Conference Education


Are You Providing A Homogenized Or Personalized Conference Experience?

Walk into most annual conference sessions and what do you see? What do you hear? You’ll probably hear and see the same thing in each room. One voice talking at a time. A speaker or panelist at the front of the room talking to a group of attendees. The attendees are sitting theater style facing … [Read more…]

14 Adult Learning Principles To Combat The Conference Learning Crisis

Leaving no conference attendee brain behind. It’s the new motto of the 21st century conference organizer…that is, if you want to get them back next year. It’s time for associations and corporations to address the root cause of the conference learning crisis: a limited understanding of successful adult learning. Andragogy – How Adults Learn Malcolm … [Read more…]

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. I certainly want to attend a conference where what … [Read more…]

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 Medina, Brain Rules; E. Dale, Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching). 30 … [Read more…]

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 a big noisy family and friend gathering with people sharing video clips, … [Read more…]

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 buy and sell seat time rather than performance improvement. … [Read more…]

Two Reasons Why Crowdsourcing Your Conference Content Won’t Work

Let’s put children in charge of their own meals. Being the forward thinking leaders that we are, we’ll allow kids to decide what they want to eat. We’ll use an online voting system similar to Digg so kids can crowdsource the suggestions. They’ll even be allowed to announce to their friends which food items they … [Read more…]

Do Conference Session Learning Objectives Really Matter?

This is the last in a series of posts on writing better conference session descriptions. Read the previous posts Conference Descriptions That Whet The Appetite, an overview of the four elements of a successful conference description, How To Write Killer Conference Session Titles That Attract Attendees and Crafting Better Conference Materials: Writing Session Descriptions For … [Read more…]

Crafting Better Conference Materials: Writing Session Descriptions For Dummies

This is the third in a series of posts on writing better conference session descriptions. Read the first post Conference Descriptions That Whet The Appetite, an overview of the four elements of a successful conference description, or second post How To Write Killer Conference Session Titles That Attract Attendees. Begin With The End In Mind … [Read more…]

How To Write Killer Conference Session Titles That Attract Attendees

This is the second in a series of posts on writing better conference session descriptions. Read the first post Conference Descriptions That Whet The Appetite, an overview of the four elements of a successful conference description. What is the primary purpose of most conference session titles, descriptions and learner objectives? Did you say, “To get … [Read more…]