Monthly Archives: March 2010

Conference Curiosity Didn’t Kill The Proverbial Cat. It Awakened The Attendee

Imagine a conference where every attendee was learning, a world where what the attendee wondered was more interesting than what the expert presenter knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. (With nods to a quote from The Cluetrain Manifesto.) I don't know about you. ...

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We Are The Problem: We Are Selling Conference Snake Oil

80 percent of what we learn comes from informal learning.* Ironically, 60% to 80% of a conference attendee's time is spent in formal learning, passively listening to a presenter. Unfortunately, 14 days later we only recall 20% of what we hear in those presentations. (John ...

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Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevancy even less.” ~ General Eric Shinseki, 2003 The Chaos Scenario, by Bob Garfield, is about the historic re-ordering of media, marketing and commerce and traditional business triggered by the revolution in digital technology. It explores examples of adaptation to what is literally ...

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Looking For The Right Answer

Life can be a big noisy party with people talking, music playing, glasses clinking, people dancing and the floor shaking. Twitter can be a big noisy stream with people tweeting hordes of information flowing past you in a 24-7 stream. Facebook can be ...

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The Conference Session Is Dead

The conference session is not the appropriate shell for most learning experiences. The sixty- or ninety-minute presentation was created for the convenience of the institution, not the learner. The conference session is a triumph of standardization and it is so ingrained in our thinking we still ...

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