Of course there’s always darkness simmering in the bestial recesses of the Monkey Mind. I’m committed to rising above it, friends. Let’s use the internet to connect across space and time in real-time, not to divide us further.
Standing in line at the market this morning, waiting to pay for my milk and muffins, I couldn’t help laughing out loud at the tabloid and magazine headlines promising fifty ways I could lose the body I’ve created with my choices over the last 6 weeks of holiday parties.
* 10 Best Weight-Loss Pills
* Strip Off 25 Lbs in Just 20 Days
* Drop 4 Dress Sizes Before Valentines!
* Revitalize Yourself for the New Year – in 1 Short Week
* 5 Exercises, 10 Minutes, 15 Days to Washboard Abs
You know this stuff! Maybe you still believe one of these will work…I don’t.
I’m old enough – and 2009 was tough enough – for me to skip pretending that one more quick recovery scheme will deliver anything but disappointment when it comes to my health. Or health care reform ;-(.
A Trustable Resource For Your 2010 Care-For-My-Health Plan
On the other hand, I am so excited about a live, online telehealth resource called EMindful that I want to open 2010 with the interview I did recently with the visionary founder and CEO of Emindful.com, Kelley McCabe, and her web class producer, David Lessak.
The interview runs about 35 minutes and it explores Kelley’s invention of Emindful and some of the ways she and David are using virtual meeting technologies to deliver a variety of telehealth services – including mindfulness training and live yoga classes.
(A MILLION THANKS! shout-out to my friend and partner-in-virtual-meeting-adventure-games, Tom Carroll, of EvolutionaryLearning.com, for his help recording this conversation with Kelly and David and helping me get it posted!)
WHAT A DELIGHTFUL IDEA! USING YOUR COMPUTER TO DO YOGA!
Among the handful of high-quality telehealth resources offered at EMindful, the one that impresses me most is the live online yoga classes with Kirpalu-trained yoga instructors.
Here’s a little screencast that shows briefly what an Emindful yoga class looks like.
While you may never have considered using your computer to do yoga, having the opportunity to work with a live, online instructor offers many benefits – distinct from using VHS or DVD recordings of yoga routines. Just off the top of my head, here are five:
1. You can develop a relationship with a live instructor who varies your daily practice – instead of leaving you repeating the same few postures over and over on a tape.
2. Both before and after class, your live instructor is available to answer individual questions about specific challenges you’re facing in your practice.
3. You can practice anywhere you can get online, using a desktop or laptop computer.
4. If you can’t attend a live session, you can access the class archive at a later time in the day to do the class when it’s most convenient for you.
5. If you don’t live within walking distance of a high-quality yoga studio, you can walk-your-talk about lowering your carbon footprint by not driving all over town for a one-hour daily class.
Access and Convenience
Despite the phenomenal growth of yoga and other Eastern health practices across the US, substantial chunks of the population still lack access to well-trained instructors. Not just in rural areas. Access issues abound in traffic-jammed urban areas, too. Some groups that could benefit from Emindful’s yoga workshops and classes include:
1. People whose jobs require them to travel so much that they can’t attend local classes at regular times and build up a steady relationship with a knowledgeable teacher.
2. Mothers who are temporarily home-bound caring for young children.
3. Aging Baby Boomers – or other caregivers – who are providing care for seniors and can’t leave them unattended for long.
4. People with transportation issues that prevent them from getting to regular local classes.
If you’re in one of these groups – or you know people who are – and you’d like for yoga to play a bigger role in your 2010 Care-For-My-Health Plan, I hope you’ll check out Emindful this week and take Kelly and David up on one of their special offers.
Emindful is certainly stretching the limits (sic) of what can be accomplished with virtual meeting technology – and that’s exciting! I’m wishing Kelley and David great luck in 2010 will be keeping an eye out for new offerings from them in the fast-moving connected health and telehealth markets.
