Growing up 2.0

I read Danah Boyd's piece on her recent experience with the back channel while presenting and shocked at the level of maturity in which twitter was used. What does it mean to be a professional at one of these conferences? One of the comments came from an individual who attended a scientific conference and the norms for their back channel set the bar a bit higher and a result was a cleaner, more present chat.

After 4 semesters at BGI , I noticed chaos ensues when norms and expectation are not articulated and written down. This is true of BGI as well as everyone else, which connects to the Dunbar Number and seems to represent a boundary between good and bad behavior and the requirements to setup best practices. Brian Weller brought up some great research regarding memory(after 40 minutes recall fades), attention spans(20 minutes then focus wanes) and use of a figure ground which has the power to shock and refocus people's attention just when they drift off.

The crowd at Web 2.0 seemed to suffer from ADD and a need for everything to entertain to have value.  Through the many presentations we do at BGI, remembering to be authentic and own what you know helps empower the speaker and engage the audience. Does the IT profession need a courtesy lesson followed by sometime behind the lectern to help with empathy? Maybe the Unconference needs to go mainstream to engage the speaker with the audience at a more personal level to create a collaborative learning enviroment.

my appreciation to the faculty and staff at BGI for role modeling what this looks like to give me the tools I need to affect change in the world.