Zany times at Corporate Learning Trends

Sometimes things go so far off the rails that all you can do is chuckle at life’s absurdity. Today at Learn Trends, I demonstrated my ability to screw up everything technical within reach.

Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, Jane Hart, and I had planned to lead a session at noon today to explain the thinking we’ve gone through to develop a lightweight, turn-key social learning platform.

Reading the enthusiasm around the more experimental presentations this week, I decided it would be cool to have a four-way conversation, sort of an online fishbowl. Instead of a presentation, we’d have lots of pieces of content on my desktop ready to call up in response to specific questions and topics. That was the theory.

What happened? First off, the computer with all the assets died right before the session. Not a problem; I have other computers hereabouts. Then we got a report that Jane was stuck in terrible traffic on the way to Oxford. The moderator I had hoped to have running the software was trapped in a low-bandwidth environment and couldn’t join us. Screen-sharing didn’t work for rapidly changing slides. Voices sounded like we were gulping helium. The screen exhibited Op-Art designs. People who wanted to ask questions found they couldn’t.

Harold managed to app-share my wiki, which contained some of the day’s presentation graphics. I encouraged him to speed up the pace. Bad idea. Comment from our backchannel: “guys, playing around so much is really hammering app bandwidth: audio suffers, typing suffers, settle down!” and “I’m finding audio is WAY behind the slides/chat.” Toward the end, “going to go get bandages, pain killers.” Then “what do you want?” Reply: “A drink.”

In the post-session discussion, I wrote “Asking Elluminate to do what we wanted was akin to inviting 70 people into a classroom for 30, gagging the teacher, using spray paint instead of chalk on the board.” I also wrote, “No regrets. Joni: ‘Life is for learning.’ Some of us won’t forget this un-session for a while.”

Years ago, I learned to face trying situations by asking myself, “What am I supposed to learn from this?” Harold, Clark, and I jotted down some lessons learned:

1. Pre-load the slides
2. Don’t trust the stuff that works at night to work the next morning.
3. That app sharing and slamming through big graphics can break the system.
4. Know what the system does and doesn’t do well.
5. (Maybe) stick to asynch and only go live with small groups; large groups get one-to-man presentations.

We’ve begun experimenting with more net-robust software.

Oh, and in the interest of history and full disclosure, I posted the script of the chat during our meltdown. …. I just read it. Closing down the session this afternoon, I said it reminded me of Stephen Stills at Woodstock, saying “You people have got to be the strongest people anywhere….” From the transcript, I see that the audience didn’t understand the reference. Woodstock? Some 60s thing.

Many paragraphs back, I made reference to Joni. For you youngsters, I was referring to Joni Mitchell, who sang, in the song Woodstock, “I don’t know who I am, but life is for learning.” My anthem. Give it a listen.