What else can people do in virtual meeting rooms? We’re only beginning to scratch the surface, aren’t we? What a decade this is going to be!
When times get tough, the tough get going, they say. Well, times remain tough, don’t they? I’m having so many people telling me they need my help but can’t afford it that I’ve decided to create my own Economic Stimulus Package for 2010. It’s called “Meri Bucks.”
Here’s how it works: I want and need to exchange my services for cash so I can pay the rent and buy groceries and fuel while we reinvent the economy together. Clients and potential clients want and need my help tweaking their businesses processes so they CAN take advantage of the incredible time and cost savings virtual meetings have to offer. Most people would really like to use web conferencing and other kinds of virtual meetings with clients, customers, coworkers, and suppliers. They just don’t want to risk losing their relationships with people. They don’t want to look stupid. They don’t think they have time to learn something new. And, worst of all, they don’t know how to tweak the way they’re doing things now – just a little – so they can translate some of their service processes into virtual meeting spaces.
On top of that, everyone needs to be able to squeeze every last drop of value out of whatever cash they do have. That means they’re agonizing over which help they can afford to get now – and what just has to wait.
So, here’s my offer: Throughout the entire year of 2010, I’m going to be trading in “Meri Bucks.” These certificates of service come in two denominations only, $1250 and $625. I’m trading them for $1000 or $500 in US greenbacks. This means that “Meri Bucks” are paying 25% return on investment.
Now I know – and you know – that no one is offering to give you a 25% return on investment for your precious greenbacks right now. So this is a terrific deal for you! And the deal is worth it to me because I have some holes in my calendar and want to fill them now. So, I’m willing to offer this extraordinary return as part of playing fair and doing my part to stimulate the economy in 2010.
I know you can’t afford to keep coping with workarounds that are costing you profits you need to pocket. And I can’t do what I love to help small business people if you can’t afford to get the service you need from me.
If you’re ready to make a few changes to your business processes – and learn quickly and painlessly how you can use virtual meetings to pocket more real profits throughout 2010 and all the years ahead – you can get an extra FREE 25% service from me by purchasing and trading in “Meri Bucks” right now. This could translate into you getting several team members trained for FREE, several hours of management consulting for FREE, several hours of producer support for FREE, or some other kind of help you know you need to get busy transitioning into virtual meeting space. You design your project and, using “Meri Bucks,” I’ll deliver 25% extra into it for FREE.
So, tell Santa. Tell your partners. Tell your CFO. Tell your investors. Tell your husband/wife… Starting right now you can use “Meri Bucks” to get a leg up on transitioning your business into the 21st century using virtual meetings.
If you’re interested in taking me up on this offer and want to discuss it further, please feel free to phone me directly at 541.488.7942.
You will need to call soon, though, because I have minted a LIMITED NUMBER of these certificates and when they’re gone, they’re gone.You can use them for service anytime in 2010, but you will need to purchase them now if you’re interested!
I have to say right up-front that I feel like I’ve been ambushed out of nowhere when I read and hear objections to President Obama’s web meeting tomorrow, September 8th, with our nation’s school children. From 1/3 and 1/2 of our nation’s school children are routinely dropping out of school before they complete a high-school degree program. The figures are higher in blighted urban areas. There, 4 out of 5 students are dropping out before completing their high-school degree. So, maybe I’m nuts, but to me it only makes sense that the President would do something different to inspire students, teachers, and parents to do something different. So, what gives with the objections to having a national Back-to-School-Meeting?
I guess the biggest part of my surprise about the resistance comes from the fact that I meet online every day – with all kinds of people – in both my business and my personal life. Apparently one of the reasons that vendors like Go To Meeting are running the same ad over and over and over through the evening news broadcasts on CNN is that a lot of people still don’t know they, too, can use virtual meeting tools easily and safely to meet with groups as small as 2 or as large as ???? (Tomorrow’s meeting will be historic and give us some new data about the possibilities of virtual meetings, too!)
