Want a simple way to improve meeting session learning? Provide a shared Google Doc where all participants can take notes, ask questions, and get answers!
A shared Google Doc is an easy, familiar tool you can use to facilitate and improve real-time conversation and learning around presented content. And when the session is over, participants have a convenient archive for reference.
The idea was sparked by discovering this deleted tweet thread. “I learned today that a group of students used a Google doc to take lecture notes–they all took notes simultaneously in a collective file.”
“As they took notes they would mark places they were confused or couldn’t follow the lecture–other students would see & explain, real time.”
“At the end of the semester, as they are prepping for finals, they have this massive document of notes, questions, & explanations from peers.” —from a 2016 since-deleted tweet thread
Now this isn’t an original idea. I’ve used collaborative Google Docs at meetings since 2010 to collaboratively brainstorm and solve a problem, for scribing answers to The Three Questions, and to capture the pluses and deltas in a group spective. And a quick web search will discover numerous examples of teachers who use this technique in elementary through college classrooms.
Here’s an example from a community college class…
A group of us did something similar in 2014 when we live-blogged the PCMA Convening Leaders conference. Offering the same technique to all participants at meeting sessions may be new. (If it isn’t, let us know in the comments below!)
Create a short link to each Google Doc. I use a link that combines an abbreviation for the event with a short version of the session title. For example, an “Improving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” session at the 2022 XYZ conference might have the link tiny.cc/XYZ2022ImproveDEI.
Add the session title and the short link to the top of the linked Google Doc.
Repeat for all meeting sessions.
For meeting owners
Before the meeting publicize that meeting session participants can and are encouraged to create collaborative notes on each session. Right before the meeting provide participants with a list of links to the collaborative docs for each session. Also, ask session presenters to display the URL for their session’s Doc and encourage participants to use it.
For session presenters
Even if meeting organizers haven’t adopted the above approach, there’s nothing to stop presenters from incorporating this technique into their sessions.
After the meeting or presentation
Change the access for each Doc to “viewer” (people with the link can see the document but not edit it) and then make the session notes available appropriately. You could share them on a private website, email the Doc links to participants, or use any other distribution method that fits.
What do you think?
If you use this method to improve meeting session learning or have ideas on extending it, please share your experience in the comments below.
What is the mix of presentation versus interaction at your meetings? What should it be?
Traditional meetings focus heavily on presentation. Interaction is limited to a few questions at the end of sessions, plus conversations “outside” the formal sessions. And this has been the norm for hundreds of years.
The written word
Let’s explore the popularity of the written word presentation versus interaction over time. Using Google Books Ngram Viewer to do this, we notice a curious thing.
In 1804, the earliest year included in the Google Books database, the word interaction barely appeared. The word presentation is a hundred times more frequent. Both words slowly become more common over time, but presentation stays predominant. But, in the 1950s, something strange happens. The popularity of interaction abruptly rises. In 1964, interaction became more frequently used. It has remained in first place ever since.
Presentation versus interaction at meetings
Society, as reflected by books in English, now talks about interaction roughly twice as often as presentation. But our meeting designs, in large part, haven’t changed to reflect this shift in cultural awareness. Presenters still rarely incorporate interaction into their sessions, even though there are ample reasons why they should.
Since my first book on participant-driven and participation-rich was published 16 years ago, I’ve been gratified to see how the meeting industry has at least started talking more about the importance of bringing interaction and engagement into meeting sessions. But, despite all the talk, meeting owners and presenters still all too often serve up the same lecture-style sessions that are far less effective and engaging than learning in community through a well-designed interactive process.
In the 1960s, we finally began focusing on interaction versus presentation in our culture.
Last week, my friend Traci B wrote to me about a workshop that wasn’t.
“You’ll love this…I went to a 4 hour morning workshop at this digital conference. The speaker said, this will be interactive because no one wants to listen to me talk for four hours. He then proceeded to talk for 4 hours!
I did learn stuff and it prompted some ideas, but imagine how much better they might stick if it actually was a workshop. Also, he polled people in the audience and asked who was B2B [business-to-business] and who B2C [business-to-consumer]. 90 percent of the room was B2B…his presentation was almost all B2C.”
Sadly, experiences like this are far too common. Speakers (and the folks that concoct conference programs) decide to jazz up the description of a broadcast-style session by calling it a workshop.
The lecture Traci had to endure wasn’t a workshop. Genuine workshops include significant, frequent, and appropriate work by participants, guided by leaders. The leaders typically have significant content-specific experience. However, they also need adequate facilitation skills to guide the group through the session’s activities.
