Comments on: How being online can trump face-to-face

By: Sundar Balasubramanian

Sundar Balasubramanian — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:44:00 +0000

Other benefits:

It's much faster to setup and complete a course / workshop online - grabbing a day of 10 diaries can push the meeting by say a month (it's not just the time of an expert). It's much easier to find 2-3 hours.
Extending your point about participants dropping out, you could argue that it adds pressure on the presenter to be good enough to sustain the interest of his/her audience - thereby improving quality. If you are f2f, you are likely to stick not just to be polite but to make something of the (sunk) investment in time and money.

By: Rod Griffiths

Rod Griffiths — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:24:48 +0000

I think all your points are good, I find the biggest problem is that lack of facility with online tools or even maybe downright suspicion of them. I found when I was working, which thankfully I now don’t (mostly), that I could organize a telephone conference with 5 – 30 people and it all went well but if I decided to try the same thing through a chat room I’d get hardly any people joining. I never could put my finger on it exactly but I think a lot of people still think the web is just porn and pedophiles, apart from email, and they worry that if they try some of the newer tools then something awful will happen to them. We need ways of drawing people into it, that feel like things they already can cope with. I’m not sure what those are but I suspect that interactive Television would sound better to many people tan a web conference, even though the electrons are doing the same things. Web conferencing with the red button on the TV may catch on much quicker than anything Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs offers. If you could hit the red button and then text with your phone, a lot of people would find it easier than a keyboard.

By: Jane Lunt

Jane Lunt — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:05:03 +0000

By: Phil Green

Phil Green — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:23:40 +0000

By: ednz

ednz — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:09:29 +0000

your 2nd +ve point resonates hugely,

in a 'blended' sense - I'd love it if we all 'tweeted', or similar, to each other during face-to-face meetings

more knowledge would be generated and consolidated with far less aural messyness

By: phil

phil — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:32:54 +0000

Nadine makes an interesting point. I’d like to build on it. I’ve thought to myself in the past, “I like plays on the radio; the colours are brighter there.” Also, as a spotty youth, when I read “Far from the Madding Crowd” I came to know Bathsheba very well, right down to the swirl of her skirts. Later, Julie Christie in the screen role ticked all my teenage fantasy boxes, but the relationship was not the same. I might have fancied Julie, but it was my own Bathsheba who defined the character; it was she whom I knew, loved and understood. In many teaching situations, reflection and the chance to give rein to the imagination are stifled. Over-stimulation and unnecessary arousal are often the cause. Some of the most engaging webinar and virtual classroom sessions I’ve attended made excellent use of the auditory channel, and resisted overcrowding the screen with gratuitous images, diagrams and text. The human voice conjured images, set the pace and allowed me to add some of the imagery, the highlighting and bullet the points for myself.

By: Nadine Hengen

Nadine Hengen — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:19:38 +0000

Hi,

I think another huge advantage (if NOT using webcams) is that the stigma that goes with visual clues is removed: no-one knows Marie is fat, John is bald, and Jack is half the age of the rest of the group. This can be extremely liberating.

I witnessed this first-hand during a Masters course in Education with the Open University UK: our first group discussions were online. Although we had exchanged CVs, we didn't pay too much attention to that. It was only when I turned up at the first f2f tutorial that it was very obvious I was 10 years younger than most other students. Other people were a lot quieter than online, maybe because of self-consciousness due to physical appearance: and most of these people were classroom teachers! How much more self-conscious are people not used to speak in front of groups?!

Discussing online (especially in text) lets our brains express themselves without being held back by the body, which in an academic setting is fantastic.