The tool: Pigeonhole Live – The Mindset: Sage on the stage
One of the main issues with lectures is that the interaction between the lecturer and the audience is rather limited. The verbal Q&A between the audience and the lecturer is one method of increasing the interaction but it is often time consuming and the question quality varies.
In comes technology to the rescue! Pigeonhole Live is a platform that allows the audience to post questions and the cool part is that other audience members get to vote up the question which they deem worthy of the lecturer’s time to answer. This was developed by a group of clever NUS students who were frustrated with the traditional Q&A seen in lectures. You can take a look at the video below to find out more.
Pigeonhole Live is suited for a Sage on the Stage mindset where the lecturer is the main source of knowledge. This could be due to the lecturer’s preeminent position in the field or when the audience is made up of people with limited exposure to said field.
The tool: Twitter – The Mindset: Guide on the Side 
If, however, the audience comprises practitioners of the field who are experts in their own right, then perhaps a better tool would be twitter. I myself encountered twitter in a formal setting in the 2012 International Conference for Learning and Teaching with Technology (ICTLT). The participants of the conferences were all practising educators. Throughout the keynote and various concurrent sessions, participants were tweeting their thoughts and engaging with each other via twitter hashtags, e.g. #ICTLT2012. There were moments when the speaker would stop and attempt to answer questions that have been posted on twitter (the twitter conversations was projected onto a screen) but it was pretty much a random process and the question quality varied. In this case however, it mattered less because other participants may tweet an answer to the question or they may even contact each other via twitter to meet up and carry on the conversation face-to-face. Thus the speaker is in a sense a Guide on the Side, with his/her lecture content serving to stimulate ideas and conversation between participants rather than to impart knowledge. Given the public nature of twitter, the conversation may carry on after the talk via the hashtags. This helps sustain the inspiration/energy from the talk for a few more days, maximizing the positive impact to the participants. Some speakers join in the conversation as well, serving the role as Guide on the Side again even after his/her talk is over.
Later on I learnt that the role twitter was playing in the conference was called a “backchannel“. The benefit is, of course, the increased interaction among audience members but there are concerns that it may prove to be a distraction. The counter-argument to that is that audience members are increasingly being distracted by their mobile devices anyway so twitter is a way of stealing some of that attention back.
Conclusion
I hope I have given you enough information about these two tools for you to make a decision regarding their usage. At the end of the day, this simple principle should always hold true – Choose the Technology that fits your Pedagogy.
edutechie 