I know from personal, daily experience that virtual meetings hold tremendous potential to support dialogue, discussion, and interaction – even when we can’t be in the same room with other people. Like I say here often, they’re not magic, but almost.
I’m thinking about what else I want to say about the rhetoric of resistance and hatred that seems to be fueling some schools boycotting the President’s meeting.
But for now, if you’re someone who really cares about education – a parent, a teacher, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, or a school kid – please help yourself to Wes Fryer’s blog today. Wes has been tirelessly covering all the bases for many years now in the conversation, “How can we think differently about instruction using Web 2.0 tools?” His passion and the encyclopedic drive of his blog are legendary amongst teachers who have their eye on the future. And for good reason.
Wes’ chart above is old, by Web 2.0 standards, but it still illustrates well some things you need to think about – whether you’re a teacher, a trainer, or any kind of business person who needs to share information in order to help someone else achieve their hopes and dreams – and you can’t always be in the same room with them at the same time. The technologies that support virtual classrooms and other kinds of virtual meetings allow us to view each others’ slides, photos, documents, web pages, and even video.
However, it’s always seemed to me that the most crucial thing we can share in virtual meetings (that we can’t do just watching television or one-way web presentations) is our voices, our thoughts, our in-the-moment-feedback with each other. To me, this is the real beauty of virtual meetings – their live, interactive potential!
Now that I think about it, maybe that beauty that I value so much is exactly what the resisters are resisting. The interactive potential of virtual meetings spells an end to nation-wide one-way communication and the structures of hierarchy and domination that one-way communication perpetuates. Hmmmm….. Maybe that’s what’s up… You think?
Well, if you’re a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle who would like to attend the meeting live with a classroom of students and their forward-thinking teacher, Karl Fisch, you can check in there tomorrow, and attend with Karl and his class of 5th grade students who live right in the heartland, Littleton, Colorado. The meeting will, of course, be recorded and immediately reposted to YouTube and the text of the President’s remarks will be posted online today ahead of the meeting. It’s unlikely that the President will be able to take live questions from the children – although I hope, somehow, the White House staff figures out how to do that technologically challenging task!
There are tons of materials available to support your talk and interaction with your children and anyone else who attends this meeting with you. Wes has linked to some of the best on his blog today. Please use one or more of them to help each other make the most of this opportunity to set a new tone for everybody starting back to school this fall, 2009. They need all our help to get across the finish line!
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know I’m crazy about all kinds of virtual meeting tools. And in this economy, I’m especially crazy about helping people practice their chops using some of the fabulous new FREE tools.
DimDim is one of the best of the free web conferencing, virtual meeting, internet conferencing, online meeting tools out there. They recently published a new set of simple setup tutorials and if you’re ready to dive in and explore, you can’t go wrong using them. Go here to find a well-organized set of tutorials.
Then, when you’re ready to focus on how to think about and organize your virtual meetings so you get – and keep – the rapport you need with the folks you’re meeting with, come back and see me here. Your next step? Get yourself a copy of The Coach’s Short List and sign up for my next live – or online – training.
It’s not rocket science learning to setup and use virtual meeting tools skillfully. It’s also not something most people want to do without some help – until they get good at both the technical part AND the relationship part. That’s what I’m here for.
Just watched a SelfGrowth.com live-streaming TV show and I have to say I’m impressed with the courage and creativity of David Riklan!
David is the CEO and rabid advocate for his website which aggregates the work of thousands of self-help teachers and authors. SelfGrowth.com has an enviable traffic flow and I’m predicting that David’s latest experiment using UStream’s live feed plus Twitter is going to ramp up his traffic even further!
The stage setup for the show had David behind his desk with a speaker-phone co-host whose presence was made “visible” by having the phone displayed prominently, upstage, on David’s desk. David introduced one of his staff members, the onsite “Twitter manager,” who mostly remained off-stage tracking participants’ live tweets, but made an appearance every so often behind the desk with David, too. Other staff members made personal appearances – sitting next to David behind the desk – throughout the show, as well. The team seemed to have someone juggling the IM/chat window on UStream, too, although I couldn’t get it to take my input.
