My Experience With a Webinar

I wanted to write about my experience listening to my first webinar.  I listened to Steve Hargadon's webinar with Mark Bauerlein entitled:  "Mark Bauerlein on Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking."

I liked the set up Hargadon had.  He would show occasional pictures as he and Bauerlein would talk. He showed a picture of a world map and had all listeners put a star next to where they were tuning in from.  It was really cool.  There were people in China, Korea, Australia, Singapore, and all over the US listening to this webinar.  There was also a chat feature set up so anyone could chime in and say what they were thinking about the speaker, or whatever.  There were so many layers of information being presented.  Many people put up links to what the speakers were talking about, or to their own blogs or research, etc.

As amazing as it all was, it was hard to try to wrap my head around all the different layers of conversation that were going on.  I would be paying attention to what people were chatting and totally miss what the speaker was actually talking about, and then I would go to one of the links and again lose the conversation.  If I could go back, I would have prepared myself a little better for that part.

One really interesting thing I saw was that there was a lot more hesitation with merging traditional literature and social/digital media than I originally anticipated from those listening to a webinar.  There was a lot of talk about the psychology behind reading a physical book you hold in your hand vs. looking at a computer/ebook screen.  I had thought everyone would be avid digital literacy advocates and liberal with the world of technology and literature, but there were a lot of conservative comments made on the subject, which was surprising.

All in all, it was a really great experience to be involved in a live webinar, chatting with people from all over the world.  I wish I had been on the ball enough to connect with some of the people participating, but I was too absorbed in trying to find my way through all those layers of information to add yet another layer of social networking.  I would definitely recommend that anyone participate in a webinar, if only to have the experience.