Event design Archives : Page 3 of 4 : Conferences That Work

The new patron economy and its impact on events-Part 2

Sunday, March 13th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

We are increasingly moving into a patron economy. This impacts events.

I believe we are moving inexorably towards a time that is similar in some ways to an era in our past—a time when content creation will be supported largely by the subsidy of patrons.
—from Part 1 of this post

We are returning to a patron economy

In Part 1 of this post, I explained why I believe we are returning to a patron economy.

Luckily, there are a lot more patrons now than there were when Mozart and Beethoven eked out a living via the largesse of nobility and the wealthy. These days, when you tip generously in a restaurant, donate to worthy causes or volunteer, you are a patron. Once we’ve satisfied our core needs, our desires to create and share remain. These desires, decoupled from financial reward, are now easier for many to fulfill than they’ve ever been.

How will this future affect the world of events? Events have always relied to some degree on the contributions of volunteers. For example: family members at a wedding, conference advisory board members, and student interns. As emphasis shifts from content to connection at face-to-face events, the contributions of enthusiastic volunteers become increasingly important. Even a few true fans can make a dramatic difference to an event.

The new event patrons

I’m writing this just after attending a four-day, 500-attendee association conference where key participatory sessions were facilitated or led by twenty enthusiastic volunteers.

Hiring professional facilitators to lead these sessions would have been very expensive. The volunteers received branded fleece jackets, a reduced event fee, and public acknowledgment of their contributions. No extra lodging or travel expenses had to be paid because the volunteers were already attending the conference.

In addition, hiring professional facilitators to lead sessions would have been a far less satisfactory experience for attendees because outside facilitators would not have had the substantial subject matter expertise and experience that the volunteers possessed. I sat in on some of the sessions, and an outside facilitator would not have been able to understand, let alone guide, the discussions because of the considerable professional knowledge taken for granted as the basis for discussion by the participants.

Volunteers are the new patrons

When I think back, I realize that none of the conferences I’ve organized over the last twenty years would have been possible without the significant contributions of volunteers. Think about the events you’ve organized—how true is this for you? As we move towards more participative and participant-driven sessions at events, the role of volunteers will become increasingly important. Your volunteers are your new patrons—ignore them at your peril!

Photo attribution: Flickr user cali2okie

Tags: Event design, patron, patron economy, patrons, volunteers| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

The patron economy and its impact on events-Part 1

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 by Adrian Segar

We are becoming a patron economy. Over the last thirty years, we’ve seen the slow crumbling of business models relying on paying for atoms carrying the real article of desire: information. Once, being paid for cassettes, CDs, newspapers, DVDs, copy-protected software, and password-protected services was how “content providers” (such a soulless term!) made money. These schemes are dying wherever and whenever the cost to the consumer of playing buy-my-content-by-my-rules is greater than the cost of downloading the associated bits that have had their copy protection broken.

We’re in the middle of this transition. For example, right now, the paperback version of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love outsells the ebook four to one, even though the ebook is half the cost of the paperback. So perhaps people still like physical books. I don’t expect things to stay this way for long.

Making a living

A few years ago, I got into a heated public argument with software freedom activist Richard Stallman about how I might be paid for the four years I spent writing my book. (At the end of his presentation, Richard complained that he had never spoken in front of a more combative audience. We took this as a compliment.) Richard told us we should give our content away. I asked him why anyone would bother to spend four years writing a book. He told me, scornfully, that I should give the book away and make money in some related arena.

I have to admit that now, knowing the bald economics of writing, I’m more sympathetic to Richard’s point of view than I was when we sparred. If the book continues to sell at its current rate, it will take another year just to earn back the money (for editing, copyediting, interior design, cover design, and copywriting) I spent creating it. That’s before I start receiving any compensation for the time I spent writing it! Meanwhile, people are hiring me to design, organize, and facilitate conferences, and I have to sell many books to equal the income from a day of consulting. Richard, maybe you were right.

With the repeated demonstrated failures of attempts to copy-protect information and the rise of ubiquitous online content, I believe we are increasingly becoming a patron economy — a time when content creation will be supported largely by the subsidy of patrons.

In part 2 of this post, I’ll explore how this shift to a patron economy will impact events.

