Originally posted by Beth Kanter for the 2006 NCDD Conference… 

I’m gearing up to do some live blogging at the NCDD.   

Live blogging is basically taking notes, photos, or recordings at lectures, conferences, and presentations of what was said and posting it to your blog.

I ended up doing live blogging because I think through fingers anyway, so why not share it with others on my blog?

So, here are some pointers:

First of all, live blogging takes a certain chutzpah.    Someone said that live bloggers should carry around a hip flask in their tool box!  So, you can’t be afraid of making mistakes publically. The nice thing about live blogging is that it is written in electricity, not stone – so you can always fix things later.

Because I’ve had such bad luck with wifi connections at conferences, I use blogging software that let’s me save my work offline.  I started off just using notepad, but then I learned about FireFox Performing  and ecto and have used both of them.

I’m now using FireFox Peforming more these days because it is what I use at my desktop and I’m used to its little quirks or perhaps my bad habits.  (Like you better save your work as a note before you close your browser or you will loose your work.)  Ecto on the PC is okay, but far superior on the MAC.  There are other blog editor tools, but if you’re on a PC and already use FireFox – the performing can’t be beat.  Just be careful about closing the browser before you save your work.

The value to using one of these tools is that it doesn’t matter if the wifi goes down – you can still save your work and past it later.

Before the conference, I decide which sessions I’m going to live blog.  I create a post draft and cut and paste the description into as well as gather up any useful background links.  I put a live blogging disclaimer at the top of the post that says “I’m live blogging, excuse lapses of grammar, spelling errors, and typos.   I will clean this up later.”   I also add in the conference technorati tag at the bottem as well as any trackback urls.

I get to the room early so I can park myself in a strategic location so I can hear and see the speakers. When the session begins, I take notes and hit the publish button at various points to save my work. I usually do this after each speaker.

I’m a fast, very fast typist. I learned how to type while I was in music school so I could temp to make some extra money.   I approached typing like practicing the piano.  Using a metronome, I did all the exercises very slowly and gradully went from largo to allegro to motto allegro.  So for me, when I take notes, I do a combination of vertbaim transcript and summary.  What I do is summarize the points and if there is a juicy quote I take it down verbaitem.

I also try to get several photos that capture the essence of what it was like to be in the room.  I’ll photograph the speaker, selected slides or fipchart notes, and people in the room. If someone asks a particularly compelling question or says something, I will photograph that as well.  I upload the flickr photos using the uploader tool into their own set and annotate them with notes. 

However, now that I’ve recently upgraded my camera phone – I will play with using email to flickr option.

At the end of the session, I will clean up my post and photos.  Add a photo to the post with a link to the photo set.

I might add a paragraph or two later on with some reflections about what I learned personally or what I might apply.

What live blogging tips do you have?

Originally posted by Beth Kanter for the 2006 NCDD Conference… 

I recently discovered a blog by a colleague, Allison Fine, called A. Fine Blog. Her focus is on “the ways that digital tools, particularly social media, are enhancing our connectedness to one another and our ability and willingness to work for the collective social good.” Her forthcoming book Momentum: IgnitingSocial Change in the Connected Age takes an indepth look at the topic.

One of her entries, “The Softer Side of Social Media” shares the story of how a friend set up an email account for her niece to email the tooth fairy. Sometimes it is very useful to have fun examples of new technology when introducing it to people — it made want to play with the idea — social media and the tooth fairy. A quick search through Flickr resulted in many photos of beautiful, but toothless children, tooth fairy pillows, a pair of tooth fairies from a dental school, notes to the tooth fairy a dog’s visit from the tooth fairy and children’s notes to the tooth fairy like the one depicted in the photograph above. What a great way to celebrate the myth with your child!

And, if you search through delicious, a social bookmarking service, you will turn up some interesting bookmarks that give you some dental tips, background, an online service that facilitates communication between your child and the tooth fairy, and a critical thinking exercise that debunks this popular childhood myth.

When my son, who was born in Cambodia, lost his tooth, I turned to social media to help him learn about Cambodia customs. With the help of Cambodian bloggers who shared some sound files of the khmer word for tooth and a description of tooth customs, we created a one-minute documentary about the Khmer Tooth Fairy: Remixing Cultural Customs Around Loosing a Tooth If social media/networking tools can do that for the tooth fairy, imagine what they can do for your work or organization’s cause?

Originally posted by Kai Degner for the 2006 NCDD Conference…

Greetings,

Since I’m one of the ”new practioners” represented at the NCDD this year, I thought I might share a mini-version of how I got involved with this wonderful crowd.  I hope to convey to any readers the opportunity I feel exists for involving hundreds of thousands of people into more regular conversation about things important to them. This will also set the stage for the title of my Friday showcase titled “OrangeBand: A Gateway to D&D.”

In 2003, I was a senior undergraduate student working at James Madison University’s Community Service-Learning Office.  Even being connected with other “engaged” students, I still felt there was a lack of quality conversation going on around me about things that mattered.  Turns out, I wasn’t the only one.  In a lunch conversation with a few friends who shared this sentiment, we decided to do something to try to get people talking.

Our initial goal was to spark a campuswide conversation, but we soon decided to come up with a way that would welcome into the same conversation people who thought differently from each other.  Rallies and protests didn’t seem to do that.  Soon in the planning we decided to focus the conversation on the then-pending war in Iraq, which seemed to warrant more conversation than was being had (no matter if you were in favor of it or not).

Our idea was simple: hand out orange strips of fabric to be used as invitations to conversations about how YOU felt about the issue.  The OrangeBands would spark the conversation but also bring attention to nonpartisan events we organized during the week of the big band distribution.

Well, in that first week, 2,000 people took OrangeBands, 400 came to our 8 forums, 3 other schools picked it up, and there was a buzz of conversation!  The response was unexpected and overwhelming.  The next semester, we decided the OrangeBands would represent any issue someone felt important to bring into conversation.  Since then, more than 6,000 more OrangeBands have been distributed and there has been interest in our model from students and faculty across the country.

Over the last few years, this experience has tuned me onto a connection between three major areas: civil discourse (respectful conversation), social capital (trusting relationships), and civic engagement (citizenship).  Civility, respect, and thoughtfulness is far from the norm in popular media; quantity of relationships seem to be favored over quality; and rates of civic participation are abysmal according to a variety of measures.  OrangeBand seems to tap a reaction against these trends.  It amazes me how the question, “What’s Your OrangeBand?” so consistently sparks conversation about one of these deeper issues.

Until I connected with NCDD, I felt I was in my own bubble, unsure of what it was exactly that I – and OrangeBand – was trying to accomplish.  But then I caught the term “dialogue practioner” and liked it.  I dove into some of the models and techniques available on the website and began incorporating them into OrangeBand events and into facilitation jobs. 

This all helped crystalize an important point: OrangeBand, like the  NCDD community, is here to empower and support people to create spaces for respectful conversation.  The niche I believe OrangeBand can fill is reaching out to students and others who may not come into contact with these concepts and models in an academic or professional setting.  But this niche can best be served in tandem with some of the models, processes, people, and organizations represented at the NCDD conference.

So, I’m coming to the NCDD to find collaborators in facilitating a widespread elevation in the quality and content of our conversations.  I have everything to learn and an OrangeBand to offer.

See you in San Fran!

Kai