Some workshops are better described as trainings, where the participants are novices and the leader supplies the vast majority of the content and learning environment. However, most workshops I’ve led included professionals with significant skills and experience.
Customizing a workshop
When running such sessions, it’s important to customize the workshop in real-time to meet the actual wants and needs of the participants, rather than plowing through a predetermined agenda that may be partially or largely irrelevant.
This did not happen at Traci’s event!
“Also, adapting your presentation isn’t tagging on “it’s the same for B2B” after every example…cause it’s not.”
Skilled leaders know to uncover the wants and needs of participants at the start of the session, and use the information to build an optimized workshop for attendees.
This sounds more difficult than it usually is. Preparation involves having a broad set of potential content, techniques, and skills to cover. Then, during the session, the leader concentrates on the wants and needs the attendees have initially shared, adjusting the time spent on each area to match the expressed interest.
One final suggestion
If a presenter (like me) is actually running a workshop, please don’t insist on calling them a speaker! In my experience, attendees prefer well-designed workshops to almost any other session format. Tell them the session is a workshop. They’ll appreciate the information (and likely the session too)!
How often have you heard “Any questions?” at the end of a conference session?
Hands rise, and the presenter picks an audience member who asks a question. The presenter answers the question and picks another questioner. The process continues for a few minutes.
Simple enough. We’ve been using this Q&A format for centuries.
But can we improve it?
Yes!
Let’s explore, starting with…
Six criticisms of traditional Q&A
Traditional Q&A reinforces the engrained assumption that the presenter is the expert, and audience members are relative novices. This ignores today’s reality that the smartest person in the room is the room.
Traditional Q&A is a one-to-many process. These days, conference attendees come to learn andconnect. But the only connection going on (if any) during traditional Q&A is between the presenter and individual audience members.
Have you ever thought, “I could answer that question better than [the person on stage]!”? Traditional Q&A provides no opportunity for obtaining answers from audience members.
Who gets to ask questions? The presenter decides, allowing any implicit (and explicit) bias full reign.
How much time is available for questions? Again, the presenter decides. Too little time scheduled frustrates audience members whose questions remain unanswered. Too much time leads to a premature session close.
During traditional Q&A, the questioner is in the audience while the presenter is up on stage. As a result, questioners remain largely anonymous; audience members can’t even see a questioner behind them without turning around.
Ways to improve Q&A
I can think of two fundamental ways to improve Q&A. Here are…
Five ways to refine the traditional Q&A format
Include multiple Q&A opportunities throughout the session. This helps audience members get answers to questions while they’re top-of-mind, rather than waiting until the end of the session. It also increases interaction with the presenter, which can help maintain attendee attention and improve learning.
Instead of the presenter picking the questioners, have an independent third party (a moderator) choose them.
Or you can have the audience submit questions via an app and then vote on the list. This helps uncover popular questions.
If you’re using a moderator, have the audience submit questions in writing or via an app. This allows the moderator to curate questions to be asked. When appropriate, the moderator can combine similar questions.
Instead of taking questions from the audience, have questioners line up at a front-of-room mike so everyone can see them.
Or, we can…
Further improve Q&A by integrating it into a discussion format
Traditional sessions have two parts, first a lecture, and then Q&A. As mentioned above, presenting multiple short pieces of content interspersed with Q&A increases interaction and consequent learning. But we can do better!
Combined with experiential exercises, here’s the approach I use in my Participate! Labs.
Using a facilitated discussion format like the fishbowl sandwich, I create a session that offers Q&A on an as-needed basis. As I share content, attendees can join me on stage at any time for questions or a discussion that I moderate. (Check the link to see how this works.) The session then becomes more like a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) around my content.
Creating a truly participative Q&A in this way lets the resulting questions and discussions reflect the audience’s just-in-time needs, optimizing the value of the session for participants.
Do you have additional suggestions for improving Q&A? Share them in the comments below!
On May 7, 2012 Google opened up Google Hangouts On Air (HOA)—a free service for broadcasting and recording live video with up to 10 participants—to all Google+ users. Six weeks later, the night before edACCESS 2012 started at the Peddie School in New Jersey, I decided to try using Google Hangouts On Air to stream and then archive the conference keynote. A couple of edACCESS old-timers who couldn’t attend in person this year had asked me if there was any way we could stream any of the “public” conference sessions. I had nothing to lose by trying out this new technology.
Here’s what I did, what I learned, and how things turned out.
Google Hangouts On Air preparation
First I created an empty Google+ Circle and went through the process of creating a test Hangout On Air. This allowed me to get familiar with the process and check in advance for any potential problems. I was able to successfully view myself streaming, and see how the stream turned into a YouTube video once I ended the Hangout. This gave me the confidence to announce through social media channels that the stream would be available. (Though I neglected to figure out how to provide a link to the stream in advance).