Image attribution: Flickr user fernando

Tags: copy-protection, economy, Event design, patron, patron economy| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

How the rise of online is changing your events

Friday, February 11th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

How is the rise of online changing your events?

How I used to find information

When I was living in England in the 1960s, finding a telephone number was cumbersome. Five huge telephone books, each requiring both hands to lift, sat in a cupboard in our hallway, with millions of alphabetized names and associated numbers in microscopic print. The books quickly became out of date and were updated sporadically. And, if you didn’t know the exact spelling, or had only an address, you were out of luck.

Books were a key way to obtain information. Wealthy families (not mine) purchased the Encyclopedia Britannica and proudly displayed the 24+ volumes on sturdy bookshelves. The local free library was a key resource. For current information, I could watch three TV channels and read several rather good print newspapers. For specialized information, I subscribed to, or read in the library, a bewildering variety of magazines and journals.

And, of course, I talked to people. My parents, my teachers, my friends, and, later, my professional colleagues were all valuable resources. I found my friends through face-to-face social events or through my work. Finally, if I needed to know more about a subject of interest, I would attend a conference and listen to papers delivered by experts in the field.

How I find information today

The rise of online has changed everything. I don’t remember the last time I consulted a paper telephone directory. Ten years ago I checked eBay to see if an Encyclopedia Britannica set was worth anything. Reluctantly, I ended up recycling the books, because no one wanted to buy them. Today, apart from a local paper and a few paper magazine subscriptions, online is where I find telephone numbers, email or physical addresses, and information on just about any subject that, in quantity and mostly quality, dwarfs the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

People are still a major resource for me, but the primary way that I first meet new people professionally these days is online, via a variety of social media, rather than an initial face-to-face encounter.

And, of course, these days I am a creator of conferences rather than a passive consumer of them. For me, a good conference is one where I can interact, connect, share, and learn with others, and can influence what happens at the event in a way that is useful and meaningful to me.

How the bountiful availability of online content changes events

Today there is amazing one-way content on the web. The internet is where we go for information about people, places, facts, processes, techniques, and solutions to problems. Our resources have migrated from cumbersome books and broadcast media to browsable indexed data servers in the internet cloud.

For face-to-face attendees, this makes vanilla delivery of content at events far less compelling.

In the future, people are not going to travel to your event to listen to a speaker they could watch streamed live, or as a recording at a time and place of their choosing. Providing a ten-minute opportunity for questions at the end of a presentation isn’t going to cut it either. Viewing one-way content over the internet is cheaper and more convenient for attendees. If broadcast content is mostly what you have to offer people will gravitate to obtaining it online; either from you or a competitor.

As a result, traditional events concentrating on the transfer of predetermined content from experts to a local audience are dying. I don’t know how long it will be before rigor mortis sets in. Perhaps some events will remain viable as training opportunities for novices, or as vehicles for CEUs to be awarded or certifications to be maintained. Over time, however, the majority of professionals who care about their profession and the best use of their time will stop going to face-to-face events that don’t incorporate significant opportunities for connection, peer-to-peer sharing, and participant-driven sessions. And, no, a lunch and an evening social or two aren’t going to be enough anymore. Instead, you need to put opportunities for connection front and center of your events, because connection around content is becoming the most important reason that people attend face-to-face events.

Why you should care

Since my first book on participant-driven conferences was published, I have been amazed and delighted by the flood of interest from meeting professionals, peer communities, and business & association leaders. And I’ve also been disturbed. A common story I hear is of long-running conferences in trouble: conferences where attendance, evaluations, and consequent income are falling. The organizers who are contacting me have realized that the traditional conferences-as-usual models are not working like they used to. Attendees are starting to defect or ask for something different. I’ve heard this story from professionals in many different fields.

In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before the importance of the shift in emphasis away from content towards connection at face-to-face events becomes apparent and generally accepted by the events community. As usual with industry trends, the people who recognize and respond well to them early will be the beneficiaries. Those who continue doing things the old way will lose out. If you’re not currently investigating ways to restructure your events to significantly increase attendee connections and participation, I recommend you start.

Do you see a trend of increased attendee dissatisfaction at traditional events? If so, why do you think it’s happening, and what are you doing about it?

