Showcase day part one
The day started with organising laptops, loading the materials to the flying classroom and pinching each other’s promo banners 
Mark Sayer (Head of Skills Tas) kicked off the formal parts of the program in the Plenary Hall at Wrest Point. Providing an overview to the work of Skills Tasmania, Mark set the scene for the day and introduced the Keynote speaker, Jonathon Finkelstein from Learning Times.
Bringing Subject Matter Experts – and squirrels – online
When you’re online you have so many ways of knowing what the audience is thinking eg polls, chat, text etc. When presenting to a face to face group you know so little of what people are thinking. Just a simple set of eyes. Jonathon invited participation in terms of questions, comments, blogging and more. Then he also put his mobile number up on screen for texts – to feed into the end of day wrapup – first text message was ‘what’s a chipmunk?’
Sharing expertise – rather than capturing knowledge, we need to be thinking of bringing them into the community so they can be part of the learning and building of new knowledge.
Bringing in Elluminate as a debating tool between different groups/ schools brings a whole new level of performance as the audience is way more serious than just your own classmates.
Perhaps early expeiences with tech have scarred people in relation to tech. Needs deflection and to consider learning outcomes, then chase the technology.
Need to make the invisible visible.
Encourage critical thinking – reflection, challenging, thinking
Respect your audience and their experience
Make your audience feel good about themselves
Help others realise they have the skills to make magic themselves
Employ ESP – just because you’re f2f doesn’t mean you know what they’re thinking, new forms of non-verbal communication
Through a card trick/ experiment Jonathon did a great job of reinforcing that with a few tools you can employ different ways of knowing what is going on.
Direct attention to where it needs to be.
Be Yourself (as part of this, using authentic people for voiceovers)
Use rel worl objects rather than constructed ones (less suspect), so applying learning to the work people are doing at the time – ie like the ideas dropbox for cstp course.
No matter how large the audience, make the individuals feel like it was just for them.
Check out www.ltgreenroom.org
Proximity brings trust
Use misdirection to direct attention elsewhere
Good magicians never share their secrets, good teachers always share their secrets!
Magic Skills:
Engaging (not necessarily entertaining)
Keep our own sense of wonder
Focus on the effect – especially when teaching skills online
It’s about the impact, not the props
Simpler techniques often have the most impact.
* this post needs a tidy up as it looks like some of my sections are out of order