Peddie’s charming and efficient Director of Academic Technology provided a laptop with a decent external webcam and we circled each other on Google+ so I could add her computer to the hangout on the morning of the keynote. (Important note: you cannot invite people to a hangout unless they’ve added you to one of their circles first.) I decided to use her computer to stream video and audio of the keynote speaker, and my trusty 17″ MacBook Pro with built in webcam to setup the hangout and publicize and monitor the feed.
To broadcast Hangouts on Air you must have a linked and verified YouTube account associated with your Google login. This linked account will be where the broadcast stream, and later the video recording will appear. You only need to set up this linkage once, but I strongly suggest you do so (and test it) before your first HOA. Verification is apparently necessary if you want to save a hangout that lasts longer than fifteen minutes!
Showtime!
Ten minutes before the keynote was due to begin I started a hangout in the usual way by clicking on the START A HANGOUT button on the Google+ hangouts tab. Then I added Emily to the invitee list, named the hangout, checked the option “Enable Hangouts On Air” (and agreed to the warning dialog), and clicked the Hang out button. This led to a normal-looking hangout window, with the addition of an Embed link and a Start Broadcast button at the top right.
Once Emily accepted my invitation, we were nearly good to go. The big picture feed in a hangout is switched to the webcam with the loudest audio. I wanted to avoid having the stream switch away from Emily’s webcam so I muted the microphone on my computer by hovering over my small video window at the bottom and clicking on the microphone icon.
But I still needed to share a link to the stream so that anyone could watch. Clicking the Embed link on the Hangout page I obtained the embed code for the stream and quickly created a blog post with the embedded keynote stream. This embedded a YouTube player onto the page. Visitors could watch the live Hangout On Air directly from the page, as well as on Google+ and my YouTube channel. (Note: once the broadcast is over, this link points automatically to the resulting YouTube video post.) I checked the blog page to ensure the video looked OK before we went live. Then I tweeted the page link to the blog page.
[Later I discovered that when the hangout is starting, if you right-click on the timestamp of the Google+ post that announces the hangout you will also get a link to the stream.]
We were ready!
By this time the speaker was being introduced. I clicked the Start Broadcast button and we went live.
While hosting the hangout on my computer I could watch the broadcast stream, delayed by 5-10 seconds, in another browser window. Pretty cool! I also noticed that an updating count of stream viewers was displayed on the hangout page. Also cool!
After a few minutes I realized that seeing my face at the bottom of the hangout was distracting, so I turned off my camera.
Then I received a tweet from my friend Ruud Janssen in Switzerland(!) who was watching. He asked if I could use my camera to show the slides as the main video, moving the video of the speaker to a small window at the bottom of the screen. This made sense, so I turned my laptop round, pointed it at the slide screen, and clicked on its window to make the slides the main video for the stream. This worked well. (I should have thought of this earlier. Next time I will explore using a tool like CamTwist to pipe presenter slides directly into a hangout feed.)
Unlike a regular hangout, where any participant can override the camera switching that Google normally does, the main window for a Hangout On Air is either determined automatically from the webcam with the loudest audio or by the person streaming the hangout. So I became the camera operator. When the speaker asked for and answered questions, I chose Emily’s webcam. When he began speaking again, I returned to the slides as the main video.
We had no audience microphone, so I asked the speaker to repeat audience questions. That allowed stream followers to hear questions and they’d be included on the final YouTube video. Next time we could add a small netbook webcam to the hangout and have a volunteer run it round as a mike (and video) for audience questions.
When the keynote was over I simply clicked End broadcast. After about ten minutes, a recorded video of the 105 minute hangout automatically posted to my YouTube channel as well as the post on my Google+ Page, and the embed post on my blog. At this point I was able to edit the video information on YouTube. Now it appeared in my YouTube Channel with the same title I had given the hangout. Apparently you can use YouTube’s tools to edit the video itself, but I didn’t do this.
Conclusion
Broadcasting this impromptu stream only required a small amount of preparation. Upon completion the stream automatically turns into a standard permanent YouTube video. The ease and quality of the result pleases me. Sure, it’s not a professional broadcast and recording. But for the cost (free!) and minimal effort required, Google Hangouts On Air provides an attractive solution for streaming and archiving events that will fill many needs. I recommend you try out this approach for a low-profile event.
– You can join a Hangout twice from two different devices. This will let you put up screenshots, videos, etc in another pane.
– Create an intro screen graphic beforehand that introduces the Hangout. Run this in your hangout for the first 5 minutes before you start.
