Backchannel Backchat

It seems that the LesBlogs conference in Paris was the scene of an interesting spat between Ben Metcalfe, the brain behind the BBC’s brillant Backstage project and Mena Trott, the co-founder of SixApart.

It centred around comments on the IRC backchannel which Ewan describes as ‘ a kind of MSN that everyone in the conference was tuned into and could use to communicate with each other.’ The backchannel was displayed behind the speakers on stage. Ewan used it to maintain a conversation with all the participants and between segments of his talk and he was able to respond to questions or comments left spontaneously by the participating audience.

However, others found the experience not so productive. When the criticism from Ben was deemed too harsh then Mena (from the stage) forced him to stand and give an account for his actions. There was quite a scary teacher-pupil kind of thing going on and it reminded me of once when as a pupil, I was told by the headmaster to stand up and ‘face the music’ in front of the whole school. I can’t even remember the misdemeanour now (I was probably guilty though!) but the buttock-clenching embarassment is still fresh in my mind. Another similar experience drove me to verse years later! Fast forward to 2005 – How not to deal with an unruly student- the video

Why this interests me is that every classroom has a backchannel. It may not be electronic but be in no doubt that an undercurrent of relevant and irrelevant thoughts, comments and questions is whirring around every body of students sitting in front of every teacher. Sometimes the output of the backchannel is rude ‘backchat’ but most of the time the skilled teacher ignores the irrelevant and sometimes the irreverent, to take the gems from the classroom backchannel and use them to motivate and move a class on. It doesn’t surprise me that Ewan used the backchannel with aplomb. He’s a teacher! Despite what people might think, not everyone can teach. Most couldn’t deal with the classroom backchannel!