Nic Pillow
Member Since: 30th May 2017
In 2016 Nic Pillow co-founded Rhizome Live with Jonathan Worth. Their mission is to make training and education more interactive and engaging using the principles of Connected Learning - by creating bespoke courses and the technology tools to support them. Nic's background is in mobile telecoms, from start-ups to multi-nationals. It was the latter that drove his desire to improve online training.
My answers
Hi Hannah,
Glad you like it! The best techniques inevitably depend on the participants and material but some general tips:
* Get everyone to contribute AND to reply to someone else right at the start to remove the "first time" barrier
* Provoke a response: ask questions, court controversy, or set a group challenge for everyone to work together on
* Prime a few vocal people you can rely on to keep things going: no one wants to speak (or type!) in a quiet room but a bit of chatter soon encourages more
* Use an environment or tool that promotes conversation...
... which of course is your other question. You want to see all comments but easily follow multiple threads of discussion simultaneously; and the conversation needs to be the main focus rather than an optional extra.
Slack and similar messaging platforms - even a Whatsapp group - are better than most LMS on the last point. But even they suffer at scale and TBH we've ended up creating our own interface that integrates with local systems. I'd be happy to demonstrate it, as well as to talk about how the approach could work in your case if you want?