Tags: connectedness, connection, content, Event design, internet, online, rise of online| Posted in Event design | 12 Comments »

Why hybrid events aren’t going away soon

Sunday, January 30th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

I’m a big fan of hybrid events (events designed to provide a worthwhile experience for both local and remote audiences). But I think Dannette Veale is hankering after those Jetsons flying cars, based on this recent quote:

In the future, says Dannette Veale, global manager of the Cisco Live and Networkers Virtual event, there will be no more live vs. virtual discussions. The two experiences will overlap so completely, that what we now perceive as two separate environments glued together through some “hybrid” sleight of hand will merge into a single, seamless stream of content, entertainment, and engagement that can be accessed from either end of the physical to virtual spectrum…
…In the future, there will be no more hybrid events—a term that implies the cobbling together of two separate realities into one hiccuppy, Frankensteiny, excuse to multi-task. The future of events as Dannette Veale envisions it is one where the learning is über compelling, the engagement is exhilarating, and anyone can participate.
—When there are no More Hybrid Events, by Michelle Bruno, posted January 10, 2011

Optimism

I wish I were as optimistic as Dannette Veale. She predicts that live and virtual will “merge into a single, seamless stream of content, entertainment, and engagement”. It would be great—but it isn’t going to happen any time soon.

It’s the last term, engagement, where I part company with Dannette. Yes, content and entertainment can be easily and effectively streamed now. But engagement, arguably the most important ingredient for a successful event, cannot be created by a single stream and suffers from signal delay issues that are very difficult to overcome.

Effective engagement requires many-to-many channels

Effective engagement amongst remote attendees requires many-to-many channels. If I am a local attendee, I can wander up to a group of people in conversation. I can then listen and engage with anyone present. I can be aware of multiple simultaneous connections and can initiate and switch conversations with ease. However, a remote attendee is restricted to (usually) one or (at best) a few streaming feeds produced at the event site. These feeds are not under remote attendee control. I’m not aware of any hybrid events that provide individual, real-time, two-way AV connectivity to more than a modest number of remote attendees. That’s because the number of streams required increases as the square of the number of participants.

We have a hard time providing a few simultaneous streaming channels now. Let alone the hundreds or thousands needed to effectively match the experience of live attendance at an event. Including a chat room for remote attendees is a pale substitute for the rich real-time interaction that routinely occurs face-to-face.

[2023 update (twelve years after this post was written). We now have platforms for online socials that do a decent—though not yet rock solid—job supporting flexible, fluid, many-group video chat interactions.]

A fishbowl-like alternative

One possible way to live with bandwidth limitations while providing a better remote experience is to develop systems that, while providing a small number of two-way connection channels, dynamically switch the limited channels between attendees who are currently active. This is analogous to the fishbowl group conversation technique I often use at Conferences That Work. At any one time, a limited number of interactions are possible, but the people in conversation can “swap out”, while everyone else watches and listens. Such approaches are still at the research stage. But they still will not create the kind of seamless engagement Dannette implies.

Currently, the best hybrid events do a decent job of providing text-based back channels for remote attendees to comment and ask questions. Remote emcee ambassadors can help to bring these attendees into the room and offer them some compensatory content, e.g. presenter interviews, that the local audience doesn’t necessarily get. But without individual, real-time, two-way AV channels for remote attendees, their experience will always be significantly inferior to that of local participants. I don’t see this state of affairs changing soon.

OK, maybe one day soon we’ll all have rock-solid 1GB+/sec connections to the internet. All at a cost that’s too cheap to meter. (Don’t hold your breath.) Even if this glorious day arrives, however, remote attendees will still face another fundamental problem.

The effect of signal delays on engagement for remote attendees

Anyone who has used the fledgling group video chat services available on the web (e.g. tokbox, tinychat, and, recently, Skype) knows the limitations of these services. [2023 update. Today, Zoom is pretty good!] We can overcome the flaws, like poor video & audio quality and unreliable operation, by providing high bandwidth links and appropriate internet backbones. What is harder to mitigate, however, is the signal delays that video conferencing routinely introduces.

Research has shown that signal delays of less than a quarter of a second can seriously affect both the interpersonal understanding of conversations and the free flow we take for granted when we speak to another person face-to-face. Terrestrial links often suffer delays this large. Satellite circuits require a minimum of .5 seconds for a simple round-trip signal. It’s unlikely that we’ll overcome these limitations soon, except for remote attendees who are close (in channel terms) to the physical location of an event.

