways to bring people physically together to share knowledge and form stronger community bonds.

What are other ways to nurture a culture of sharing within an organization? How can we create a foundation for building communities of practice? Do you have any real-life examples of how you can move an organization from a culture of competition or knowledge-hoarding to one that generously shares?

Some Video Advice from Two Companies On Using Online Communities of Practice

A couple of short videos on communities of practice. The first is from Dave Vance, former president of Caterpillar University, who shares some of Caterpillar's experiences in facilitating online communities of practice. His advice?

• You need to have a sharing culture to build from--communities of practice don't work in organizations that have a culture of hoarding information.

• It isn't about capturing the knowledge, although that can be a good side benefit. It's about facilitating the conversations between people.

• Caterpillar makes their communities as de-centralized as possible. They provide people with the tools, the guidelines for using them and some idea of the potential and then they leave it up to employees to develop their communities. One full-time staff person supports 4,000 communities of practice that include 40,000 Caterpillar employees.

• Don't worry that people will give bad advice. There are enough people participating in the conversations that if someone says the wrong thing, it will quickly be corrected. "You have to let it sort itself out," says Vance.

• Don't put knowledge through a vetting process. Again, because there are so many knowledgeable people, the system is self-correcting. Plus having to always vet information will certainly hamper any kind of sharing.

This second video is an example of the benefit of online communities of practice in the mining industry at Rio Tinto. It shows how through an active online CoP, one Rio Tinto division saved over a year's worth of work and headaches because they were able to quickly connect with another division that had experienced and solved a similar problem.

Both Caterpillar and Rio Tinto mention that their communities of practice save considerable time and money. What's also interesting is that these online communities are being fostered in heavy manufacturing types of industries where you'd think that maybe uptake would be slower. Not the case, though.

You Say "Tomato," I Say "Tomahto"

I'm working with the folks over at the e-Learning Guild on a project and had the opportunity yesterday to get a guided tour through their incredibly rich data. One of the practice searches we ran was to look at which online conferencing tools were being adopted in different sectors. What was interesting was that the tools being used by most businesses were NOT the same as the tools being used by education and government. It was like every sector from aerospace to retail was on the same page and then there were the two outliers--the educational community and government agencies.

This got me speculating on not only why this occurs, but, more importantly (to me) how this illustrates a gaping chasm between what happens in business and what's happening in education and government. Now I'm not suggesting that businesses, education and government should all be using the same tools. I recognize that different sectors have different needs and, therefore, might be more likely to use different tools. But what I wonder is if this doesn't contribute to a communication gap? Using the same technology tools tends to give us a common frame of reference. When we don't have that, it becomes more difficult for us to communicate. Might this kind of thing be both a symptom and a cause of communication difficulties between business, education and government?

I suspect that this is on my mind because I've been doing some thinking about something I noticed during the Comment Challenge. Several of the Challenge activities provoked some surprisingly (to me) negative reactions from participants, which, upon further investigation, seemed to indicate that we were having some issues with the language I used.

The first time I noticed this was in the activity where I suggested that people create a comment "policy" for their blogs. Several participants indicated that they didn't like the idea of a "policy" governing comments--they wanted people to be free to say whatever. This caught me off-guard. I personally hate policies (when used in the sense of rules) and I was thinking more along the lines of guidelines when I came up with the activity. But since most people call it a "comment policy" and I knew what I meant, I didn't think twice--just used the commonly referred to concept. That clearly didn't go over well, though.

This happened a few other times, too--on the activity where I asked people to consider how commenting impacting their personal "brand (another word people hated) and the next day when I suggested developing a commenting "strategy."

What I observed in this process was that the people who didn't care for these words tended to come from education, where "policy," "branding" and "strategy" may have some more negative connotations than I intended. It got me to thinking about the issue of culture and communication and how when we don't share a common framework of understanding--when discussions are framed using words that carry powerful positive or negative emotional weight--they can seriously impact communication and trust. (Read George Lakoff's article on framing and politics to see what I'm talking about).

One of the benefits of homophily, of course is that it creates this common cultural language. If I say "brand" to a group of marketers, that's a really positive word--everyone understands and supports the concept. As soon as we start trying to expand beyond our usual circles, though, (like using the word "brand" with educators), issues of language begin to loom larger, even when we think that we all mean the same thing.

