Thursday, December 3, 2009

Evaluation of a facilitated online event


I keep being told that I am too self-critical. I think this helps me to constantly improving what I am doing. In this case. I have decided to look at someone's work to get more distance and hopefully have a more positive approach.

The event I will be analysing was advertised as:

Guest Speaker: Bronwyn Hegarty
Venue : Elluminate, back-up Skype
Date and time : November 30, 2009 @ 8:00 PM(NZ)
Facilitator : Rosceli Valdrez
You are cordially Invited visit my blog for more info http://roscelifacilitatingonlinecommunities.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html

My thoughts are based on memories of the event, since I do not seem to be able to access the recording at the moment. I think that it is not an issue with the recording itself, but probably because of my location behind GFO (Great Firewall of Otara).

The event was promoted through the Wiki, Rosceli's Blog and posting in the Google group. The information was adequate. I feel that may be a reminder to the event sent the previous day might have attracted a few more people on the day. It is not always possible to remember everything that is going on when you are very busy. However I remember seeing a reasonable number of people being present.

Do you feel is it better to advertise in parallel on several media (same information on all platforms) , or to have a main repository for the information then putting shortcut towards it? I have used the first method as s it limits the number of clicks someone has to do to access the information. This is a principle of web design I can remember, but does it work in this situation?

Rosceli had a great presenter in Bronwyn, which really helps to be able to focus on the job of facilitating the event. The event went on smoothly from beginning to the end, and the topic was really interesting. There might have been disruption taking place, but if this was the case the facilitator was right on top of it and I did not notice it. 
All participants were familiar with the Elluminate environment, and I do not think that anyone had any technical difficulties.
After the introduction to the session was made, the facilitator remained neutral throughout and did a round up at the end.  It felt very professional all through the session.

The link towards the recording was provided by Sarah the next day.
 It would have been nice to have had it appearing in the Wiki as well to centralise all the information together. Bronwyn followed up the session by emailing the course participant with further information.


2 comments:

  1. Hi Herve,

    I also think Rosceli's event went very smoothly and the presentation by Bronwyn was very good, information we can use in our future.

    I myself have used the first method as you mentioned "advertise in parallel on several media (same information on all platforms)" rather than providing links to the main repository. Users tends to participate and respond to posts if it is in their comfort zone platform - so by advertisng the same infor in different platforms would definately increase participation and attract more people... I think... :)


    cheers
    krishan

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  2. Hello Herve, thanks for the evaluation - it was interesting to see you take a slightly different tack from the others. When you do a comparison of Rosceli's event and yours, what would you see as the main differences?

    The other question I would ask: how was Rosceli's facilitation affected by the fact Bronwyn herself is an experienced online communicator?

    The issue of advertising is one that we didn't really discuss but it is a very important one, none the less. The thing is, there's no point in advertising if you've got no one to advertise to... you've got to have a network before you can advertise to it :) So, maybe that's the thing we're left with...building our networks over the coming months.

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