Here’s the summary handout for my workshop on participation techniques you can use in conference sessions that I’ll be leading at MPI’s World Education Congress 2011. Sources for additional information on these techniques can be found in the notes at the end of the list.
Technique: Setting ground rules ‡*
Brief description: Setting ground rules before other activities commence clarifies and unifies participants’ expectations.
When to use: Start of session, worksh...
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I have been filling out quite a few conference presentation proposals recently, and began to notice a pattern in my behavior. My mood changed when I had to fill out the session’s learning objectives (which are statements of what attendees will be able to do by the end of the session.)
Specifically, every time I had to fill out the learning objectives for a proposal I got really, really annoyed.
Over the years I’ve found that paying attention to patterns like this is nearly always a learning experie...
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When I was an IT consultant I used to build custom database management systems—complicated, company-specific software that handled the unique way an organization did things. The normal way to do this is the Microsoft Word or kitchen-sink approach: add every feature and ability you can think of (or that any important customer asks for) into the application, and let the user work with the entire glory of what you’ve created.
Over the years I found I could make a good living creating integrated systems that did thi...
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How you program conferences depends (or ought to) on your answer to the question: Do conference attendees know what they want?
No one ever asks this question, of course. But if they did, the conventional answer, given while under the influence of truth serum, would have to be: “No they don’t. That’s why we have a program committee that puts together a set of sessions that’s tailored to our audience.”
The problem with this answer is that, after twenty ye...
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“Why do you want to go to this conference?” is a question that you’ve probably been asked at one time or another. The real Question being asked (usually by our boss) is, of course, Is it worth the money and time invested in having you attend? It can be a hard question to answer, especially when the event in question has no or few predetermined sessions, like the peer conferences I design and facilitate.
Probably the most exhaustive methodology of planning and evaluating event ROI has been...
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Best Practices look backward, providing advice that worked in the past; Next Practices focus on what to do in the time ahead.
—The Internet Time Alliance
I always felt irritated, but never knew why, when I heard someone talk about best practices as the business processes we should strive for. Reading the excerpt quoted above, taken from the Working Smarter Glossary of the Internet Time Alliance led to an aha! moment.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with learning about and comparing different...
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