My First Webinar
Jun. 13th, 2007 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebToday at work I got to attend a seminar on multi-culturalism. This was transmitted from another state and we had technical difficulties. First, we lost sound for about ten seconds, then the sound was ten seconds off from the visuals for the rest of the presentation. (Someone e-mailed them about this problem, but apparently the cause was local.) The visuals were slides, so we were generally viewing one or two slides ahead of what we were hearing.
Second, and worse, the speaker asked us to discuss a question and then send in our vote. However, he would not be quiet long enough for us to be able to talk amongst ourselves. Well, we had several good laughs when he would sound like he would be quiet but then couldn't help but say one more thing. As you might expect, one-way real-time communication is not ideal.
Also, the volume was turned up so loud that I decided to take initiative and leave the room. I watched from a bench out in the hall. This was only a problem when people walked down the hall having loud conversations, as they had to if they wanted to be heard over our blasting presentation. That would have been fine, but both times it happened the people felt they they had to come back the way they had just gone and talk some more. People should travel more efficiently when I'm trying to hear!
My sitting out in the hall did help some other folks find the room, so that was nice.
Finally, we lost sound again during the question and answer session at the end. (Questions had been e-mailed in previously.) Everyone just left at that point. We didn't even discuss the content among ourselves.
Overall, the experience was a complete waste of my time. I had heard that the speaker was awesome and we should be thrilled to have the opportunity to hear him on any topic. I did not find this to be the case.
I couldn't even quite figure out his message. On the one hand, we are supposed to realize that people come from different cultural backgrounds, but on the other, we can't go around stereotyping people. We are supposed to respect different cultures and different people and be sensitive to different cultures, but don't assume we know anything about a person's cultural connections just by looking at them or having other cues--we have to treat people as individuals.
The only interesting thing I heard is that academic counselors can help their students deal with being marginalized or feeling like outsiders. Since most people feel like outsiders, one way or another, at least for brief periods, this could be an extremely handy skill. But we didn't get any hints on how to actually do that.
We were given a hierarchy of skills and knowledge relating to dealing with cultural differences and asked to rate ourselves. I didn't even understand really what the different levels were or how they could be considered a hierarchy. I most identified with the bottom (worst) level: you understand that there are cultural differences, but you pretty much ignore them and treat people as individuals. Sounds good to me. So I guess in my case, the presentation was a failure from the speaker's perspective as well as from mine since not only did I not learn anything, but I'm more pleased than ever at my ignorance.
Blog entry of the day - Merle Sneed's Master Gardener Applicant. It starts off as just another guy about to retire who's fantasizing about gardening, but then turns silly. "I may have hurt my chances when I showed up in my homemade Master Gardener superhero suit, complete with cape and Viking helmet. The epaulets might have been over the top, because I noticed a lot of eye rolling."
Second, and worse, the speaker asked us to discuss a question and then send in our vote. However, he would not be quiet long enough for us to be able to talk amongst ourselves. Well, we had several good laughs when he would sound like he would be quiet but then couldn't help but say one more thing. As you might expect, one-way real-time communication is not ideal.
Also, the volume was turned up so loud that I decided to take initiative and leave the room. I watched from a bench out in the hall. This was only a problem when people walked down the hall having loud conversations, as they had to if they wanted to be heard over our blasting presentation. That would have been fine, but both times it happened the people felt they they had to come back the way they had just gone and talk some more. People should travel more efficiently when I'm trying to hear!
My sitting out in the hall did help some other folks find the room, so that was nice.
Finally, we lost sound again during the question and answer session at the end. (Questions had been e-mailed in previously.) Everyone just left at that point. We didn't even discuss the content among ourselves.
Overall, the experience was a complete waste of my time. I had heard that the speaker was awesome and we should be thrilled to have the opportunity to hear him on any topic. I did not find this to be the case.
I couldn't even quite figure out his message. On the one hand, we are supposed to realize that people come from different cultural backgrounds, but on the other, we can't go around stereotyping people. We are supposed to respect different cultures and different people and be sensitive to different cultures, but don't assume we know anything about a person's cultural connections just by looking at them or having other cues--we have to treat people as individuals.
The only interesting thing I heard is that academic counselors can help their students deal with being marginalized or feeling like outsiders. Since most people feel like outsiders, one way or another, at least for brief periods, this could be an extremely handy skill. But we didn't get any hints on how to actually do that.
We were given a hierarchy of skills and knowledge relating to dealing with cultural differences and asked to rate ourselves. I didn't even understand really what the different levels were or how they could be considered a hierarchy. I most identified with the bottom (worst) level: you understand that there are cultural differences, but you pretty much ignore them and treat people as individuals. Sounds good to me. So I guess in my case, the presentation was a failure from the speaker's perspective as well as from mine since not only did I not learn anything, but I'm more pleased than ever at my ignorance.
Blog entry of the day - Merle Sneed's Master Gardener Applicant. It starts off as just another guy about to retire who's fantasizing about gardening, but then turns silly. "I may have hurt my chances when I showed up in my homemade Master Gardener superhero suit, complete with cape and Viking helmet. The epaulets might have been over the top, because I noticed a lot of eye rolling."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
woo
on 2007-06-14 06:55 am (UTC)