The 'retreat' continues today.... highlight being a small invention of mine. TwitterSim.

One of the hopes of the Web 2.0 workshop was to get people familiar with things like Twitter so that there could be a kind of 'back channel' of chat about the retreat using the technology. It's kind of working, there's a few of us 'playing'.

One of the sessions this morning though involved discussion at four tables which the guy running the session wanted 'twittered'. Last night he asked if I could tweet, I think is the word, from one table but this morning told me he was going to forget the idea because there weren't enough people.

I suggested that we didn't give up the idea we just do it in paper based form. Perhaps inspired by the paper blogging training session I've run, it was simple enough. We ripped up lots of inch wide strips of paper; I instructed everyone to use these to comment on anything they wanted - from the environment and process to the content and complex issues; they had to come up with a nickname or id tag for each strip they wrote on; they couldn't use more than 25 words which I worked out was about 140 characters; and they were to pin up their twitters on four boards/panels we had round the room. (one for each question we were considering).

I worried that people would think it was a bit silly and not bother, but in fact it was just the opposite. Perhaps because Twitter had been mentioned several times in the retreat by then so people were curious, perhaps because even a 'post-it' type session seems quite formal, perhaps because it simply was fun (!), people seemed to really engage with it.

Perhaps not quite as simple as just Twittering in the first place, it did mean everyone could participate and you avoided lots of login/registration problems and the like. It also meant that you felt you weren't missing out on what other tables were doing, found that you could reflect on the process more (which was useful as the subject of the discussion was on student reflection - or lack of it), and it was, well... fun.

I even got inspired half way through to start typing up the comments so that I could produce a Wordle of the event for when the guy running it was wrapping up which was both interesting and encouraged people to explore another tool.

Anyway, it turned a worthy but perhaps slightly dull session into one that was worthy and most enjoyable. (Even my curmudgeonly colleague in attendance had to grudgingly admit through gritted teeth he'd been impressed).