I echo a lot of your comments about NECC. I too felt as though it was fast paced. I often wanted to take breaks (which I did) but that meant missing sessions I would have liked to attended.

The best organized conference I’ve ever attended was Online Educa in Berlin. There most of the sessions are panel sessions for 1.5 or two hours. All sessions have 20 minutes at least in between with free coffee and tea provided. This works really well as after the sessions you have time to interact with presenters and talk with fellow attendees (not rushing off). I also think this works well becuase quite frankly a lot of people don’t have the content or presentation skills to fill up an hour. Better to hear five people talk briefly (10 minutes each) on a connected issue and have time for questions. This format allows you to see more and is more interactive. of course having hour longs for people like Warlick is important (and Educa has that as well) but it should not be the defacto format. I went to some forums at NECC but they did not seem to be well regulated in terms of how they were run (long transition times between presentations, not always time for questions, etc).

One comment on Learning 2.0. Although I like the idea of 20 people per room the problem with this is people do not spread out evenly on the sessions. One comment I heard a lot last year about 2.0 is that it was easy to miss a lot of the keynote level speakers. I’d encourage more keynotes with backchat. At least one a day (but not need for the speaker intro which just wastes time). have less simultaneous sessions, it is hard for teacher presenters to ‘compete’ with the headliners!

Cheers.
Justin

One thing that I might add to your thoughts on designing and organizing a conference would be context. By this I mean that the attendees come from a similar context. At Learning 2.0 the context is international schools. Of course diversity is important and one needs to guard against group think but it can be beneficial when people are trying to apply what they hear to similar contexts. At Learning 2.0 most people are trying to apply the ideas they hear and the tools they see to an international school context.

I agree that the bloggers lounge (and most of the rest of them for that matter), are in lousy locations. It’s hard to have a conversation with a few people, much less a larger discussion/presentation with all the noise.

As far as the number of sessions offered – I don’t think more is better. In my case, I already have several I want to attend at the same time – which makes decision making challenging. If I had 7 or 8 to choose from, I’d go nuts.

I’m sure organizers have a hard time figuring out what sessions are going to be packed and which ones aren’t, but perhaps a fix would be asking people who had a packed session to repeat it another time and day. Maybe logistics would make this difficult, but it’s a thought.

I can’t stop thinking that as presenters and workshop organizers, we need to “Conference by Design” – determine the enduring understandings and work backwards from there. If we allow our students a few moments to reflect, what is it that stops us from those moments of silence at the end of a presentation/workshop? Imagine a surveymonkey-type eval that participants could take away that asked “The thing that stood out the most. . .” or “My next steps are”. . .

In EdTech, there is so much that is worth being familiar with AND important to know and be able to do, but, when it’s all over, what do we want to endure in the minds of participants?

Sounds like you’re well on your way in that mode.

Let’s do it…make it happen.

Reading bits of the blogs so far on NECC it seems like a whole lot of hand wringing– a mentor early on in my career said the most important thing about doing these events are just getting people together in one place for a meaningful purpose. There’s only so much you can do.

I’m curious why the model is based on such low numbers per session- perhaps the venue space limits? There is a downside to running 50 simultaneous sessions in that you make the program densely overwhelming AND the presenters themselves miss a lot of sessions. I attended SXSW Interactive this year, and it is a huge event, NECC scale.. even the “smaller” sessions had seating for 100-150.

Also not to be underestimated is building a lot of padding time between sessions- at SXSW it was at least 30 minutes. We talk about the action taking place in the halls, yet most programs end up like crazy class schedules with 10-15 minutes to scramble. No wonder people are dragging zombies after a few days.

I know you are thinking alot on busting up the normal conference format, and if you can move it farther away from the lecture mode of sessions, you will have really cut a new path.