Teaching Technology and International Support: An Interview with Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter has worked with non profit groups for 25 years and has specialized in technology assistance since 1993. She provides training, evaluation, planning and research services for a variety of organizations including The Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (N-TEN) and Compumentor.

Twelve years ago Beth worked to spread e-mail amongst skeptical new users. Today she writes three personal blogs and contributes to Global Voices Online, Blogher and the Net Squared blog (see Beth's posts).

A big believer in online communities, Beth talked with me about non profit adoption of Web 2.0 tools, technology training in general and her ongoing work with bloggers in Cambodia.

You can click on any of the links below to skip to a particular point in the interview, your browser's back arrow will return you to this table of contents.

Table of Contents

Organizational/Internal Use of Blogging and Tagging

On Helping People Learn Any New Technology

Helping New Bloggers Start Blogging

Historical Patterns in Emergence and Adoption

International Communication in a Web 2.0 World

Organizational/Internal Use of Blogging and Tagging

Before we talked, I knew that Beth had worked with some interesting organizations using blogs not for communication with the outside world, but internally amongst staff and participants. She provided me with two examples that she believes are indicative of other experiences and possibilities.

The first was a community technology center, the Cyber Cafe at Malden Square, that Beth helped use both blogging and tagging for internal communication. The group had a lot of technical resources, a large number of volunteers and instructors - but their information resources were distributed, redundant and inaccessible. They were stored in places like one computer's browser bookmarks or on disks that people would pass around around the group.

This group didn't have the resources to set up a formal library system, so they used del.ico.us tags instead to put resource info they found online in a "location" that all the group members could access from any computer online. Beyond archiving their own resources, del.icio.us also worked well as an extension of search - for finding related resources that other people online had tagged.

In its early days, Beth says, Del.ico.us was full of nothing but technology related resources. She believes this has changed fundamentally in the last 6 months, though, with a much wider variety of information now being stored in the public database.

The group's blog also hosts resources and conversation in one place. Initially restricted to use in communicating between staff and with social service clients, the blog is informal, comfortable and saves time by creating an easy-to-update, centralized place for communication. Using a blog was good for this group, as they are very action oriented - preferring in this case to start right away and refining the blog workflow and structure as they went.

The second organization that Beth told me about, GreenWood After School Poetry , used internal blogs for lesson plans and del.ico.us to bookmark poetry related resources they found online.

One blog was used to post assignments with links to offsite resources and responses could be posted as comments. The group considered setting up poetry blogs for the students but most were still learning to keyboard and it would have been too much to learn in the time available. The group did offer parent trainings on computer skills and posted parenting resources to a blog.

Beth says she's just recently connected with a number of preschool and kindergarten bloggers. (See this link, for some examples of kindergarten bloggers. )

She believes that most professional topics are good for blogging about. Her own blog has played a large roll in her work, she says.

For professional development, the connections I've made with people, their knowledge and skills [through blogging] have been much richer and improved my work far more than just google searches or going to a book store.

On Helping People Learn Any New Technology

Beth describes her work as primarily that of a trainer and a trainer of trainers. She helps people in designing effective technology learning experiences for technologies new and old. She's recently been found an increasing amount of information and inspirationdrawn from blog writings to bring to her trainings on a variety of topics. Many trainers end up in that role on accident. She emphasizes the following in working with other trainers:

There is more to training than standing up and doing a word-only powerpoint; there is a place for powerpoint and lecture but there's techniques to make them more interactive and engaged. "In fact, the Web 2.0 service Flickr is a fantastic tool for trainers in developing more visual presentations."
The best learning is a two way channel.
It's important to understand how our brains process information in order to avoid cognitive overload when doing trainings.

Web2.0 is especially overloading. Less is more in teaching: simplify, find a hook or baby step to introduce things. Acknowledge the parts that can be overloading but let it be user directed - where do they want to go deeper?
Always provide written instructions that include visuals and text. Pay attention to different learning styles - this is key in limiting frustration.

Helping New Bloggers Start Blogging

Since it came up that one of the things Beth trains people on is how to blog, I asked how she approaches that. She said there are three key steps that she addresses with new bloggers:

What is it you're going to write about, what's going to keep you interested, why are you writing? Take a piece of paper and brainstorm about passion and topics. What do you want to connect with other people around? The first step is to think about these things - a blog should not be set up before these questions are answered.
What are you going to name your blog? What's a good tagline of one sentence - an elevator speech for your blog. "I like to keep up with what's in my field," Beth says. "Collecting, reading and writing about resources. It's useful to attract other people and thus attract other resources."
Make a personal commitment of writing X number of posts per week for the first X number weeks, whatever is comfortable for you. "Blogging has to become a habit and it takes this initial commitment to make that happen."