David collected some questions ahead of the show, using an online form he circulated to his list. He answered some viewers’ questions live and punted some to his telephone co-host to answer throughout the show.
He used a very smart giveaway strategy, encouraging real-time Twitter participation (now incorporated into UStream as the “social stream”). Asking participants to tweet a “commercial” message for him made them eligible for a live drawing of a multi-piece CD/DVD set he showed. The commercial feel of that strategy felt more than a little tacky to me, but it certainly demonstrated an interesting way to incentivize others to broadcast your message on Twitter if that’s something you want to do with Twitter.
The experience reminded me at lot of the early days of Access TV. And, of course, the value of Access TV shows always hinges on the creativity and mindfulness of the show host. David has been developing his community for quite awhile and he’s a pretty fair show host. I look forward to seeing where else he takes this approach…
Interesting experiment! Is this Access TV on the internet… or a new kind of Virtual Meeting?
Did you attend? If so, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the experience. Did you feel like you were in a virtual meeting with David…or was this a second-tier version of the new ABC Nightline Format (that includes Twitter participation)? What do YOU think?
For over a year, my friend, Tom Carroll, and I have been playing with free virtual meeting tools. Testing them, pushing them, breaking them, seeing which ones work best for what kinds of meetings.
My fascination with real-time virtual meetings comes from my very real, very non-technical experience as a child growing up in a divided bungalow in Chevy Chase where the upstairs bathroom of our home shared a pretty thin wall with the upstairs bathroom of our neighbor’s home.
When I was a curious little girl, I wanted more than anything to be able to “see” through that wall and “hear” what my neighbor, Don Jackson, was doing over on his side. Don was 10 years older than me and generously tolerated my crush on him by actually encouraging me to memorize Morse Code and tap out little messages back and forth with him on the bathroom wall.
I know. It sounds really silly. And it was. But that experience birthed my fascination with “distance” communication and it survives today in my desire to be able to “see” and “hear” what my neighbors around the globe are doing and thinking – without me actually having to travel around the world all the time to see them face-to-face.
Not that I’ve got anything against traveling! I love traveling more than almost anything. But I can’t live that way. After awhile, everyone wants a place they call home. But I still want to take adventures from home, too. What’s the internet for, anyway, if not adventuring?
So, from my home in Ashland, Oregon and Tom’s home in Austin, Texas, we’ve been taking adventures, using all kinds of web conferencing tools to have live, authentic conversations that incorporate all kinds of media.
Now we’ve started inviting people who have something interesting to share to join us.
About a week ago, Tom made this recording I posted today to Blip.tv. It’s the introduction to a 4-part conversation I’ll be having over the next couple of weeks with Matt Sweet and Rene Fabre.
Matt and Rene work for Ticor Title in the Pacific NW. It’s their job to help REALTORS and title people from Astoria, Washington to Ashland, Oregon, make sense of the ways that online communication has forever changed their businesses.
Matt and Rene are not quite Ren and Stimpy. But almost. They’re a couple of wild and crazy guys who happen to love exploring what makes Google tick. Their passion – and their work – is finding new ways to use social media to help professional business people make friends and influence people to buy from them. Every week they take their people into free, online meeting rooms at vYew.com to have raucous conversations about new ways they need to start building their reputations and connecting to customers – online.
I’m still experimenting with these kinds of interviews, and Tom’s still testing out ways to record them for me, but I hope you’ll take a look and a listen to this one and let me know what you think about the format.
Over the next 3 sessions, I’m hoping you’ll get to see a little more about how vYew works and, at the same time, learn something about how you can use social media to establish a more visible/audible presence for yourself online.
Please share any thoughts or suggestions you have that will help us improve!
