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How do you give a presentation when people are texting?

Posted in gatherings, learning, technology on 11/09/2011 by mark novelli

I read a good article in Fast Company entitled, Giving Kick-Ass Presentations In The Age Of Social Media. Here is a an overview – with my thoughts added:

1. Don’t Panic if They Aren’t Looking at You - Engagement doesn’t always mean eye contact in these settings. Drawing or typing on an iPad can be engagement.

2. Stifle the Temptation to Ask for a Device Moratorium - People don’t like being told how to engage. A pen and paper is no more valid or appropriate than a smartphone.

3. If You Aren’t Nervous, You Should Be Now – Your audience has access to unlimited amounts of information almost instantly. This means we must work hard to make our presentations more than just lectures that transfer information to the listener. They must be passionate stories and experiences that allow for participation.

4. If You Don’t Speak Twitterese, It’s Time to Learn It. Share your social media information before you start. Make connections with your audience that extend the conversation outside of the presentation.

5. Congratulations! You May Be Speaking to Millions You Can’t See. Every presentation is an opportunity to share your story with those inside AND OUTSIDE the room. The influence of those in the room is a powerful thing.

6. The Reviews Are In–In Real Time. We should welcome and seek to grow from the instant feedback that the internet provides (but not get too focused on a negative comment here and there).

7. When All Else Fails, Surprise the Audience with Honesty. I believe this has always been at the center of any good message. People can sniff out when someone is honest, and when they they are not.

Things effective speakers have in common - Don’t use word-heavy powerpoint  // good storytellers // use humor // keep it short // allow for Q+A

The full article can be found here

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Ideas from a math teacher that could change how you teach

Posted in communication, creativity, learning on 09/21/2011 by mark novelli

I think Dan Meyer’s approach to learning is brilliant. What struck me is how the principles of his approach apply to all kinds of learning, not just math.

Do any these issues sound familiar when thinking about those attending our church gatherings? Lack of initiative / perseverance / retention / aversion to word problems / Eagerness for formula

Especially in our shifting culture, I think his suggestions for helping learners are relevant: Use Multimedia / encourage student intuition / ask the shortest question you can / let students / be less helpful

I firmly believe that we need to push ourselves to embrace new learning methods in our gatherings, especially Church gatherings. This starts with empowering our congregations to discuss, imagine, explore, visualize, interact, experience – rather than sit and listen to a lecture or performance.

Let’s lead the innovation towards deeper learning environments!

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MERGE 2011 (Instant Nostalgia)

Posted in about imago, events, learning on 07/20/2011 by Kelly Dolan

The clip above is a photo highlights video of our time at MERGE last week. We showed it Saturday morning in our final gathering together. Watching students and leaders respond to the video was a lot of fun, and instant nostalgia was definitely in full effect.

Every day of MERGE is packed with interconnected experiences from the time students wake up until the time they go back to the dorms at night. We’ve found that it’s really important to give them moments throughout the day to simply stop and reflect on what they’ve experienced over even the previous few hours. But it’s for more than nostalgia’s sake. At MERGE, we tried to help students become more aware of those moments in each day where they found themselves wrapped up on God’s amazing story, or made a real connection with God, learned something new, or heard from God in a specific way.

Then, we had the joy of sitting back and listening to students share those moments with each other. Some students used art to share. Others wrote spoken word pieces. Others simply wrote a letter to God, then read it for all of us.

For every image we captured at MERGE, and for every moment a student shared with us, we know there are countless more moments where God was at work in students’ lives.

We are grateful to have witnessed some of those moments, and to have been a part.

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Ready for MERGE

Posted in about imago, communication, creativity, events, faith, gatherings, learning, story on 07/08/2011 by Kelly Dolan

Tomorrow, we head up to Cornerstone University with Michael Novelli and the rest of the team for MERGE 2011. Students and leaders will arrive Monday of next week, and we’re so happy to have a mix of new and returning groups joining us. As we’ve said on the blog before (and pretty much any time we talk about it), MERGE is one of our most favorite things we do each year.

One of the main reasons is that MERGE is a chance for us to take all that we are learning about narrative, experiential learning and creative communication, and use that learning to inspire us to try new things, new ways of learning and gathering. It’s the kind of stuff we think about and help other organizations with year round. But at MERGE, we get to personally be with student ministries for a week and do everything we can to help them truly experience God’s story, and find themselves in that story.

