Are You Providing A Homogenized Or Personalized Conference Experience? April 12, 2010 by Jeff Hurt 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…] Filed Under: Conference Education, Experience Design Tagged With: , association, conferences, content, delivery, Education & Adult Learning, meeting planner
The Three Dimensions Of Meeting Stewardship April 8, 2010 by Jeff Hurt Recently I wrote about the need to create meeting stewards for our conferences and events to plan, orchestrate and oversee each conference attendees’ experiences. We can’t continue on the trajectory of piecemealing together conference logistics, content and other meeting fragments and expecting a sophisticated, quality attendee experience. It just doesn’t work. Attendees know when the … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning Tagged With: , association, conferences, Education & Adult Learning, meeting steward, meeting stewardship, professional development, social container for learning
Who Is In Charge Of The Attendee Meeting Experience? Why You Need A Meeting Steward April 7, 2010 by Jeff Hurt Who is planning, facilitating and managing the attendee’s experience at your conference and events? Is it the job of the meeting professional? The education or marketing departments? The conference organizers? The attendee? Often no one person or group that is involved in organizing the meeting is actually taking a holistic approach to facilitating the attendee’s … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning Tagged With: , association, community, conferences, content, Education & Adult Learning, meeting planner, meeting steward, meeting stewardship
The Art Of Sculpting Conference Design April 5, 2010 by Jeff Hurt Recently I wrote Two Reasons Why Crowdsourcing Your Conference Content Won’t Work. In that post, I referred to organizations that were using crowdsourcing as a voting platform to source their conference topics, speakers and sessions. These organizations were not using crowdsourcing in its purest form as a distributed problem-solving and production model. It was strictly … [Read more…] Filed Under: Experience Design Tagged With: , conference design, conferences, content, content design, crowdsourcing conference content, Education & Adult Learning
14 Adult Learning Principles To Combat The Conference Learning Crisis April 1, 2010 by Jeff Hurt 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…] Filed Under: Conference Education Tagged With: , adult learning, adult learning principles, adult learning strategies, andragogy, association, conferences, content, delivery, Education & Adult Learning, engagement, professional development
Conference Curiosity Didn’t Kill The Proverbial Cat. It Awakened The Attendee March 31, 2010 by Jeff Hurt 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…] Filed Under: Conference Education, Experience Design Tagged With: , association, conferences, content, Education & Adult Learning, engagement, formal learning, GenY, informal learning, Millennial
We Are The Problem: We Are Selling Conference Snake Oil March 30, 2010 by Jeff Hurt 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…] Filed Under: Business Model, Conference Education Tagged With: , association, conference learning model, conferences, content, Education & Adult Learning, formal learning, informal learning, professional development
The Conference Session Is Dead March 25, 2010 by Jeff Hurt 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…] Filed Under: Conference Education Tagged With: , association, blended learning, conference session, conferences, content, Education & Adult Learning, formal learning, informal learning, learning, Unconference
Two Reasons Why Crowdsourcing Your Conference Content Won’t Work March 24, 2010 by Jeff Hurt 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…] Filed Under: Conference Education Tagged With: , association, conferences, content, crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing conference content, Education & Adult Learning, meeting planner, professional development
The Wal-Mart Conference Experience: Why It Doesn’t Scale March 23, 2010 by Jeff Hurt We’re not in Manhattan anymore. That’s the tagline for the Sarah Jessica Parker, Hugh Grant movie Did You Hear About The Morgans? The plot: An estranged New York couple observes a murder and is relocated to a small town in Wyoming as part of a witness-protection program. In the movie, Parker’s character did not pack … [Read more…] Filed Under: Event Planning Tagged With: , association, boutique conference experience, conferences, content, Education & Adult Learning, mass of niches, meeting, meeting planner, Wal-Mart conference experience