Whew, I think I’m starting to get social media well enough to quit kicking constantly and take a little rest. For a minute.
Truly useful insights came this week from reading John Borthwick,Marcia Connor, and Tony Karrer‘s thoughts about what people are doing participating on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media — including live-tweeted seminars and webinars.
As I catch my breath and let my legs dangle for a little bit, I’m relaxing into the realization that publishing and meeting are mashing up.
As more and more of us just let go of the side of the pool and swim out into the deep waters of online relationship, we’re “meeting” and “distributing” at the same time. Human communication has always served many functions at once. But the possibilities offered by social media (including live virtual meetings) are really stirring things up.
From out here in the deep, I can see that most newspapers are gonna be gonners. No amount of refinancing will change anything. And magazines are either going to become clubs where all the members publish or they’re gonna die, too. But there’s actually a lot more going on than that.
For sure, as Karen Stephenson says, human beings have begun “storing our knowledge in our friends.” But we’re also finding new ways to store other people’s knowledge in our friends, too. And that has huge implications for all media distributors. Makes my head hurt stretching my mind around that one.
Social media is a much bigger thing than I can understand yet.
Sure is nice finding ScribeFire to support my blogging this week. It’s going to take quite a bit of writing to help me get my thoughts clear while I kick around out here so far away from familiar shores.
Right now though, I notice I’m asking myself over and over, “When we meet virtually, where are we meeting?” And, “Who are we, anyway?” I’m not talking about the tools, now. I’m talking about the place of mind we meet. Where exactly is that? Who is that “we” that’s following me on Twitter? Who are all those “we’s” I’m part of when I’m following someone, especially someone I haven’t met yet F2F? And how are we ever going to keep track of all those fluid identities?
Multimedia learning doesn’t happen by chance. It’s not about entertainment and it’s not about “creativity.” It’s about using words and pictures in quite specific ways to ENHANCE cognition and memory.
If you’re going to use slideshows in your virtual meetings and web conferences – and you don’t want to put people directly to sleep – it’s crucial to understand and master the basic principles of multimedia learning.
Jeff Brenman’s 2008 winning Slideshare show, “Thirst,” does a masterful job of demonstrating the key principles of cognitive theory of multimedia learning that Richard Mayer and Ruth Colvin Clark have been researching and writing about for the last two decades.
As you watch Jeff’s show, notice not just what you learn, but how the show itself affects your thinking. It’s truly remarkable and Jeff deserves all the kudos he’s received!
If you’re already persuaded of multimedia learning theory and hungry to put it into practice, you’ll want to grab yourself a copy of my friend Cliff Atkinson’s handbook, “Beyond Bullet Points,” and get busy using the organizers and strategies he offers to enhance the effectiveness of your sales and instructional presentations.
Beyond Bullet Points provides solid background on multimedia learning theory and then goes on to help business and educational speakers start putting it to work right away.
If you’d like to see an example of the Beyond Bullet Points strategy at work, you can also take a look at this little slideshow I made in February, 2008, to support my application for a distance learning position at the college in my new hometown. It’s short and sweet, but the architecture of the show is pure “BBP.” I never intended anyone beyond the hiring committee to look at it, but it was favorited by the CEO of Slideshare a week or so after I hosted it on Slideshare. So now it’s been viewed by several hundred folks. (I hope they’re having a laugh! Maybe they’ve learned something…) The “architecture” of the Beyond Bullet Points thinking is right up at the surface in the show.
Enjoy! And, as always, I’m genuinely interested in your thoughts and comments…
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I know. It sounds really silly. And it was. But that experience birthed my fascination with “distance” communication and it survives today in my desire to be able to “see” and “hear” what my neighbors around the globe are doing and thinking – without me actually having to travel around the world all the time to see them face-to-face.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ecfad938-a2b6-4b35-a8ff-005a34611842)
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– it’s crucial to understand and master the basic principles of multimedia learning.