All of this has me wondering what we can do to encourage cross-community conversations by being more purposeful in our discussions about language. I can see, for example, that I should have explained in more detail what I meant by some of the words I used during the Challenge activities. This might have prevented some misunderstandings and helped me be clearer myself about what I meant. It also, presumably, would have improved the learning experience for Challenge participants.

It also has me realizing that one of the key work literacy skills we need to cultivate is cultural competence, and not just in the traditional sense of being able to work with people of different racial/ethnic backgrounds or with people from different countries. There are cultures all over the place--in different professions, organizations, and communities. They may or may not give the same emotional weight to certain words that we do. It becomes critical for us to be able to recognize when language is impeding our communications and find other ways to operate within the same frames of reference.

What do you think? How can we address these kinds of issues to improve the quality of our communications with others who may not share our same frames of reference? How can we nurture these skills in cultural competence to improve both our personal learning as well as our interactions and work?

False Starts and Learning Through Conversation: An Interview on Social Media and Learning with VCU Staff

UPDATE--Be sure to check out Britt Atwood's take on our discussion here.

The other day, I had the great pleasure of doing a Skype interview with Britt Watwood, Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl of the Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Teaching Excellence. I've been corresponding with Britt on a variety of topics for awhile and Bud and I had bonded over Jott. Through our interactions and though reading their blogs, I began to see how social media seemed to be changing their learning and teaching practices. There is also a clear sense of camaraderie and of three people working together on a learning journey that I thought was really interesting so I asked Britt, Bud and Jeff if they'd be willing to do an interview with me. Luckily they said yes. Click above to listen or you can also find the interview here.

Interview Highlights
Our discussion is about 24 minutes, a little longer than I'd intended, but they had a lot of really interesting things to share. A few key things that came up:

• Through blogging, social bookmarking, etc. each person's work practices and interests have become more visible to the others. This mean that they are able to better share resources and ideas because they know the thinking that's going on and what each person is exploring. This has also increased their own learning as they are able to follow along with what the others are doing so they can start exploring those topics themselves.

• Even though they have physically been working together for a few years now, their online activities have strengthened their off-line relationships and professional work with each other. Jeff, Bud and Britt meet regularly for coffee to discuss what they're learning, but they also "meet" on weekends and in the evenings through the technology. This has given their professional learning and interactions a tremendous boost. I think it also highlights something important--that the benefits of social media aren't just felt online with people half a world away. They can also be experienced very locally, actually making relationships within organizations stronger as a result. This is something that a lot of people don't get about social media, but it's a really critical point.
  

• Jeff pointed out in the interviews that working with two other people who are using social media has helped them overcome the fear of jumping into the tools, especially their fear of blogging. Their feeling is that without the face-to-face relationships they'd built, they might have struggled longer with a fear of taking risks. But because they have each other to act as cheerleaders and coaches, they're moving much more quickly into exploring and adopting different tools.

• They also reminded me that using social media, especially blogging, is full of false starts and moving in and out of using different tools. In fact, this should really be considered a very natural part of the process that we acknowledge and support because it just goes with the territory. What we need to do is help people stay engaged on some level so that when they're ready, they can come back to a tool they dropped for a little while. And as Jeff points out, having two channels of communication--face-to-face and online--can really help that process of adoption.

One thing I noticed is that you just can't anticipate what tool will get people excited about social media for learning. I've had a lot of people identify blogging as their gateway into social media, but for Jeff, Bud and Britt, it was del.icio.us that got them going, despite the fact that Bud initially thought that "folksonomies" sounded a little ridiculous. Fortunately Britt heard from someone in Romania who was using del.icio.us in her classes and it's been a wild ride ever since.

What I really loved about the interview was how infectious these guys were in communicating their excitement about learning and the tools. It's one of the main reasons I wanted to interview them and this enthusiasm is even more apparent in the discussion.

Related to all of this, I also encourage you to check out Bud's recent post on what he's been learning by using social media--a really great example of reflective practice.  You may also want to add Britt to your de.licio.us network. The man is a bookmarking fiend. 

Some Technical Notes
I used the Pretty May Plug-in for Skype to record the interview. Very simple--just click on "record call."  It worked well, but we did have some problems with Skype fading in and out at certain points, which was something I couldn't fix. It also seems to have recorded our conversation in two separate tracks. If you listen to this with headphones, I'm in your left ear and Britt, Jeff and Bud are in your right. Also something I couldn't seem to fix in Audacity.

