On Monday 15th March I attended an event which is new to me; a learning event conducted entirely through the medium of Facebook. Now you could argue that with text and voice chat, Facebook is more than able to host live events, learning or otherwise, but this one took place entirely through the message walls.
There is a video competition which I would like my Communication and IT students to enter. Not only do they have the chance of winning a fair amount of money but the competition is based on the needs of real organisations which have themselves paid a fair amount to be able to take advantage of the creative juices of the general public. The brief is to produce a viral video (or idea for one) to fulfil the specific needs of the organisations involved. Most are purely commercial propositions such as the soda company Cult but I found some of the briefs interesting such as the organisation which supports the aged which wants to encourage young immigrants to visit elderly Danish people.
This is not the first time that the organisation Kort og Godt has run the competition but they are increasingly using social media to create interest amongst the competitors. Inevitably they have set up a Facebook group which they use to let people know when new organisations have added a brief to the competition or when the competition is featured elsewhere in the media. However I was intrigued by the idea that you could run an innovation training event through Facebook so I decided to try it out.
The event ran for about three hours and it worked best if you were working with a small group of people who were physically in the room with you at the same time. What happened was that tasks were posted on the wall with deadlines. So for example we had 5 minutes to find some headlines and 15 minutes to choose which headlines we liked best from the assembled company of participants. Responses were posted as comments to the wall posting and you were alerted when new comments came in by the Facebook interface so then it was just a matter of clicking refresh to see what the others had written. As an exercise in how to get new ideas I think it worked very well.
I was curious also to see if the organisers would leave the wall postings in Facebook. I suspected the event would be deleted and so it was. In that way they retain the element of surprise should they decide to repeat the event. Meanwhile I am happy that I cut and pasted the event as it was going on. I plan to do a more mundane version face to face in class at some point.