The Virtual Meeting Coach

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!