Live Colearning: Quick Guide to Blackboard Collaborate Live Online Sessions

Live sessions (also known as webinars) using Blackboard Collaborate enable people who share an interest in connected learning to interact with guest lecturers, practitioners and each other, to establish relationships, and to work collaboratively. Experience has taught me that this medium works best when the facilitator states, models, and encourages an informal, participative, open, and collaborative atmosphere - starting with a tolerance for goofs, inexperience, technical collisions. It’s OK for presenters to model learning by reflecting on trial and error when something goes awry. You aren’t on the edge if you don’t fall off it once in a while. In other words -- don’t worry about making mistakes if you are new to this way of facilitating learning. So is everybody else. High quality video and audio make it possible for people all over the world to meet simultaneously. The presenter or any participant who has the floor appear in the large video window. Up to six other participants can project thumbnail live video feeds. When a participant starts speaking, their thumbnail expands to fill the large window. Guest presenters can upload and click through slide shows or PowerPoint presentations while they speak, and upload graphics at any time to display to all. Presenters and participants can use text chat for backchannel and open parallel communications. Screen sharing and web tours enable presenters and participants to show and tell. Collaborative whiteboard tools make possible mind-melding exercises like group mindmapping. If you want to get more complicated, multiple whiteboards and breakout groups are possible. Although this medium can be used for presentations and interviews, it also affords a more social and collaborative interaction. Participants, for example, can choose to take responsibility for various active roles during a presentation or discussion -- searchers, curators, mindmappers, summarizrs can use text chat, whiteboards, private messaging while presenters speak and push slides..

This quick guide will enable a first-time user to set up and manage a presentation using the Collaborate platform. I’ve also included some peeragogical techniques I have learned while using this platform with co-learning communities

Facilitating a live session with Blackboard Collaborate

Facilitators can lecture, using audio, video, slides, screen sharing, and web tours. They can also interact with other participants via audio, video, and text chat. Some facilitators keep an eye on the text chat and respond to in real time to written queries via voice or chat while they are presenting; others wait until after their presentation to open the discussion to others, leaving the chat as a parallel channel for participants to discuss the presentation, query each other for clarification, add relevant resources during the presentatio. A guest facilitator can direct written queries privately to other moderators through private chat while trying to use one of Collaborate’s features. Although this medium supports lectures, visual aids, and interviews, the affordances for including or relying entirely on many-to-many communication can make for a richer experience. A facilitator can behave like a traditional lecturer with Q&A, as an open-space variety of facilitator who encourages emergent self-organization (as in “unconferences,”), or at any point on the spectrum between one-way and completely open.

Preparation prior to session

1. If you have a PPT or Keynote presentation smaller than ten megabytes, you can use “Load Content” to upload the presentation to the Collaborate whiteboard. Otherwise, you can use “Save as” to save it as a folder of .jpgs.

2. Rename the first nine .jpgs from 1, 2, 3, … to 01, 02, 03 …

3. If you have unordered images that you might want to use, keep them handy.

4. Check your microphone and consider what participants will see in the background when you turn on your webcam.

5. Avoid backlighting -- test your webcam and see whether your face is clearly

visible. Bouncing a desklamp off the ceiling often works well. Lighting doesn’t have to be professional -- just visible.

6. If you’d like, you can view a 7 minute video orientation to BlackBoard

Collaborate: http://youtu.be/IuFgfLgMJfg -- it isn’t absolutely necessary. This guide should be all you need, and it’s pretty easy to figure out without any guide.

Getting started: setting up your audio

1. Howard or another moderator will set up the session for you. Twenty minutes before the session, log in with the URL Howard or another moderator provides. The current moderator will give you moderator privileges.

2. Set up your audio and video. Make sure your microphone and webcam are

set up and that lighting on your face makes you visible. When you get online, use the “audio setup wizard” from the “audio” submenu of the “Tools” menu or click on the microphone icon on the “Audio & Video” panel.

Getting started: setting up your video

1. Note the “Audio & Video” pane in the upper left corner of the screen. Use the “Detach Panel” entry under the small menu in the upper right corner of the video (the icon that consists of horizontal lines) to pop out the video panel, move it around the screen, resize it. In the screen shot below, I detached the audio-video panel, enlarged it by dragging the corner of the panel, and click-dragged it to a position directly under the whiteboard.

2. Click the “Talk” button under the video window in the “Audio & Video”

panel to talk; click on the “Video” button to start your video. Use the sliders under the video window, right above the “Talk” and “Video” buttons to adjust the volume of your speaker/earbuds and your microphone.

3. Pull down the “Tools” menu to “Video” and set the number of simultaneous video windows you want to display – video participants who are not speaking are visible in thumbnail-sized video screens under the video screen.

