Well, I had six users lined up after the southern conference and felt pretty good about everything. I thought at least four would come through for me. As of today I have 2 that have begun the training. Not much discussion can happen between two people.
I am at another conference today (do you see a pattern here?) doing some training. I have three sessions that I am doing tomorrow that will have at least 40 people in each session. The first session will be full of people that will have high interest in the topic of my project, so I am going to put out a shameless appeal for participants.
The difficulty I can see with my chosen project is that to get the kind of communication that I think I need for this to truly be a good learning activity I need larger numbers of people than I am able to do in such a short time. Basically I am creating a space for a learning community on a particular topic. You need to have a critical mass of people to get it to take root and for in depth conversation to take place. I am not there yet.
I still think the format that I am using is a good one and that Wiggio is a good tool for building such a community. I see the difficulty in the early stages of growing such a community though.
I also have struggled to get participants to test my project, but mostly because I feel guilty asking them to do so when I know how busy they already are. I'm asking co-workers to help me and can only imagine how much harder it would be for you given your situation.
ReplyDeleteDavid,
ReplyDeleteI hope you were able to obtain enough learners for your project. Maybe you should consider bribery. When you are pleading for participants in a training, you could offer them candy, if they sign in at the end of your training? Sometimes candy can be a big motivator.
Tammy