My session Designing Participation Into Your Meetings will, unsurprisingly, include a fair number of interactive exercises: human spectrograms, pair share, The Three Questions, a mild experience of chaos, and others. My goal is to motivate participants to incorporate participant-driven and participation-rich design elements into their meetings.
Here’s why PK (Pecha Kucha) is OK.“Being architects and having been to countless lectures, we knew that once people start to talk about their work and have a mic in their hands they just go on about details forever…”
—Mark and Astrid Klein, the inventors of Pecha Kucha
To recap, a typical Pecha Kucha session at an event consists of around an hour of back-to-back presentations, each 400 seconds long. There’s no time allocated for questions during the session, and (unless people start throwing stuff) no participation during each presenter’s time on stage.
My defense is brevity. Because all presentations are purposefully short, I like to describe Pecha Kucha as speed dating for ideas. The Pecha Kucha design purposely and explicitly excludes formal Q&A during the session, with the clear expectation that presentations will spark dialogue outside the session.
In other words, unlike the claims of many a traditional presentation with an obligatory Q&A session tacked on the end, a Pecha Kucha event doesn’t pretend to provide an interactive experience. Rather, a single Pecha Kucha provides a rapid introduction to a topic, an idea, or an experience that acts as a jumping-off place for stimulated viewers to start learning more via engagement after the presentation. A single fifty-minute session can expose attendees to multiple powerful, interesting, and entertaining ideas and viewpoints, and leave plenty of time during the rest of the event for captivated individuals to seek out presenters for further discussions.
Short, sweet, and to the point. That’s why PK (Pecha Kucha) is OK.
EventCamp Twin Cities Pecha Kucha
Want to experience Pecha Kucha as applied to the world of event professionals? Then you owe it yourself to attend EventCamp Twin Cities next month (September 8-9, Minneapolis, MN) for our Pecha Kucha session, moderated by yours truly. Here are the scheduled presentations from a variety of event professionals!
Elling Hamso on “Event ROI for non-believers.” Brandt Krueger on “PowerPoint SchmowerPoint: The Next Generation of Presentations and Presentation Technology.” Lara McCulloch on “Stories, Sagas & Fables.” Lisa Qualls on “#EventsThatLast.” Lindsey Rosenthal on “Give Your Event a Charitable Makeover!” Greg Ruby on “Foursquare for Events, Exhibitions, and Destinations.” Adrian Segar on “Face the Fear—Then Change Your Conference Design!”
Include Pecha Kucha, not Ashton Kutcher, at your next conference!
Instead of going after celebrities to present at your next conference, highlight some stars amongst your attendees with a Pecha Kucha session.
Pecha Kucha is a dynamic presentation format that has spread globally since its invention in Japan in 2003. Think of it as a haiku for presentations. Twenty slides automatically advance, each shown for twenty seconds, while the presenter shares their passion for a topic. Because each presentation lasts just 6 minutes and 40 seconds, presenters are challenged to be concise, targeted, and creative—and you can pack eight attendee presentations into an hour-long conference session.
Oh, you have a question. You want to know how to pronounce Pecha Kucha? Don’t be embarrassed, everybody asks. Just watch this short YouTube video:
O.K., glad to have cleared that up. You can also incorporate Pecha Kucha into a social event at your conference by scheduling your presentations during an evening social, with food and drink available while the presentations go on. This is the format used at Pecha Kucha Nights, held in hundreds of cities all over the world four or more times a year.
Pecha Kucha set up
It’s pretty easy to set up a Pecha Kucha session. Before the conference, you’ll need to:
Explain the format to your attendees;
Promote the session;
Solicit presenters; and
Send them a presentation template.
Have them send their presentations to you before the session. On the day, you’ll need an appropriately sized location with presentation-friendly lighting, a wireless mike and sound system, a schedule, and a screen, projector, and laptop running PowerPoint or Keynote. Add an MC and a staffer for the laptop and you’re ready to go!
I’m a big fan of Pecha Kucha as a way for people to connect and learn in a fun, fast-paced environment. I’ve just signed a contract to run Brattleboro Pecha Kucha Night, and we’re working on holding a Pecha Kucha session at Event Camp Twin Cities this fall.
Here are the slides and resources from my June 18 2010 presentation to the NE/SAE (New England Society of Association Executives) annual meeting held at the Colony Hotel, Kennebunkport, Maine:
NCDD’s Engagement Streams Framework helps people navigate the range of approaches that are available to them and make design choices that are appropriate for their circumstances and resources.
Last week, my friend Traci B wrote to me about a workshop that wasn’t.
How often have you heard “Any questions?” at the end of a conference session?
