Last month I had the wonderful opportunity to be on a panel at ACM CSCW on digital backchannels—danah boyd and Joe McCarthy invited me to participate, along with Elizabeth Churchill, Bill Griswold, and Melora Zaner-Godsey (who couldn’t make it due to a family illness, and was replaced most ably by Richard Hodkinson).

Others have blogged the panel already (from both sides of the podium—see Joe danah, Richard, and Jack Vinson), so I’m not going to replicate that. I do, however, want to mention one thing that I heard that’s really stuck with me.

During his presentation, Bill Griswold was talking about how he’s using chat environments in the classroom. He observed that using the backchannel to allow questions from students “materialized the question, not the questioner.” More than anything else I heard during the panel, that one line made me really stop and think about implications of the backchannel, and why it is that I find it to be so attractive a medium.

I was reminded of that moment this week while sitting in a faculty meeting, watching a faculty member impatiently hold his hand over his head while someone spoke, waiting to be recognized to speak. I can remember years ago being advised that it was rude to hold one’s hand up while someone was talking, because it indicated that you were more focused on what you were about to say than what the person speaking was saying. My experience has been that it also causes disruption for the people in the room, who are split between the attention-getting visual mechanism of hand-raising and the current speaker. And in many cases, it creates expectations (often not accurate) on the part of both the audience and the speaker as to what the questioner is about to say.

When I was at CSCW, the only way audience members could ask questions or make comments was to queue up in front a microphone in the middle aisle and wait patiently for a turn. It’s hard to describe how nerve-racking this is for someone who’s new to that community. You’re standing in the middle of a big room, with the audience and the speakers staring at you, trying to listen to what’s being said while being intensely aware of your position.

This is where a formally acknowledged/sanctioned backchannel can really shine, I think. It allows members of an audience (whether the group is as small as a faculty meeting or as large as a conference presentation) to ask a question and have the question itself—not the questioner—be the subject of focus.