Conference Presentations
After spending two days at a technology conference/workshop, my mind has been racing. Generally, this conference was a very beneficial experience. It was a great time to share ideas with colleagues, take the pulse of where other schools are on the technology integration continuum and to focus some concentrated time on what I enjoy doing most.
There is one thing that has always bothered me about presentations in general and conference presentations specifically: Why must they be given in the traditional stand-and-deliver manner? When we do this, praticularly at a technology conference, we lose a valuable opportunity to model the sorts of teaching we profess to endorse. The leaders at this conference could have easily presented this session in a manner that reflects the sort of student-centered learning they were endorsing. Instead, it was PowerPoint after PowerPoint - and they even joked about this.
I suppose that it is too easy to fall back into the way we are normally the recipients of presentations, but when will these presenters apply some of the very strategies they cheer for? While there were many things postive about this experience over the last two days, it is really eating away at me the way that they chose to present their material to us. It could have been so much better.
The other irritation, and one again that is entrenched in the old model of presenting, was the manner in which the room was set up - traditional business style with rows of conference tables set up with people looking toward the front of the room (mostly taking in the backs, not faces, of all the other participants). A better way would have been to enlarge the room by opening the wall, and then assembling the tables in a U-shape. We could have seen faces! The space was too cramped, and it was difficult to actually interface with anyone. Plus our team was cramped with not enough space to work.
I guess this really does show how we sometimes have great difficulty thinking outside the box, or applying the theory of what we believe to make it reality.
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