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Learning Design Applied to Conferences

Have you been truly inspired or experienced deep learning at a professional conference or seminar? Are you looking at these words cynically about now? For me, these moments are unique opportunities, bringing people together, away from our daily work routines, to get informed and inspired from our field, to connect with others and to gather feedback on our work and ideas. From my learning designer standpoint, these are learning events – ideal informal learning opportunities.

The good news is that the traditional formats of these professional pow-wows are evolving: the techniques, the technological tools and the shift towards collective intelligence are making gatherings more meaningful. Traditional academia is pondering on how to improve the conference model, (Spaces of Interaction: An Online Conversation on Improving Traditional Conferences), geek world has developed its own formula known as Barcamps, while Open Space Technology and World cafés are making their way across the world. Twitter backchannels are gaining in popularity for facilitating a parallel dialogue amongst the audience. And simple storytelling techniques are being refined for their communication potential. The architect world has brought us the fun formula known as Pecha Kucha.

But, how to go about making the appropriate match between the needs/context of an event and the format, techniques and technological tools that work it? I have begun a list of questions/thoughts that might help in improving the learning design of events:

1. How much do you want/need to pre-program the event? Perhaps it’s our need for security that makes us automatically tend to want to pre-program events. Sometimes, especially if a wide-open common topic is to be explored, it is more powerful to allow attendees to determine the agenda. Open Space Technology is a technique supporting this approach.

2. Are the participants experts or novices in the field? When uniting many experts it makes sense to tap into the collective intelligence in the room rather than have only a single expert speaking. There are all sorts of techniques to open up to allow this. In Possibilities for Transformational Conferences, Tree Brens outlines various such participatory activities.

3. How much should the specialists be provided a structured framework for their documentation? For example, in a “Conversations event” organised by percolab, we requested that the 8 “presenters” present their work based on the same 8 themes and limit their summary to 1 page. This took multiple iterations for everyone to be on the same track, but the foundation allowed for rich conversations to follow and also provided helpful documentation for the attendees. This is particularly interesting when dealing with international situation whereby cultural and vocabulary differences need to be overcome.

4. How much do the participants know each other – want to know each other? Perhaps participants would like to know who else is attending, where they are from, and maybe even easily find a person attending with a common interest? But from information sharing to building a community there is a leap. Event-based social networking is often lots of energy with little payback (see here). But if this group regularly meets there should be a structured way to harness the learning from the event.

5. How can technology support and amplify the impact of the event? For example a twitter feed, during the event, is not appropriate if attendees are without laptops. However, a pre-event poll (short and sweet) can be a meaningful way to begin conversation with information on audience perception or state of play. I have yet to attend an event that allows those that present to upload their own presentations. Still people collecting them and inevitably creating that bottleneck that causes such delay you almost give up. Personally, all my presentations are on slideshare and I await the day whereby people simply request my link, or wip it into a web cast (such as this one).

6. And finally, a question we don’t always dare to ask: How much is the event contributing to real transformation and tapping into people’s souls? I don’t really know where to begin here, but let’s just throw out some words that come to mind: stories, authenticity, spoken word, music, humanism, vulnerability, imagery poignant…

Would love to hear some positive experiences/stories and ideas.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 8:15 and is filed under Apprentissage non formel, Apprentissage tout au long de la vie, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.