For uploading and storing the file, I used the Internet Archive, which is a nice free resource if you're willing to have your audio be public.

Open PD--Professional Development on a Global Scale

Via Stephen Downes comes this link to the Open PD project, a world-wide professional development opportunity for teachers to learn about social networking tools together. What's interesting to me is the model, which could be applied across occupations, industries and topics. This happens to be a group of teachers learning about social media. It could just as easily be a group of managers learning about how to support their employees.

The group is using basic tools available for free--a wiki (hosted on Wikispaces) for managing and sharing course materials and Skype and Ustream for audio and video interactions during "class." It also looks like some of the participants are creating wiki-based portfolios for professional development credits.

If you watch the video, you'll see that teachers from the US, Australia, Argentina and other countries are participating in the project. Imagine the learning that occurs when you get not only the perspectives of people from different school districts, but from entirely different school systems.

Darren Draper, one of the organizers of the project, writes about his conception of open professional development, building from the ideas of open source software:

• Open Enrollment - All that desire are welcome to participate.
• Free of charge.
• Combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet.
• Built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint.
• Not limited to the course we've named OpenPD.  Thus more of a movement - like Open Education - than a particular class.
• At times can be on-demand - but not limited to such.  Sessions should be recorded and archived as a general rule.

These are ideas that can apply to professional development in any number of professions and industries, not just education, although one advantage teachers may have is that there is more of an organizational culture of professional development that has evolved over time than may exist in other occupations.

Most definitely an interesting model to watch.

More on Facilitating Blog Conversations

Last week's post on facilitating conversations between commenters on a blog post opened up some great discussions, both in comments here and at other blogs, that I wanted to try to pull together a little. Warning--ill-formed "process post" ahead.

As you'll recall, I started with asking some questions about what we as bloggers could to to expand conversations so that they didn't just occur between the blogger and the commenter, but also between commenters on a particular post.

I mentioned that I thought part of the problem in doing this is the very nature of blogs, but Christy Tucker said it far more eloquently than I did:

Part of it boils down to the fact that blogs really are designed more for the conversations around one person's ideas than around each other's ideas. Conversations that are really in-depth are often more suited to become actual posts, either on the original blog or on the commenter blogs. And blogs in general are more for parallel dialog than direct dialog; George Siemens wrote about this idea last January on his connectivism blog. Much of the conversation with blogs isn't through comments, but through other blog posts responding to those ideas.

True. Blogs, by their nature tend to be a one-to-many type of medium, despite our best efforts to turn it into something bigger and more community-oriented. I still control where the conversation goes by virtue of the fact that I'm the one who starts all posts. If I'm responsive to readers, I'll obviously take their interests into consideration. But reality is that I'm still the one in control. If I want more of a community feel, then forums are probably more suited to that because they allow others to start up their own discussions.

Related to this issue is the current state of blog technology,  which doesn't allow for very effective or efficient managing of conversations that occur not only in comments but also in responses to a post that are posted on other blogs. Yes, tools such as coComments and plug-ins that allow you to sign up to be notified of subsequent comments to a post can help you keep track of what's happening in the conversation in some ways. But, as Atul Sabnis notes

If we go by Christy’s thought — which I completely agree with — and in-depth responses to posts are presented as posts on the commentators blog, then we have a small problem of tracking the entire posts as responses — and someone who is tracking the topic, now needs to go many places to see what people are responding.

Is it possible for RSS to become slightly more intelligent such that it tracks (a) the comments on Michele’s post, (b) the response posts to Michele’s post, and (c) the comments/responses to the response posts on Michele’s post?

You can see that pretty quickly if we bring up a juicy topic, there are so many strands of discussion to follow that can add to our knowledge on all of this--the original post, blogger responses to  that post and all comments to each of those responses. These different strands potentially add to our exploration of the topic, yet we don't really have a way to keep track of all of that or at least I haven't seen anything that will allow us to have that level of tracking.  But maybe I'm missing something? Anyone know?