After a bare bones blog is set up and people are taught the basics of how to post on it, Beth leaves them on their own for awhile. "I'll come back in a couple of weeks, so keep a log of goals and frustrations. People email those to me and a lesson is prepared from that feedback."

The next step, Beth says, is to join the blogging community around your issue of interest and start reading feeds. A small number of RSS feeds read through a tool like Bloglines can inspire further writing on your part and help create the sense of connectedness that is important to getting the most out of the medium. Beth recommends reading your feeds like you read your email, as a daily habit.

Historical Patterns in Emergence and Adoption

Beth says there are a lot of parallels between the technology that's emerging today and what she saw when trying to convince people to start using email and internet before those were mainstream. She says she heard many people say,"why should I care about that? I don't want an email account! Why should I give up my fax machine?"

Once again today, early adopters have permission to experiment, to gather lessons learned and good examples. Education, training, stories and lessons learned, she says, will help usher in a new era of technologically enabled communication. Beth has been around from the start. In the original CERN World Wide Web Library she edited the section on Dance, creating a directory of links to dance related sites around the world. Initially, she says, "it was a bunch of UNIX programmers putting up clog dancing web pages. Now every non profit dance company out there has a web page."

Nonprofits would say in 1994 - the World Wide What? In 1995, they would say -- it's hype. A few early adopters set up simple home pages, but around 97 more and more nonprofits started to put up pages. Then nonprofits moved to the second generation sites - more professional graphics, interactivity, etc. Webmaster became a professional position and there were web specific graphic designers. I think it (Web2.0 for lack of better phrase) is here to stay. There's still a lot of wild west ideas, but things like flickr and del.ico.us are not going to go away, I think. We had a lot of failures in early days of the Internet in adopting email and web pages, but there were valuable lessons learned. The early failures -- while some point to these as reasons why nonprofits should ignore web2.0 -- the early failures are important because they pave the way for more widespread adoption.

International Communication in a Web 2.0 World

Since Beth does a lot of work with bloggers in Cambodia, I asked her for tips on being an effective ally for people internationally who were engaging in the Web 2.0 world. She responded with a series of stories.

The Cambodian blogosphere is very rich, expatriates from the US and many people from Cambodia are blogging there. I've made some incredible connections with these people about cultural learning, more than I could have from a website because of the personal connections that blogs have facilitated. Cambodians have sent me mini podcasts on how to pronounce things correctly, for example.

For the Chinese (lunar) new year, I developed a curriculum for my kids' school about how other people celebrate. Through my connections via blogs, people around the world pointed to lots of and pictures from their homes. Someone set up a flickr slideshow for me. Songs pointed to. Through my blog a much richer lesson plan was possible.

In Cambodia, there are American expatriates organizing blogger meetups, but they've had low turnout despite the high number of Cambodian bloggers and good public awareness. It turned out that's because Cambodians are not used to just showing up and meeting someone they've only met on the internet.

Offline meeting and networking doesn't always translate in terms of comfort level. When a person does show up, then offline invitations become possible because they can go and do face to face invites. Person A already knows person B offline, so person C organizes and person A invites person B. It only really works with the help of intermediaries with pre-existing offline relationships.

Beth identified computer access and electricity as key factors to take into consideration as well.

People's pace of response is different. Most Cambodians have to pay for internet cafes, they don't hang out online. They are working in short spurts and this lack of time leads to less depth in their exploration of these new mediums.

Blogging is the most comfortable, because some people in Cambodia have seen value come out of it. Skype and IM have been great. Some folks have camera phones so flickr good. RSS is good, people I work with have seen and are using that.

Different countries have different questions. Broadband penetration and basic literacy levels make a big difference. We end up collaborating mostly with middle class urban early adopters.

I asked Beth how she does her international support work. These are the things she identified as most useful:

Lots of comment following, seeing if people who leave comments on the blogs I read have blogs of their own.
Adding new blogs into my aggregator.
Leaving supportive comments on peoples' blogs to give them a sense that there really is an engaged audience.

I email people and get them on Skype.
If they get real into it, I write a profile about them for Global Voices.
Supporting things like the Cambodian Free Expression Campaign and supporting bloggers in prison for criticizing their local government.