Using twitter, sms, word clouds and audience response systems in my workshop ... a technology too far?

I tried using Twitter, SMS, Word Clouds and Audience Response Systems in my last presentation. I suppose the first question must be, why use so many technologies? A previous comment on this blog asked if there was any evidence of people using Twitter within their large group teaching. This post describes a use by me in a recent session that I ran, and gives feedback on some lessons learnt.

In a recent session I ran at IWMW2008 I relatively successfully combined a large number of technologies designed to enhance the learning experience of large group teaching.

A driver for this was to improve the the quality of the feedback in the session, encourage people in the session to connect with each other and extend the learning to beyond the face to face session.

So why use so many technologies? Well, not one technology would achieve all of these goals. The audience response system would not capture free text responses, the SMS system would not display the feedback in an elegant, easily readable format (hence the use of the word cloud), and only Twitter (with an agreed tag) would allow people to connect with other people in the session and extend the discussion after the event.

Overall, I must say it went relatively smoothly, and I was very please with the outcome. It didn't feel that the technology was intrusive. That said, I designed the session so that there was a good mix of techniques so we didn't become over dependednt on one approach. Therefore, given it was a workshop there was also verbal feedback loops and group work based around  various scenarios.

The session slides, including the audience response system, SMS and word clouds are available from <http://www.slideshare.net/andyramsden/iwmw2008-workshop-session-use-of-web-20-in-teams>

Overall, it is relatively easy to do. I thought the SMS feedback was really useful, and should have spent a little more time reflecting on the messages coming through. The generation of the word cloud was really powerful. It worked for me because I only used it on free text questions where I was expecting a number of one word answers (based around technologies). The way it was generated was to simply cut and paste the responses from the SMSs into tagcrowd.com. Knowing how the SMS would present the replies I created a exclude list before the session on tag crowd which meant it would filter out the question identifiers.

The question I asked was, how do you share web resources?  (this slide included some examples), they then had to SMS in their answers. I then simply collated the responses from the EduTxt web client and pasted them into TagCrowd. The outcome was wonderful as it it illustrated the three most common words were; email, wiki, delicious. This gave me the opportunity to use this as the contect for the next activities.

The SMS - Word Cloud section was on slide 15 and slide 16. 

In terms of responses, there was about 20 people in the session. But the SMS responses where around 7 people (approximately 30%). This was a little disappointing. However, not surprising given this was a one of session - so  where is the motivation for them to actively take part? I'd imagine over a lecture series, when you clearly use the feedback then students would warm to it as a communication tool.

In terms of the twitter use, then I didn't monitor this during the session as the aim was to use this afterwards. So I'll see if anything comes through over the next few weeks.

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