New Presenter and Learner Methods and Skills

In response to my recent post Narrowing Gap between Face-to-Face and Online Presentations, the comments were really fantastic, but got the discussion going in a different direction - and it is clear that a comment box is way too small for this discussion.

Both your face-to-face and your online audience is likely multitasking. They might be participating in chat / backchannel. They might be blogging. They might be taking notes. They might be checking and responding to email. They might be figuring out where to go to dinner.

Clive Shepherd captured the problem as Multitasking is now every presenter’s problem.

The comments suggest that there are things that presenters and learners should do to to address this. Hence, this month's big question is:

New Presenter and Learner Methods & Skills?

Related questions:

1. What should we do as presenters in this multitasking world?
2. Should presenters coach (or ban) people away from multitasking?
3. As a presenter, how do you deal with the backchannel effectively? (I personally can't present and work with the backchannel at the same time.)
   
4. How does the backchannel fit with effective note taking?
5. What could a presenter do in 2 minutes at the start of a presentation to get this all to work out well?
   
6. What should we do as learners?
7. What if the presenter is not making effective use of our time?
8. What have you seen that worked really well?
9. What didn't work well? What would you do to change it?
10. Any tools that make this better?
    

I'm hoping to learn a lot out of this discussion which is certainly far bigger than my original post.

How to Respond:

Option 1 - Put your thoughts in a comment below.

Option 2 -

Step 1 - Post in your blog (please link to this post).
Step 2 - Put a comment in this blog with an HTML ready link that I can simply copy and paste (an HTML anchor tag). I will only copy and past, thus, I would also recommend you include your NAME immediately before your link. So, it should look like:

Tony Karrer - e-Learning 2.0

or you could also include your blog name with something like:

Tony Karrer - e-Learning 2.0 : eLearningTechnology

Responses So Far (also see Comments):

• Kristine Howard October Big Question
• Tony Karrer - Multitasking
• Multitasking learners? Opportunity, not threat
• Max Bezzina: What presenters could do when the audience multi-tasks
• Rani Gill: Social norms, expectations, attention, a game?
• Ken Allan - Binge Thinking
• Claudia Escribano: Presentations Re-Imagined
• Clive Shepherd - How should presenters address multitasking?
• Clark Quinn's Learnlets: Presenting in a networked age