Retroblogging Myself on the Backchannel

Back eons ago (i.e. on Thurs in NC, today is Sat in La Jolla), at the CHAT Festival at UNC, John McGowan and I had a dialogue with a ferociously interesting audience on "The Future of Learning Institutions."  We made a radical decision before our panel to not have prepared papers or even prepared remarks and to not use any other form of technology either.  Nada.  Unscripted.  Unplugged. 

The questions started in the first minute and there was a long line of people at the end, 90 minutes later, with more questions.  I've had several emails since with follow-up questions too.   The session flew by.   So fast, I don't really remember much of what we said.   So I thought I'd look at the liveblogs and tweets sent by all the HASTAC peeps in the audience.  Not so many.  Maybe half a dozen tweets, several on the same one line of the session.   Why?  (A):  no connectivity in the room, so the tweets came from cell phones.  (B) The questions came so fast and furious that the conversation wasn't linear.  It was engaged, and people told me later they couldn't figure out how to blog it and didn't want to.  Too much was happening in the room to keep track of it.  The converstion was so intensely interactive it didn't translate into notes, linear narrative, or even tweets.   

Interesting.   Are certain forms of exchange untweetable?  

And the corresponding Big Question:  what's happening in a room where there are a ton of tweets, live blogging, plus a whole world of backchanneling, all happening in a text space simultaneous with the oral lecturing space?  And what does that mean?  Imagine someone who did not know our intellectual cultural observing all this typing and tweeting while real humans all sat there, facing forward, looking at the back of one another's heads, only the speaker facing us, and s/he is looking at her paper, her powerpoint, not at us.  From another cultural perspective, this arrangement is not exactly a "meeting."   It's an un-meeting.   (Thus Barcamps, Foo Camps, Un-Conferences---all designed to create actual human "meetings" not conference room un-meetings.)

Is more or less happening in the traditional lecture conference room than in the lively, interactive, unscripted discussion such as the one I was privileged to be part of on Thursday?  I hasten to add it was John's genius to ban technology (including the most coercive technology of the "read outloud paper") at our session at the CHAT Festival.   He also kept the conversation flowing with great questions and comments.  He managed the flow.   But it really flowed.  What is the relationship between representation and content?  I don't know the answer but I've been at conferences now for five days straight and I am thinking that there are some very smart people with amazing things to say who, in some cases (the back channel would say this more stridently than I do and insists it happens lots more often than I think it does), just get robotic when put at a podium.  Not everyone.  I've heard many talks and panels at both conferences that I won't forget.  And others at both where I found myself having to project myself beyond the mode of presentation to the excitement of the work itself. 

A great lecture is a complex art form and not everyone is a great artist.  And there are obstacles.  Put someone behind a slab of wood, put a mike in their face, give them a laptop and a mouse and a script to juggle with an enormous power point projected on a screen behind them, and, well, they can lose the human touch.  Are we surprised?  We are proving, by negative example, exactly what we are preaching about:   the importance of interactive and participatory learning.   It's a lesson learned over and over at every conference we go to.  Ask anyone and they will say  the hallway talk, the follow up one-on-one, is what we remember and take away. 

So I'm wondering.  What makes a tweetable presentation?  Back at UNC Chat, at that interactive and energetic session that John McGowan came up with, the one that wasn't documented, there was one comment tweeted over and over.  If you've seen it, you actually have a pretty good capsule of the emotional temperature of the room (even though the content and facts and figures and examples etc are not represented).  At the height of what was a uniquely engaged exchange about pedagogy, a lovely man in the audience asked why so many teachers are cynical and talk about their students with derision that borders on contempt.  According to the Twittersphere, I answered:  "Put me in the room with any cynical teacher for an hour and I'll show you a broken heart."  Whoa.  Methinks I get a bit Oprah-like  in a charged, interactive session.   But now I'm sounding like the cynical one and I'm rotten at cynicism (it's my least favorite human trait, as Conan said recently in his farewell remarks to his fans) . . . and it would be particularly wrong here since there was nothing cynical about that exchange.  On the contrary, the gentleman who asked that question looked back at me, after I answered him, with such a look of sadness in his eyes that I realized I had struck a nerve.  

The conversation then turned, with urgency, to the way all of the tedious forms of assessment we have evolved over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st--from IQ tests and achievement tests andNo Child Left Behind and standards-based school reform and multiple choice testing and disability testing to annual assessment forms and tenure committees (they all go together)--take a passion for teaching and learning.  These externalized and mechanical measures turn teaching (a most idealistic as a profession) into a mechanistic and detached process of "gaming the system."  It kills the spirit by increments.    If assessment is not geared to learning, it replaces learning.  Teaching to the test (NCLB or tenure).  That's what grinds the soul.

There ensued a blur of conversation, so fast and so deep it passed untweeted. In this case, the credit goes to expert moderation.  John reminded the audience at one point that one of our groundrules was "no grousing."  We wanted to dig deep and be visionary, not whine about all that was wrong now.   That is not productive of change.  We know what is wrong.  So he kept the whole room on track, not only with a topic but with expert management of questions and response.  It was great choreography and it made a great session.   I suspect that no power point, no matter how skillfully presented, would have gotten through the cynicism to that personal cost we all pay when we game the system again and again.  No read-outloud-paper by moi would have turned us to the moment when you look in the mirror one day and see the system has gamed us so fully that we don't recognize the face looking back at us.  The ironic humor of the back channel helps a little, but it also massages the cynicism, working it deeper and deeper toward the core where it lodges somewhere in the environs, I imagine, of that broken heart.