Furthermore, though I’m not aware of research in this area, signal delays also mess up our habitual ability to read body language responses (mainly facial). Most people, in my experience, are not consciously aware of how well they can “read” interest, boredom, agreement, and emotions on others’ faces. Body language is telegraphed almost instantly and is hard to mask. When we lose the immediate feedback from experiencing how others around us respond to what we say and do, we lose a highly significant channel for connection.

The report of hybrid events’ death was an exaggeration

The difficulties of providing a comprehensive many-to-many channel experience for remote attendees, when combined with the subtle yet important communication degradations introduced by signal delay will, in my judgment, ensure that hybrid events will be around, live and kicking, for a long time yet. What do you think?

Photo attribution: Flickr user catspyjamasnz

Tags: connection, engagement, Event design, hybrid events| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Demystifying the unconference

Friday, January 14th, 2011 by Adrian Segar

It’s time to demystify the unconference.

Nine hundred years ago, when the world’s first universities began and prestigious libraries might contain a few hundred hand-copied books, the way you learned something was to travel to where a man (in those days it was always a man) knew it, and sit and listen to him teach it to you.

This model for learning sank deep into our culture. Today, on a computer we can hold in our hands, we can search the internet for information or watch videos of the finest presenters. Yet, even though we have amazing content at our fingertips, our meeting designs have not changed much from the classroom model required by the technologies available during the Middle Ages.

Over the last forty years, new face-to-face meeting designs—such as Open Space, World Café, Conferences That Work, Future Search, and Everyday Democracy—have appeared that challenge the entrenched dominant learning paradigm of passive reception of predetermined information. Although each design has unique features and goals, what they all have in common is that what happens at the event is participant-driven, rather than being largely prescribed by the conference organizers. Such formats are unconferences.

Here are some of the key features of an unconference

You can design them to work on a group problem or goal. Or as a time for individualized learning and sharing. Longer events can also include traditional sessions, keynotes, etc.
Meaningful and useful interaction between attendees is center stage, rather than something that happens in the breaks between sessions.
The culture is participatory, not passive. This has a highly positive effect on the environment, outcomes, and community created at the event.
Learning happens in small groups, rather than in large general sessions.
Teaching and learning aren’t fixed roles; a teacher at one moment may be a learner the next.
Unconferences harness the experience and expertise of the participants, rather than relying on the contributions of a few outside experts.
Participants have more input into and control over their learning and takeaways from an unconference. The event is, therefore, more likely to satisfy their wants and needs.
Interesting, unexpected things are likely to happen. While traditional conferences discourage risky learning, unconferences create an environment where participants can create sessions on the spot. Unconferences welcome questions and encourage sharing.

Why unconferences?

It’s no coincidence that unconference designs appeared as our society responded to the increased availability of information and ease of sharing made possible by the personal computer and the internet. And yet, despite the pervasive reality of ubiquitous knowledge and connectivity, professional event planners still rarely use these new designs.

One reason is the fear that an unconference just won’t work. I’ve run unconferences for twenty years and reviewed thousands of evaluations. I can assure you that the level of satisfaction with unconference formats is much higher than traditional events. (One of the reasons for this is that I’ve found that traditional program committees predict less than half the sessions that attendees actually want.) Other reasons include the misconception that crowdsourcing session topics before an event make it an unconference, the understandable fear of giving up control over one’s event, and general unfamiliarity with unconference revenue models, facilitation requirements, and logistical considerations.

All these barriers to the implementation of unconference meeting designs are readily overcome with education and experience. Most event planners (and their clients) have begun to hear the rumbles of dissatisfaction from attendees who are no longer satisfied flying hundreds of miles to listen to speakers they could have watched on YouTube, or to attend a conference where a majority of the sessions are not what they really wanted. Instead, these attendees are increasingly demanding meetings that concentrate on what only face-to-face events can provide—like Howard Givner’s experience of an unconference:

“…one of the most innovative and eye-opening professional experiences I’ve had. Aside from coming back with lots of new tips and ideas, I easily established triple the number of new contacts, and formed stronger relationships with them, than at any other conference I’ve been to.”

