[CC licensed image by Greg Gladman]

Danah Boyd’s story of her painful experience with a (projected) presentation backchannel have generated a lot of feedback. As you might expect, some of the commentary has been more thoughtful than others. Some has been rather overblown, falling into the "Bad! No, good! No, bad!" kind of exchange that gets us precisely nowhere (and is, in any case, not doing Danah’s thoughtful post any favors).

What I hope can come from this is some renewed attention to a perennial theme in the blogging, twittering and hallway conversations of those who attend or promote educational conferences: transforming the conference presentation model from narrating PowerPoint slide shows to… well, something else (see end note). There’s been a lot of talk about how horrible many presentations are and much table-pounding and bellowing that something needs to be done, but where can we see any evidence of change? I don’t need all of my digits to number the "presentations" I’ve seen or attended that have subverted the standard model to a significant degree, coming from the likes of Nancy White (visual facilitation), Dave Cormier (you make the slides), Alan Levine (campfire storytelling), and Brian Lamb (DJ extravaganza).

This isn’t easy stuff. It’s a lot easier to talk about transformation than to engage in it. I’ve used backchannels– projected and not– as well as live wikis and chat rooms, visual facilitation, and U-Stream + Twitter combinations… and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. In the end I, like many, essentially conform to expectations and work to achieve a passable result in the limited time I’m willing to give to presentations where all that’s expected is something "acceptable."

But even if I could– and did– go completely crazy and figure out something new, creative, and engaging, do those putting on the events want the result? Will they provide for the "extra" needs some of these methods might require? Will my proposal even make it past the check box stage of the submission process when I can’t honestly choose presentation, panel or round table?

And how about the audience? It’s often been my experience that those in the audience are– like many students– uncomfortable when challenged by a "presentation" to engage and participate rather than sit back and passively receive (at best). Will they– most thinking at least as much of what they are going to do at the end of the day as they are the session they are about to attend– choose an offering that sounds out of their normal range of experience and is likely to personally challenge them over the one they can use to check their email while promising themselves they’ll download the slides later? And even if the audience members’ energy and desire isn’t in question, they are often in the room, or at the conference, because they expect an expert to fill them in on something they don’t already know– or address the nuances and complexity of something they do.

Of course Danah’s experience is confounded by other factors: most obviously the poorly thought-out physical setup, her celebrity, and the nature of the audience at a conference like Web2.0 Expo (the most savage– and funniest– backchannels I’ve ever seen have been at high-functioning geek conferences like O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference). That’s why I’m personally less interested in it as a specific example than I am that it has created a moment in which perhaps we can move past simplistic arguments about what is "good" or "bad" and into how we can move forward to something more interesting and powerful than we typically see at conferences now.

Given the alternative of death by PowerPoint, I’d often prefer a speaker simply pull up a chair and have a conversation with the group. Some of my best conference experiences have been as part of facilitating a conversation. But the richness that’s possible with readily available technology is tantalizing. No matter how well- or ill-considered the implementation, and whether it is made visible or not, the presence of a presentation backchannel indicates a desire to get away from the tired conference-standard. The backchannel should only be a beginning.

NOTE: I’m not discounting the standard conference presentation model entirely. Give me a powerful, highly informed speaker with some stage presence and set the expectation appropriately and I’ll be a happy audience member. But, as with acting or singing or any other kind of performance, not that many people are adept at the performance that is an engaging presentation. And surely no one really believes the routine conference presentation represents the best method for every need?

Reading Johanna Hanes’ paper “Google Wave: A Revolutionary CSCL-tool or Overestimated Hype” (PDF)—a nice combination of personal experience with Google Wave, light theoretical foundation, and a decent suite of links and resources—and ruminating on how I might position Google Wave for my students has reminded me yet again that I’m still not sure what to make of Wave.

As a client—a working app—Google Wave is a pretty sad affair. I can reasonably set aside some gives given that Wave is a very beta (alpha?) release, but I remain surprised Google would roll a service out even as widely as it has while in such a shabby state.

The real question is what Google Wave the client offers that might be useful in supporting my work and other activities. Now that I’ve taken part in a number of waves, some of my own creation and some not, I can give a current answer: not much. Perhaps my biggest functional problems will be resolved as the client evolves, such as:

• Performance! Wave is terribly slow and laggy—and it just gets worse as conversations reach any productive length.
• Simultaneous editing: good idea, poor implementation… engaging in simultaneous editing often leads to lost edits or completely lost entries.
• Inconsistent and painful UI—many functions are hidden in keyboard shortcuts and available no other way, others seem only available via mouse and in mysterious contexts. Mouse handling in the conversation space is often-nonsensical. Given how much information is being packed into one place, use of screen real-estate is poor.
• Conversations are awkward due to lack of good navigation and inability to “split” conversations. At least as far as I can tell.
• Practically speaking, conversations are subject to length limitations (due to performance, screen real-estate and lackluster navigation) almost as restrictive as those in email clients. Breaking into multiple waves helps, but adds to the clutter and disconnected feel of the semi-conversations that typify wave-based conversations.
• Keeping a history is a good thing, but the “playback” feature is the kind of thing that looks cool in a presentation but is rarely of practical use.

The most interesting aspect of Wave is the potential for real-time collaboration using multiple media in a single location… but at this point it’s only potential and other products can meet those needs. For asynchronous collaboration the options are numerous, including Google Docs (for basic documents) and wikis of various kinds  (that can incorporate a wider variety of media). Etherpad actually gets simultaneous editing right; I hope the open-source release means Etherpad will be readily available until Google’s snarfed up the interesting technology and used it to make Google Wave work. Group Discussion tools provide 90% or more of what Google Wave provides while being readily available, stable, etc.

I thought Google Wave was a solution in search of a problem. It’s probably more accurate to say Google Wave is (thus far) a clumsy solution to a very small problem that can be productively solved with existing, better performing tools—including a few applications provided by Google itself. This may change in the future: I can understand, even if I don’t buy, Google’s positioning of Wave as an email killer, combining functions of email communication with rich media, chat and wiki facilities. But for now it’s simply a slow, buggy, painful experiment for which I’ve yet to see a practical use with benefits enough to outweigh the cost.

However, as Alan Levine’s helpfully reminded me (and the world), Google Wave’s real promise may lie in its place as a platform. I’m not so sure Wave is a client with the future of the text browser or the protocol quite as important as http (and being of more promise than Wave’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad client is a pretty low bar), but the potential power in the combination of features and functions the API can bring together is great.

[Side-note: the debut of highly hyped products like Google Wave tends to bring the worst out of many in educational technology, (sometimes inadvertently) confirming the unfortunate characterizations of my community by those outside. First are those who immediately start looking through the wrong end of the telescope and start conversations based on questions like “how can we use Google Wave in education?” It’s not that this is, at heart, the wrong question, but in posing it that way we appear to be the very “geeks obsessed with every shiny new toy” that many think we are. Second are those that latch onto features provided by a product and highlight/elevate them without any evidence of their value in the first place. For instance, Wave may very well be useful for collaborative note-taking, but what supports the contention that collaborative note-taking is of any value in the first place? Just because a cool product does it?]