Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Conferences

Yesterday I was involved in a presentation (of the professional development I blogged about several weeks ago) at the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Conference & Expo (PETE & C).

Unfortunately, my group did not have the chance to attend any of the conference session - only to present ours during the first session after lunch. We had a decent number of people attend and there was some interesting discussion at the end. I think we all learned some things - participants and presenters.

After all was over, I voiced my disappointment to my colleagues in the whole format of conferences. It seems that virtually all sessions are stand and deliver. And there is a certain expectation from participants that they go to a session, sit (usually in the back), get filled with information, leave, and move on to the next one. Occasionally, there is some conversation, but most likely the participants move on, find themselves wrapped up in the usual routine of their day and forget about 90% of what they took in at the conference.

We talk frequently about how we need to change the way we deliver instruction in the classroom - engaging students in ways that involve less teacher talk. Maybe we should experiment with modeling this in conference sessions. My group was admittedly not proactive with this. I think we had a model in our heads and made a feeble attempt at making it less one-way and more two-way, but it really didn’t work all that well.

The next time, I think I want to start by changing the configuration of the room. The rows of chairs are just so 20th century! People can’t see each other, let alone interact with anyone but the presenters. What other ways can we change the mode of delivery for conference sessions?

Posted by Randy on 02/22 at 05:17 PM
General • Professional Development • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
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