Teach42

While driving home and listening to :Will’s second :podcast, something he said struck a chord with me (besides the shoutout!). He was mentioning that the conference he was returning from, the Conference for Managers of Information Technology, recorded the conference in blog format. They used Blogspot.com, I’m assuming because it’s both free and easy.

It got me thinking though. I went to NECC this summer which had a conference blog. I also went to Building Learning Communities which also had a conference blog. In the past few weeks, I followed the conference blog for a conference that I was unable to attend, the NSBA’s Technology and Leading and Learning. These three conference blogs were all hosted by Edweblogs.org which is a project of Clarity Innovation, Inc. They’ve also hosted blogs for a few other conferences as well, which you can find on their site.

All of these weblogs have a few things in common. They are all great examples of collaboration, discussion and reflection. They are a rather useful resource to the attendees of the conferences, by providing notes, links, and handouts online. However, they all have one other thing in common as well.

They all ‘died’ realtively soon after the conference ended.

I think this is a tragedy. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but it’s definitely a wasted opportunity. Thousands of people come together at a conference like NECC. They share ideas, collaborate, inspire and become inspired. The blogs are a wonderful way for people to record all of that. However, surely there must be a way to maintain some of those relationships and continue some of that collaboration.

Additionally, conferences generally repeat every year. Wouldn’t it be nice if the blog itself were ongoing? That as new dates are set, keynotes are chosen, and presenters register their sessions, couldn’t all that be up on the blog?

Imagine this: Attendees providing presenters with feedback BEFORE the actual session. How’s that for a radical idea? I know, I know, people put a lot of work into their presentations and can’t change it to accomodate everyone’s needs. However, let’s say as a presenter you post a few paragraphs about your session on a conference blog. People could then have the opportunity to make comments aobut what would be helpful to them, to ask what level you are targeting, whether your session only applies to Windows computers and so on. It would provide presenters the opportunity to do what Jenny, the Shifted Librarian did for the conference she’s at right now: assign her attendees homework.

As a conference attendee, one of the biggest complaints that I always hear is that so many sessions are hit or miss. It’s not that the content isn’t valuable, but often it’s not valuable to some of the individuals who happen to be in the audience. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to know more than 3 sentances about a session? To be able to ask the presenter if they’ll be covering information that will be pertinent to you? To be able to let them know that you’d love to get the handout before the conference so you can look up related research and try to get more out of the session?

This post has gotten a little out of control and gone the stream of consciousness route. There’s a few other ideas bouncing around in my head, but I think I’ll continue on with them later. For now I’ll leave you with this question: Should evaluation only occur after an event is over?

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