OTB: On the Backchannel

John Sharp · Colleen Macklin · Eric Zimmerman · Mike Edwards

Fri., June 12, 1:00–2:00, Great Hall (4th floor, Central)

OTB: On the Backchannel is a social game that will be played throughout the GLS conference. OTB uses the Twitter “back channel” discussion of GLS as the space for a game that anyone can play — even if you don’t use Twitter! The goal is to guess the themes of the conference that will be the most popular in the Twitter discussion by placing “bets” on individual words.

The game will begin Wednesday afternoon at the start of the conference and will end Friday at 10:00 a.m. Monitors will show current popular discussion words as well as the leading players. You play the game by placing bets on words you think will be popular at the game HQ, and — of course — by Tweeting about GLS. Use the hashcode #gls09.

At the scheduled session, a discussion with the game’s creators will take place to announce the winners, award special prizes, and discuss the findings from the data analysis on the stream of Tweets generated about the conference. Finally, we will ask players and observers for their thoughts on the game and use of social media in the academic and educational spheres.