It’s time to demystify the unconference. We know how to create these events. Clients are asking for them. So, if you haven’t already, attend an unconference and experience a participant-driven event firsthand. Or talk to people who have. Then you’ll be ready to demystify unconferences and begin to build unconference designs into your event planning future.

This article was first published in Lara McCulloch-Carter‘s free eBook What’s Next in Events 2011.

Photo attribution: Flickr user stuckincustoms

Tags: control, Event design, Everyday Democracy, Future Search, open space, unconferences, World Cafe| Posted in Event design | 1 Comment »

Provide clearings for your event

Thursday, November 4th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

In the 1920s, the German philosopher Heidegger wrote about the necessity for clearings: the making of space for something new to happen. I propose you provide clearings for your event.

At traditional conferences there are few, if any, clearings. The schedule is densely packed with sessions, decided on months in advance. Attendees sit in dark rooms, being led through a dark forest of content.

Why not include some event clearings for your attendees? There are several kinds you can supply:

Physical clearings

Providing attractive, comfortable lounges close to (but set apart from) your session rooms gives attendees a place:

to rest and recuperate;
to digest and integrate what they have heard, experienced, and learned; and
to meet and connect with other attendees as they choose.

Make sure these places are quiet. Why we are often expected to socialize while bombarded with loud music or constant announcements is beyond me.

Freedom clearings

Giving people the freedom to choose, to some degree, what happens at your event clears a psychological space in their minds. When we don’t constrain attendees to predetermined choices, and the event design supports and encourages them to create what they want, they get excited and motivated to actively participate, which improves their learning and facilitates meaningful connections while they’re together.

Permission clearings

I regularly run events that last several days. I’ve never expected that people would attend every session possible in an event this long. Yet I recently noticed (via evaluations) that some attendees believe they should attend everything, without a break, regardless of their stamina limitations. So now, at the start of a conference, I tell participants that we’re going to treat them as adults and explain that I don’t expect them to attend everything. I give them explicit permission to take breaks, to escape for a while as needed, knowing that they will return to the conference, renewed, with energy to enjoy and contribute to the sessions yet to come.

How do you handle providing clearings at your events? What other kinds of clearings can we offer our conference attendees?

Image attribution: Flickr user sheepguardingllama

Tags: clearings, Event design, event-planning| Posted in Event design | 4 Comments »

The myth of control

Sunday, October 24th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

The myth of control.

Misconception 7: Conflict is bad…The reality is that whenever you have more than one living person in a room, you’ll have more than one set of interests, and that’s not a bad thing.
—The Change Handbook by Peggy Holman, Tom Devane, and Steven Cady

Why do we cling to traditional event structure?

One powerful reason is that we want to avoid dealing with messy differences of opinion. When we give attendees the power to choose what happens at our conferences, people will disagree. And when people disagree, there’s the possibility of controversy and conflict. Who’d want that at their event?

Perhaps you believe learning is some kind of linear process that happens painlessly. That’s certainly the paradigm we’re fed in school. Even though most of us struggle to learn there, the underlying message is usually “If you were smart enough, this would be easy”.

If you do believe conference learning should be painless, I ask you this. Think about the most important things you’ve learned in your life. How many of them came to you without disagreement, pain, or conflict? And how many of them did you learn while sitting in a room listening to someone talk for an hour?

Do you want your conferences to maximize learning, even at the cost of some disagreement or discomfort? Or would you rather settle for a safe second best?

Conference conveners are scared about not having control of our lives and our events. That’s why they lock down conferences, forcing their essence into tightly choreographed sessions. Attendees are carefully restricted to choosing, at most, which concurrent session room they’ll sit in.

The myth of control

The reality is that you never had control to begin with, just the myth of control. You’ve been kidding yourself all these years. Unless your constituency is bound to your event via a requirement to earn CEUs, members can withhold their attendance or avoid sessions at will.

Fortunately, there are multiple ways to give up the unnecessary control exercised at traditional conferences and give attendees the freedom and responsibility to make the event theirs. All participant-driven event formats like Open Space, Conferences That Work, and Future Search treat attendees like intelligent adults.

