[Feedbacker] Blog post for tomorrow—need your, ahem, feedback

[Ben Moskowitz]

Hey all,

I'll push this out tomorrow—craving your feedback! I'm trying to hack together an easy napkin sketch submission system. Stay tuned.

Feedbacker: Flipping the backchannel

I'm working with Sam Iglesias and the brilliant folks of FutureClass [http://www.hastac.org/tag/future-class] on an awesome project called Feedbacker. Here's a video rundown: [http://ondemand.duke.edu/video/24518/the-feedbacker-internet-applic], and check out Cathy's [http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/can-device-really-help-us-pay-attention] and Sam's [http://www.hastac.org/blogs/siglesias/help-build-awesome-tool-submit-your-napkin-sketch-feedbacker-module] posts and the project wiki page [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/Feedbacker]. Read on for why I'm so excited about this one!

The new normal

If you spend a lot of time in classrooms, or conferences, or other audience settings, you're no doubt aware of the "backchannel."

If the speaker's presentation is the primary conversation that's taking place in the room, the backchannel is the secondary conversation. It's the audience reacting together, sharing their questions, concerns, quibbles, reactions, and feedback. Sometimes, that secondary conversation is more interesting and important than the primary one!

Perhaps the most popular backchannel in wide usage is Twitter. The Twitter conversation is increasingly a factor in settings with dense internet connectivity—college classrooms, tech conferences, and the like. Almost every conference has a #hashtag—an associational back channel.

But the backchannel, as a phenomenon, is certainly much older than the web. Students in today's college classrooms may be creating their own backchannels using IM and email on their laptops. But as grade schoolers, they were passing notes to each other—an analog backchannel, but a backchannel nonetheless! 

Backchannels are certainly growing in popularity (and ease). And along with the growth of the backchannel is a growing unease, on the part of educators, conference speakers, and others who spend a lot of time addressing audiences: a fear that they're not connecting. A fear that they're competing with the backchannel.

Think through the audience perspective. Who wants to listen for two hours if it's so easy to speak? Why sit passively through a lecture or conference presentation if the rest of your mediascape is so interactive and participatory?

I'm not mounting a defense for people who don't pay attention in class. But backchannels are certainly a natural response to the frustration of one-way exchange—and they can bring the best parts of small group interaction and dialogue into large groups.

Why backchannels suck

That header may seem strange, especially after my spirited defense of the backchannel. But let's face it: there are a lot of things about backchannels that suck.

First off, they can devour presenters who lack confidence. In the olden days—before Twitter, IM, and the like—you could choke. And when you choked, everyone knew it.

But backchannels can make it worse. They can create nasty, negative feedback loops. In probably the most infamous backchannel fail, Harvard researcher danah boyd was thrown off her game at the Web 2.0 expo when the backchannel went off the rails. Telling her side of the story, boyd summed up the problem: "The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me." [http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html]

You might say, pointing to Cicero or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, that the best orators will have nothing to fear. Good communicators will always be able to captivate an audience, no matter how diminished our attention spans. 

But Cicero never had to contend with a #caesarfail. And nobody was text messaging their friends during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It's unavoidable—when you put a big group of connected people in a room, and they're forced to listen, it's only natural that they'd talk back.

Which brings us to the second thing that sucks about backchannels—they're "back" channels for a reason. They're not designed with the presenter in the loop. Some folks have tried to bring the presenter into the equation, resulting in backchannel implementations that look more like tools for facilitating questions. Google Moderator is one example. [google.com/moderator] But they're not really useful at that point—they've restored the one-way communication that begs for backchannels in the first place.

Saavy presenters are adapting—here's a guide, for example, on how not to get killed in the backchannel [http://archive.pressthink.org/2010/03/17/backchannel.html]/. But wouldn't it be cool to reinvent the backchannel? To design it with the needs of both the presenter and the audience in mind?

How to improve the backchannel

Feedback can be useful. This is the simple, but important idea behind the Feedbacker. Feedbacker is about taking all that's good about backchannels, and turning that into meaningful feedback for presenters.

We'll be building several modules for Feedbacker—the first, called the Classroom Attention Barometer, already exists in prototype state [link].

As we ramp up the project, we'll be soliciting advice, suggestions, and (gasp!) feedback about how to best meet this goal.

[ADVICE ON NEXT STEPS---> how to submit your sketch? Link to project roadmap?]

[Cathy N. Davidson]

This is fabulous, Ben.   I have nothing to add . . . I really like this.   Thank you!

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***********************************************

Cathy N. Davidson

Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and

  John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute   

  Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies

Duke University

Box 90403

B196 Smith Warehouse, Bay 5, First Floor

Durham, NC   27708-0403

Phone: (919) 684-8471

Fax: (919) 684-1658

Co-founder, HASTAC www.hastac.org
Co-director, HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition www.dmlcompetition.net

[Samuel Iglesias]

Hey Ben,

Sorry for the hour of feedback, I've been trying to wrap up another project in the lab.

Reading over it, chiefly I'm wondering if there is any way to beefen up the payoff paragraph where Feedbacker is introduced. Or, alternatively, could the intro anticipate the deep dive into backchannels? Maybe the last sentence of the first paragraph ends with a little teaser, like "what is the next level for the large audience backchannel?" These could be small tweaks, but on the whole this is very exciting and I can't wait for us to get our first napkin sketches in!

Sam

Sent from my iPad

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Samuel Iglesias

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[Katie King]

I like this! I also really like backchannel connections in Second Life, where it is visible to all, and virtuoso performers (not me) do both voice and text chat at the same time. Truly amazing! Katie

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Katie King
Associate Professor Women's Studies
University of Maryland, College Park 29742
email: kat...@umd.edu or kati...@gmail.com
301.405.7294
http://katiekin.weebly.com/