2 easy pieces to engage audience

Engaging an audience with social media -- or trying to reboot communications tactics -- sometimes sounds like a tall order. But two recent examples from universities that reached my inbox this month offer two easy--and effective--ideas that are stunning in their simplicity. In one case, a low-tech series of snapshots forms the basis of a study abroad campaign, proving you don't need a toybox of toys to have fun. The other takes a common presenter's tool and puts it in the hands of the audience, literally rebooting a time-honored lecture tactic to rev up an audience.

• "Showing the O around the world" is the result of a University of Oregon contest to gather pictures of its study-abroad students all over the world. The easy part? Students just had to get a snap of themselves making the letter "O" with their hands or arms in front of a scene in the country they visited--so you can see their college pride on camel-back, on mountaintops, and yes, in front of the Pyramids, among other scenes. Watch the video compiling winning shots below.
  
  
  
• Laser pointers are not helpful in engaging an audience--unless you let the audience, not the speaker, use them to participate. I'm not a fan of the laser pointer as a presentation tool, but this experiment at Purdue University caught my eye. At a conference on technology for teaching and learning, less-than-$3 laser pointers -- small enough to fit on keyrings -- were given to all conferees, and slides were constructed to ask a question. Audience members were urged to point to their responses on the slides, and, while more complex educational technologies were demonstrated, "it was the more common technologies that created buzz." One participant summed it up, saying the pointers were "clever. Cheap. Involved the audience." Just what speakers want to hear. (The conference incorporated a Twitter stream, too.) Below, shots of the crowd using their pointers, and a sample slide on which they "voted."

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