David Wilcox raised some new and interesting questions, too, about how to spread blog conversations beyond blogs into face-to-face, Facebook, mainstream media, etc. Interestingly, this entire discussion originated in our Building a Better Blog social network and I pulled it over here for further musing and comment. It has since spread to other blogs, including to Sue Waters who has some additional ideas on how to facilitate interactions with readers.

So even without a lot of facilitation on our part, we're starting to see a bleeding of discussions into a variety of social media, beyond just blogs. It was complicated enough trying to keep track of things when we're talking strictly about blogging platforms, But now I think we may be looking even beyond that. Atul's idea of figuring out how to pull all of these conversations together into a single, easy-to-use interface that is automatically updated as people respond to the conversation will be an important value-add to facilitate discussions. Not sure what this will look like, though or how it might work. I don't think that just having feeds is going to work. It will rapidly get too complicated to really manage all the potential information coming in. So I think that there needs to be some "intelligent RSS" as Atul calls this.

Right now this is still kind of fuzzy. I'm thinking that a graphic of some sort might help.

What ideas do you have about all of this?

UPDATE--Lisa Junker emailed me to suggest that both the size of a blogging community as well as the length of time a blogger has been writing can both impact the sense of community that will be more likely to result in cross-commenter discussions. In particular, I think she's right about the size of the readership. If only a small percentage of people online are actually commenting, then you have to have a pretty sizable audience to get that level of community going.

Also--Beth Kanter is taking this conversation even further. She has a nice graphic on the intensity of sharing and how we have to create a framework for sharing that encourages and supports those who are new to blogging or else there's no room for growth. She also points out that bloggers have to "weave" new conversations by synthesizing conversations and then adding to the discussion. Good stuff--definitely go read it.

Graphic via Mexican Wave

How Can We Facilitate Conversations BETWEEN Commenters on Our Blogs?

Over at Building a Better Blog, we've been talking about blog conversations.

On most blogs, commenting looks like the top part of this image--the author posts and then commenters respond to the author. But as Skelliewag (the source of this graphic) points out, true conversation is really about the second half of this image--the author and commenters all interacting with one another. The question is--how, as bloggers, can we facilitate discussions between commenters?

For myself, I've noticed that I tend to want to comment on a post based on what the blogger has written. I may or may not read what others have said. I'm usually too busy formulating my comment in response to the blogger to really pay that much attention to interacting with other commenters.

Another part of my reasoning in not interacting with commenters is that I'm less assured of a response from them. Presumably the blogger is aware when I comment and will read what I said, but commenters may not be keeping track of the conversation and so my interaction with them is more likely to just blow in the wind. Feels like kind of a waste.

I suspect that there are some aspects of a blog that don't lend themselves to this kind of conversation. Blogs do tend to be about an individual "talking" and others responding to that individual, unlike in a forum where anyone can start a conversation. And while commenters feel like they "know" the blogger and therefore are more comfortable responding, other commenters are very much a mystery, unless commenters know one another because they also read one another's blogs. It's kind of like being at a party--you're more comfortable interacting with a friend than you are with someone you don't know, especially if you're engaging them on a more contentious subject.

Despite this, I think there are still ways to try to better facilitate interactions.  One idea, of course, is to make it clear in your commenting policy that you encourage commenters to interact with one another. Another, as Christine Martell suggested in our discussion, is to have some commenters modeling the behavior--responding directly to other commenters as a way to encourage that kind of interaction. But that assumes you have a commenter willing to do this.

The commenters to the original Skelliewag post had some additional thoughts, including:

• Using threaded commenting so that you could reply more easily to individual commenters, similar to replies in a forum.

• Posting on problems to solve that will invite readers to interact with one another in developing the solution (obviously this doesn't work for every post).

• Trying to create a culture that encourages commenter to commenter interactions through your own responses in the comments section--maybe by drawing the attention of one commenter to the thoughts of another.

This whole topic is fascinating to me as I become further drawn into the culture of blogging and consider how we use blogs to create and nurture community. In some ways, blogging may not be the perfect community tool. There are elements of blogging that aren't about community necessarily. At the same time, I think that we can be more purposeful about building community by thinking through some of the characteristics of a "real-life" one. No one goes to an event to interact only with the host. They also interact with other participants. The question is, if community-building is one of our goals as bloggers, how do we create that sense of community through our actions?

So, how do you encourage interactions with commenters on your blog? How do you interact with other commenters when you comment on someone else's blog?