Thursday, November 3, 2011

An interesting alternative to serial speeches in conferences, worth a read

Peter, in his blog, "A New Kind of Book", writes the rationale for a new type of conference format, where he think the focus should be on that, attendees can get away from the conference learning something. Most conferences we attend hardly teach us anything in a structured manner. So, he talks about setting up the sequence of talks in a way that encourages questions and discussions, cuts out needless repetitions of topics from other speakers, summarizing the talks at the end of the day by expert transcribers, and so on. For a full list of all that he suggests, I invite you to take a look at the following blog

I agree. I think streamlining conference organization and focusing conferences on learning points and learning outcomes can have a great impact on the attendees and actually can be quite fun. Besides the attendance certifcates would have a meaning at the end of the day. And this is not just for conferences, this pattern and format can be adapted for even small round tables or symposia that people organize and attend to. 

With the conference season upon us (in the North Hemisphere at least), these thoughts are not trivial. Might as well read the blog post and reflect.