Tinkering in Spatial Chat
This week I had the chance to collaborate with the Clean Conferencing Institute to facilitate an experimental online workshop using SpatialChat. This is a virtual meeting platform that lets each participant move their video around and only hear and interact with others who are close to them in the digital environment.
This design seems well-suited for making and tinkering online because it allows people to choose which activity to participate in and how they wanted to work in social or quiet areas. The visual nature of the system made it easy for me as a facilitator to get the big picture of how learners were navigating the activity. As well I could have individual conversations or offer tips to only one or two of the participants because of the spatial nature of the audio communication.
In our workshop there was about thirty minutes to get introduced to how to navigate SpatialChat, thirty minutes to tinker with materials and projects from my book, The Tinkering Workshop, and then another half hour for a reflection discussion.
I wanted to share some of the ideas that the participants shared in the final conversation that I think can inform future experiments. Some of the participants mentioned how they appreciated having the option to either work solo or get inspired by others in the social area. As well it was interesting to reflect about how this platform felt more friendly or comfortable then zoom or other box based online meeting set-ups. As well, since there’s a lot of possibilities to create the background, add clickable links, share videos and make other customizations, it mirrors more accurately the idea that the environment affects the experience.
I’m looking forward to more chances to explore this mode of virtual tinkering. I think that it would be really interesting to try setting up a workshop with multiple sessions so that participants would be more familiar with SpatialChat as the time went on. As well it would be interesting to see how it would work with managing a larger group in a conference setting. I’m excited to continue collaborating with Josh and Sue from the Clean Conferencing Institute to develop these ideas further.