Diigo In Education

A talkback board. We gave everyone post-its in their registration packets and encouraged them to post their questions and comments, especially on the “gaps” in the conference, to the board. The board was directly outside the main conference room.

If you don't engage in multiple back channels, you may not see multiple use cases. Different tools are best for different types of interaction. Just because post-it notes didn't work at WebWise doesn't mean they don't work in galleries... as we know from the success of many talkback boards.If you ask visitors/participants to try a new tool, make sure it has as low a barrier to entry as possible. I have yet to see a museum set something up that is as simple to use as Today'sMeet.If discussion is the goal, you don't need user profiles - you just need a way to talk. If building up a personal profile/relationship with the institution is a goal, people need to uniquely identify themselves.Think about the possibility for asynchronous back channels that allow visitors (and staff) to share deep content with each other over time. Consider, for example, the rich conversation on Flickr about this image from the Chicago World's Fair. You could imagine a comparable conversation available to visitors onsite alongside exhibits or artifacts in the galleries.If possible, find ways to show the real-time location of people who are engaging in the back channel. The Mattress Factory's new SCREENtxt application uses a location-based system so that visitors can identify whether other participants are onsite at the museum or not.Make allowance for emergent back channels that visitors/users "bring with them" to the experience. These tools are particularly valuable for the "portal to the world" back channel use case. Every time I see a kid take a cellphone photo in an exhibit, I know that photo will immediately travel to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc. How can your system capture that activity?

genuine, authentic and engaging learning at home/out of school. I question how possible it is for teachers to really provide these opportunities on a frequent basis. Without the adult present to scaffold, guide, question, prompt etc it is very difficult.

Bowman's main complaint is that in Google's engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would make a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behaviour, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner. "Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralysing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions," Bowman wrote.