Another reason MERGE is a highlight for us is that the entire week is shaped by the students themselves. We don’t have a central communicator for the week. No one tells students exactly what they’re supposed to learn. Instead, we provide a wide range of creative experiences and a learner-centered environment where we trust God will speak directly to students throughout the day. As they go through the day, we have specific times when students share with one another what they are learning and how God has been speaking. In doing so, the students become the teachers of one another.

It’s really an amazing thing to watch, and we couldn’t be more grateful to be a part of this event!

You can keep up with us throughout the week here, and on the MERGE Facebook page, or by following us on Twitter.

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10 commencement speakers you wish you’d had

Posted in culture, learning on 06/01/2011 by mark novelli

Good magazine recently listed 10 commencement speakers you wish you’d had. Check out the link to watch clips from several of them, but here is my favorite:

(Steve comes up at 7:30)

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The Eventual Tagging of Everything

Posted in learning, technology on 05/05/2011 by Kelly Dolan

A few weeks back, I wrote about the eventual move towards recording everything in our lives. So let’s say we get to a point where we can record everything. How will we make sense of it all, and what will we do with what we see and hear?

I wonder if on our way to recording everything, we’ll find increasingly more useful ways to identify (tag) what we record.

Cascade, a new tool from the New York Times, reminded me a lot of the data visualization work of Deb Roy at MIT. I takes vast amounts of data and visualizes it in a way that gives the data context, meaning and usefulness. But it could do very little of this if the data weren’t tagged in some way, showing who the author of the tweet is, what time it was sent, and (if location services are enabled) where the author was when they sent the tweet.

The individual tweet itself becomes far less important than it’s context.

I’m excited by this. I think we’ve spent too long fostering learning environments that have elevated individual facts (or data) above their context, or even dismissed context altogether. It’s given us a false sense of objectivity about the world around us, and has often allowed those who held the data more authority than was warranted.

As we grow into a world where data+context becomes the expected norm, the opportunities for those who teach or provide learning experiences for others don’t shrink. They grow. If my job is simply to dispense information (most of which is available to anyone online), the need for what I offer is quite limited. But if my job is to explore the information, looking for context (or better yet, leading others to discover it), and help people find meaning in it … the opportunities seem almost limitless.

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The Next-Generation Digital Book

Posted in communication, learning, technology on 05/04/2011 by Kelly Dolan

Now this is the kind of thing I dreamed of the first time I saw the iPad: a book that’s not really a book, but something totally new. I love that this book is the sequel to a documentary. When has that ever happened? A book being the sequel of a film?

How can this kind of thing not continue to change the way we learn things?

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Thinking about Thinking

Posted in learning on 04/04/2011 by Kelly Dolan

In our churches, business, schools, etc. we’re talking a lot about how to come up with new, more effective ways to do what we do, or new ways to think about what we do.

A recent New York Times article linked to one of The Edge Foundation’s recent endeavors. They asked 164 people from around the world: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”

If the sampling of answers in the NYT article are just a scratching of the surface, I can’t wait to dive in to the other answers on the foundation’s web site.

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The Birth of a Word (TED Talk)

Posted in communication, culture, learning on 03/14/2011 by Kelly Dolan

When’s the last time data moved you emotionally? It did for me as I watched this recent TED Talk. MIT Media Lab researcher Deb Roy documented over 90,000 hours of his son’s first few years of life in order to better understand the development of language. Watching this video, I got the sense that his (and our) learning in this area is only just beginning.

As he says, there’s many implications for what they are learning, but one of the most fascinating to me was at about the 7 minute mark of the video, when Mr. Roy talks about how learning environments adapt to the learner.

“…of course my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him.”

Begin a learner, a teacher and a human myself, this made me want to be more and more aware of the role environment plays in learning, and specifically how environments must adapt and reshape themselves.

As a learner: Am I aware of how my environment is aiding or hindering what I’m to learn?

As a teacher: How open am I to adapting the learning environment to serve the learner?

And as a human: Just how much could each of my relationships be enriched by taking a posture of constant adaptation to the needs of my family, friends and colleagues?

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The State of Wikipedia

Posted in learning, technology on 02/07/2011 by Kelly Dolan

Wikipedia recently released this short video celebrating their 10th anniversary, giving a brief history and current state of the site.

It’s interesting to hear co-founder Jimmy Wales continue to refer to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. I wonder if the average 12-year old even has a way of interpreting that reference. I’m old enough to remember sales pitches by World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica for why every family should own an encyclopedia set, a pitch that now seems almost laughable given the endless stream of information available online.

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