Stephen Downes

On one day I saw Bryan Alexander post about having a bad webinar experience, and on the next I saw him come out with this longish post on bad webinars. Talk about turning a bad experience into something good His main point: if you're not really seeking interaction with your audience, you should just post a video or podcast or whatever. As a follow-up, he offers a good list of the ways webcast hosts discourage audience participation. The worst, to my mind, is when they block the chat backchannel entirely (which is what happened to him the day before). Ostensibly, this is to prevent offensive comments or to get people to pay attention. But ultimately, it simply tells the audience their participation is not valued.