Some questions are best asked in writing for a more direct, on-the-record, reponse and to facilitate more pointed debate. To combine these benefits of textual responses with the immediacy of a face-to-face event, I developed the “Participant Response Display Mechanism” which receives brief messages from two or more computer terminals for display on a projection screen. As each participant responds, his answer is immediately displayed for others to see, and the system avoids bias towards fast typists by giving each participant a separate area on the screen. In other configurations, messages may be queued for manual review by an instructor or assistant, may be routed to the screen in their entirety, or may be selected randomly. With flexibility in the configuration of screen areas, this system can be used to facilitate a textual “debate” (whether genuine or role-play), and with queuing systems to share space among a larger group, the system can facilitate a written meta-discussion among all participants even as primary discussion continues orally.
This system was used at the ICANN Candidate Forum in Cambridge, MA in October 2000.
Details in Berkman Center Meeting Tools.