How many times do you hear that in a classroom, lecture hall, workshop, conference …? Increasingly so perhaps as more people start to take advantage of the fact that so many learners, colleagues, delegates, trainees, have a handy piece of communications technology in their pocket.
JISC RSC Wales have had a text wall (a text messaging service where we can receive texts from mobile phones or internet enabled devices and display them on a web page) for over a year now and we have used it as a way of collecting comments or questions during the events, workshops and forums that we run. For us it means we can offer the delegates or participants a way of feeding back to us or asking questions about things as they happen at an event … and they only need to be able to send a text from a mobile phone to do this. It is also great because we can share the feedback or the questions very easily as they come in by displaying the web page they are listed on for everyone to see. At one event we were even able to send the link to the web page (and login details) to Martin Dougiamas, who was presenting to us in Wrexham from his office in Australia, so that he could answer attendees questions as they sent them via text message to the text wall.
This year we also embarked on a series of roadshows, one of which included a session on tools and technologies that can be used to record the learners’ voice. The text wall was one of those tools and as part of the road show we offered any interested delegates the opportunity to borrow a sub account of our text wall in return for some feedback about what they used it for, how the learners (or staff) responded, what they did with the responses and whether they would consider investing in their own text messaging service like this. A number of people took up our offer (at these and other events) and although a few were unable to actually use the text wall and some are still waiting for the right opportunity to use it, we have had some really interesting feedback as to how organisations have and will be using text walls in the future. The feedback we have had so far shows that this tool has been used in a number of different ways, some of which have worked very well and others that haven’t. Here are some of the uses:
- to gather opinion on how students rated the new library space
- as a method of renewing books in the Learning Zone
- to try and glean some feedback on learning technologies
- as a way of getting feedback about events
- to gain feedback on what residents of the community would like to see offered in the Curriculum
- for feedback on aspects of teaching
- for feedback on a new website
- as an out of school hours revision facility
- to explore possible uses with colleagues
The full feedback can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/textwalluses
Like every technology, tool or resource, text messaging services like this will have disadvantages, as well as advantages. The need to have a mobile phone or access to an internet connected device to participate, the cost of a text message or even the distraction of allowing a mobile phone in a setting where they are usually discouraged may be disadvantage enough for some people BUT we have so many tools available today to be able to communicate with each other, is seems a shame not to take advantage (as these people, who we are very grateful to, have done) of this one to engage with and find out what our learners (and teachers) are thinking.
(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).