What’s amazing to discover is how liberating these event designs are for conference organizers too. When we give up over-control, we become largely freed of the responsibility to choose the content, format, and instigators of our conference sessions, concentrating instead on supervisory, facilitation, and support roles. Yes, the result is an event that is less predictable, and often more challenging. But the richer experience, the creation of an event that reflects what participants truly need and want, and the joy of uncovered valuable, unexpected, appropriate learning make it all worthwhile for everyone involved.

Tags: change, control, Event design, myth, participant-driven| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Why The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Friday, October 15th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

A number of people have asked whether EventCamp East Coast (EC²) will be livestreamed. The answer is a qualified “no”, and since this is a different choice from those made at the original EventCamp in New York City and EventCamp Twin Cities I thought I’d explain why.

We’re concentrating on the face-to-face experience of the local audience at EC² for three reasons. Two of these factors are straightforward, while the third requires clarification.

The first reason is philosophical. The conference organizers—Traci Browne, Lindsey Rosenthal, and I—want to create an effective, uncomplicated event. Serving a remote audience well, as was done at the recent EventCamp Twin Cities, adds a significant level of complexity, not only to the organizer’s workload but also to the demands on presenters and the local audience to integrate the two audiences successfully.

The second reason is a matter of logistics. We three organizers enjoy busy professional lives, and possess a limited amount of time to make EC² the best conference we can. Creating an excellent remote audience experience (we wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less) would significantly shift our focus from other important components of EC².

The final reason is event design related and, perhaps, the most fundamental. The Conferences That Work design that we are using adds a default requirement of confidentiality to what happens during the conference. Let me explain what this means and why we’re doing this.

The thought of providing confidentiality at a conference may seem strange or counterproductive, especially these days where event sessions are routinely streamed and videoed for anyone who wants to watch. But in fact, there’s always been a need at some meetings for a commitment to confidentiality.

The classic example for a need for confidentiality is diplomatic meetings, where, to make best progress, participants need to be sure that what is said isn’t broadcast to the world. In this case, the reason for off-the-record conversation is to benefit relationships between the institutions that the diplomats represent.

But there’s another reason why confidentiality can be useful when people meet face to face; the personal benefit of the participants.

Perhaps the most well known example of events that provide this kind of environment are the 30 years of Renaissance Weekends, where participants “CEOs, venture capitalists, business & social entrepreneurs, Nobel Laureates & Pulitzer Prize-winners, astronauts & Olympians, acclaimed change-makers of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street & Main Street, Republicans, Democrats & Independents” agree to the following policy:

All participants are expected to respect Renaissance Weekends®’ tradition of the candid and welcome exchange of diverse opinions, safeguards for privacy, confidentiality, and non-commerciality, and family ethos. Comments, behavior, or public references which could compromise the character of Renaissance Weekends® are unacceptable.

In my experience, all peer groups can benefit from this kind of environment. For example: more than once I’ve been told by different doctors I know that they regularly meet with a small group of their peers to confidentially discuss professional issues. In each case, the doctor I was talking with said, in effect, “There are some things that I can only talk about with other doctors.” The Conferences That Work format extends this kind of possibility to any peer group, and I believe that providing this opportunity can be important to any group of people with a common interest.

At every Conferences That Work event I’ve run, there are some sessions where the attendees decide not to share the proceedings publicly—in a few cases not even with other participants at the event. A common example is a frank discussion of the pros and cons of commercial tools and services available to attendees. And it’s not uncommon for a session or two to delve into work- or industry-related issues where attendees are looking for support and advice from their peers. Although these sessions are in a minority, it’s impossible to reliably predict in advance whether a specific session will turn out to require confidentiality.

All sessions at Conferences That Work have a recorder assigned to them, who makes notes or otherwise records the session. Because of the default requirement of confidentiality, unanimous agreement of the session’s attendees at the end of the session is needed for the recording to be made public.

In conclusion, it’s likely that the recordings of most of the sessions at EventCamp East Coast will be made available publicly, but they won’t be streamed live. So if you’re interested in fully experiencing EC², please join us on site in Philadelphia! I hope this article has explained why we’ve made these event design choices, and I welcome your comments and questions.

Tags: confidentiality, east coast, Event design, eventcamp, hybrid events, privacy, Renaissance| Posted in eventcamp, NoRepost | No Comments »

How 1984 turned out like 1884

Monday, October 11th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Unfortunately, 1984 turned out like 1884 in the realm of education.

