Redefining Conference Handouts

I have finally gotten around to visiting some of the websites from NECC that i had earmarked and wanted to point out one in particular.

David Warlick’s handouts this year were all online. Not only that, they were in Wiki format. Beyond that, they contained dynamic elements that aggregated posts that may have been related to his sessions all in one location. Pretty darn slick.

A great example of this was his session on Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century. The main page has the description, and links to additional information including his own podcasts on the subject. In the sidebar, he has links to web resources for each of the main points he makes during the presentation, other contemporary literacy projects, personal internet libraries, emerging technologies and my personal favorite, session blogs.

When you click on the session blogs section, you see people’s blog commentary about the presentation. There’s a few of my own in there where I reference his workshop and the post containing all of my notes. I spent about an hour last night reading through other people’s thoughts and ideas about the same workshop. It was a powerful followup to a session that I really enjoyed. It helped expand my own understanding of the material by providing me with other people’s perspectives.

Think about how valuable this really is. To someone who attended the workshop (like me) it provides me with insight to what other attendees thought and ideas that struck a chord with others. To people who couldn’t attend, it provides them with a variety of ways to ride along virtually. They aren’t stuck with just the people who they already knew were blogging the workshop, they can pick and choose to read from anybody who did. If they don’t like my note style, they can choose someone else’s. To the presenter himself (Dave), it provides him with instant feedback for his workshop. He can see what people chose to write about, what they took from it and can change his session appropriately in the future.

I’m guessing it’s basically a script based on keywords, in particular the author’s name and the title of the session. How complicated would it be to create a similar script for ALL of the NECC sessions? Something that has a page for each session (which we already have) and then has a script that aggregates blog postings based on the author’s name and session keywords. Of course I’m not a coder, but I wouldn’t think it would be that difficult to create. And how fantastic would it be to revisit all those sessions you couldn’t attend and be immediately rewarded with notes and thoughts about those sessions by people who were actually there.

This ties right back in to the idea that we have far too many people at those workshops who are just sitting passively and absorbing material instead of being active learners, contributing to the general body of knowledge created by the conference. We need to take advantage of the work that people are willing to do for free, like taking notes and sharing them.

1 Comment(s)

David Warlick
7/12/2005

Steve,

I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain how my NECC handouts worked. You did a far better job than I could and from a much more valuable perspective.

Thanks!

– dave –

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