Uploading presentations

PowerPoint presentations can be uploaded directly to the whiteboard by clicking on the “Load Content” button on the upper right corner of the whiteboard panel, then selecting the file to be uploaded. Collaborate won’t accept whiteboards over ten megabytes, so I sometimes have to break a presentation into smaller parts, then upload and save them as consecutively numbered whiteboards. You can create presentations in Collaborate by uploading your own images to whiteboard pages, adding your own text, and saving the aggregated pages as a whiteboard.

Navigating the whiteboard for presentations

In addition to the “Load Content” button, the two most important controls on the top right hand corner menu of the whiteboard are the left and right arrow keys that enable you to move forward and backward through a sequence of whiteboard screens – like moving forward and backward through a PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow.

Screen sharing You can switch from whiteboard to screen-sharing or web tour by clicking on one of the three icons in the upper left corner of the whiteboard, and return to the whiteboard by ending the screen sharing or web tour and clicking on the whiteboard icon.

When you click the screen sharing icon you can choose between sharing your desktop or an open application. You will see the outlines of the area of

your screen that you are sharing, and can adjust it by dragging the corners. Controls in the lower left of your shared area can pause and stop sharing or send a snapshot of the shared region to the Collaborate whiteboard.

Queuing, managing participants

Note that participants can “raise their hands: to queue up for getting the floor for microphone/camera, can also display a few emoticons. The icons at the right, next to the name of a participant, indicates whether their microphone and/or camera is on. As a moderator, you can right-click (or Control-click on a Mac) on a participants names to give them moderator privileges, turn off their microphone and/or camera, assign them to a breakout group, log them out, or turn off their raised hand.

Participation

Roles One good way to encourage learning that is both collaborative (working together on a project) and cooperative (learners take responsibility for helping each other learn) is to enable participants to choose active roles (and to invent new ones). Create a blank whiteboard page (“New Page”) and type “Roles” in large type at the top. Around the page, in slightly smaller type, write “Searchers” (people who conduct searches and insert relevant URLs into the chat), “Contextualizers” (who will add context to those URLs after the session – the way a blogger adds a few descriptive words to introduce a

link, sometimes including a snippet from the source), “Summarizers” (who take notes during the session and also work with the Contextualizers’ output), “Curators” (who organize the links found by the Searchers and contextualized by the Contextualizers, using a service such as Diigo or Scoop.it). I always include “Invent your own role.” Then ask participants to use the whiteboard text tool to add their names under the roles they would like to try. A wiki can be set up in advance, a Diigo or Scoop.it group created or Pearltrees team created.

A word on introductions Audio-video introductions help solidify a sense of presence of people from all over the world who have come to this online place to learn together, but they become unwieldy with participant groups consisting of about twenty or more members. With fewer than twenty, I ask people to turn on t heir microphone and camera, one at a time, and introduce themselves in less than 30 seconds. A moderator can go from the top of the participant list or by queuing via the raised hand icon. It can help to ask people to just say their name, location, ten words describing themselves, and a question they would like to pursue. I model what I mean by “ten words about myself” by saying that I consider myself an “independent thinker, online instigator, novice educator, expert learner, offline gardener.” With larger groups, people can type a sentence or two about themselves into the chat. If the group has an asynchronous component such as a forum or blog with comments, encourage participants to post longer, more detailed introductions there.

Icebreakers I learned from Steve Hargadon’s “Future of Education” interviews (using Collaborate (http://www.futureofeducation.com/notes/Past_Interviews ) that even when there are dozens or hundreds of participants, it is useful to upload a world map to the whiteboard and ask participants to double click on the pencil icon in the whiteboard toolbar then click once on the map to indicate their location. I ask participants to type their name and geographical location into the chat after they put their dot on the map. I’ve seen this done with hundreds of participants. It activates them.

Chat

Encourage people to use the text chat to query each other about concepts they aren’t sure about, to suggest relevant references, to elaborate on,

question, or challenge the main presentation, and just to get to know each other. Encourage and model a high level of thoughtfulness that doesn’t exclude fun but mindfully takes care to respect the speaker.

Mindmapping

The collaborative whiteboard enables even large groups of participants to work collaboratively and simultaneously through exercises like mindmapping. I use a very broad definition of mindmapping to denote a semi-hierarchical display of linked ideas. I start with one big idea and type it in a large font, then place it inside an ellipse in the middle of the page. I show how secondary concepts can be put in small rectangles and placed near the central node, then connected with a line, and tertiary concepts can be placed in small type fonts around the rectangular secondary nodes. The whiteboard enables the uploading, sizing, and placement of images into mindmaps, so some nodes can be illustrated. The magic in the process comes from seeing a kind of conceptual map of the session emerge from a blank page. Nobody can see which participant makes any particular addition, so words and shapes appear, move around the page, grow interconnected, in just a matter of minutes. Volunteers can work from the rough collective mindmap to create a more orderly, more thought-out version. Knowledge comes from a process of distillation and reframing, rather than only through lecture-style delivery. Here is an example of a rough sketch mindmap created by online learners, then an example of a more refined version that was done later by one of them.