‘While going about my day, I sometimes engage in a mental exercise I call the Laura Ingalls Test. What would Laura Ingalls, prairie girl, make of this freeway interchange? This Target? This cell phone? Some modern institutions would probably be unrecognizable at first glance to a visitor from the 19th century: a hospital, an Apple store, a yoga studio. But take Laura Ingalls to the nearest fifth-grade classroom, and she wouldn’t hesitate to say, “Oh! A school!”

Very little about the American classroom has changed since Laura Ingalls sat in one more than a century ago.’
—The 21st-Century Classroom, by Linda Perlstein

In her Slate article, excerpted above, Linda Perlstein, an education writer, muses about the effects that school classroom layout and design affect the learning that takes place. She even asks her readers to submit their “best ideas for transforming the American school”. She conflates this request with “asking you to describe or even design the classroom for today, a fifth-grade classroom that takes advantage of all that we have learned since Laura Ingalls’ day about teaching, learning, and technology–and what you think we have yet to learn”.

I think that Linda’s emphasis on transforming the physical learning workspace as the answer to our educational system’s woes focuses on the wrong issue.

Certainly, most modern school classroom layouts have changed very little from Laura Ingalls’ day. But this is a symptom of the lack of change in educational circles, not a cause. It’s often easy to alter the physical layout of a learning space simply by changing the furniture or rearranging it. (Get rid of those chairs with individual writing areas shown above!) And, see Paul Radde’s Seating Matters for a comprehensive introduction to this topic.

Why schools don’t redesign their learning spaces

The reason why schools don’t redesign their learning spaces is because the traditional all-chairs-face-the-front approach mirrors the teaching style perpetuated by our culture for the last 1,500 years. We get classroom layouts that optimize our teaching paradigm. Changing the classroom’s physical design and hoping that our learning environment will somehow improve is a great example of wishing that the tail would wag the dog.

First, change how we teach and how we expect to learn. Then, the need to change our physical educational environment will become pretty obvious. Laura, please use your considerable journalist skills to explore how we do and don’t learn effectively. Publicize what you find—we’ll all be the beneficiaries!

And then perhaps 2084 won’t look like 1984.

Do you think that changing our physical learning environments is the way to improve how well we learn? Or do you think that changing the ways we learn will lead to fundamentally different learning environment designs?

Image attribution: Flickr users buttepubliclibrary and dcjohn

Tags: 1984, classroom, Event design, furniture, Learning, seating| Posted in Learning | 8 Comments »

How the Fisch Flip sparked an idea for conference design

Friday, September 24th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

Yes, the Fisch Flip has sparked an idea for conference design. This post by Jeff Hurt on applying the Fisch Flip to your conference model got me thinking.

If you haven’t read about it already, the term Fisch Flip was coined by Daniel Pink, named after a veteran Colorado schoolteacher, Karl Fisch, who realized he could be more effective in the classroom if he flipped traditional homework and schoolwork. Instead of lecturing in the classroom and giving homework exercises for students to work on at home, he started recording his topic lectures for students to watch for homework after school. He used his lesson time to help students apply the concepts he’d covered.

Use face-to-face time for interactive, participative learning. Flip the broadcast listening-to-the-teacher instruction to the time/location when it’s most appropriate: out of school, at the student’s convenience.

Simple…and brilliant!

When I read this my first thought was: “Whoa, the flipped classroom piece corresponds nicely to the Conferences That Work design, which generates mostly participative session formats.”

My second thought was: “But Conferences That Work don’t focus on pre-shared content, but on participants’ existing experience and expertise. So there’s not an exact correspondence.”

And then an idea: How about asking participants to share (via an online event community) before the conference interesting things they’ve done or learned, to prepare/stimulate participants for potential discussions at the event? A Conferences That Work design won’t guarantee in advance that a specific session will take place. But much of the pre-conference sharing will be useful and illuminating. Some of it will spark comments, questions, and ideas to explore when participants get together.

I’ll be trying this out at future conferences.

The Fisch Flip sparked an idea for conference design. Thanks for sparking it, Jeff!

Image attribution: Daily Telegraph

Tags: conference design, Event design, Fisch flip| Posted in Event design | No Comments »