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50+ Administrators talking about skllls needed in the new workplace
50+ Administrators talking about skllls needed in the new workplace

Back at work and reflecting on the tech cohort that I tried to run at the EARCOS Admin Conference. I talked about it here and what my hopes were for the group. It’s the first time I’ve tried to embedd a cohort in a traditional conference model and to be honest I had very limited success.

We met as a cohort during the first session. I was excited to meet the 33 admin who had signed up ahead of time to be apart of the project. During the first session we had 50+ people in the room. I was really excited as people just kept coming into the room asking if they could join.

But it was all down hill from there. Our first session went really well, people were excited and we got them thinking about the skills a worker needed today by having them in groups find answers to these real world scenarios.

On the second day we had about 15 people show up for the cohort reflection….a huge drop from the 50+ the day before. I can make all kinds of excuses of why people maybe did not show up, but at the end of the day they just didn’t.

On the third and final day we had 7 people show up for the cohort reflection session. Our discussions were great as we covered everything from 1:1 laptop programs to new and cool tools on the Internet.

There were some successes though. The blog I set up really did become a place to house thinking, presentations and links to resources coming out of sessions. The greatest take away for me and most administrators I talked to was the use of the chat rooms I set up for back channel conversations.

It was very interesting as we used a chat room during two of the keynotes. During the first keynote the chat room was very active, and very off topic. Someone would throw a one-liner into the chat and we’d all head down a rat hole. It was great fun….and if you ask me what the speakers overall message was I couldn’t tell you. I was not at all engaged in the presentation. The chat room was much more engaging….even if it was off task.

We talked after the first keynote and I had many come up to me and say how much fun that was and that they were coming to the keynote the next day just to get back into the chat room.

But…the next day we got into the chat, we were all ready, and nothing….there was hardly a conversation. Some links based on websites the speakers was talking about, some stories from those who had connections via a personal story based on the presentation, and questions related to students and global awareness.

It was a completely different chat room….the pace was much slower than the day before and it was on topic, engaging, and relevant to the presentation.

To me it was a fascinating look at how engagement and presentation of information leads to learning. It also leads to the discussion in the classroom why some teachers stuggle with students getting on Facebook and others don’t have any trouble at all. Here were administrators who came to the second keynote with all intentions to “screw off” in the chat room…and yet they found the information and presentation so engaging that it didn’t happen. I talked about this realization I had with the group of 7 that showed up at the last reflection session. I just wish I would have had the 50+.

I’m not done with cohorts, they are powerful ways to learn, but embedding them into an old model just didn’t work. It’s like adding technology at the end of a unit, it’s just one more thing we have to do instead of “this is the way we do things”.

That’s why for the Learning 2.010 conference in Shanghia (Sept. 16-18, 2010, registration to open in January), we’re creating a conference that at it’s core is built on cohort learning models. We’re in the final stages of planning and I’ll have more information in another month. But I promise you this, it will be a format like none you have ever seen before, based on learning, thinking, and the year 2020.

So I walk away from this conference learning a lot about conferences and how changing mindsets within the same walls of a conference that saw it’s 41st installment is difficult. We’re so use to doing things this way that anything else is just weird feeling and confusing. We know how this conference goes, we’ve been doing it for 41 years now….this is the way we’ve always done it, why change. It’s a mind set that when you embed something new in the middle of it, something outside conventional thinking just has a hard time taking hold. Ah…..human kind….we are a strange beast!

I’m back from the ETC (EARCOS Teacher’s Conference) in Kota Kinabalua, Malaysia. Where I did four presentations as well as watched Kim Cofino pack them in for her Connecting Across Continents presentation.

It’s the first conference that I’ve gone to where I truly did not “do” the conference. Other than my own four presentations I only went to two others….one if you don’t count Kim’s.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why I didn’t feel motivated to go to more sessions. I like learning so what was my problem?

Then it hit me…..I don’t like learning alone!

The Internet was horrible…when it did work at the conference, and I found myself disconnected from my friends colleagues and my network of learners.

Learning for me needs to be social. I need to be able to live blog a session, to Ustream a session or have a back channel chat going with others in the room.

Without that….a presentation is rather boring. So boring in fact, that I couldn’t motivate myself to even go to a session. Learning for me happens in these social spaces. It happens when I’m able to listen, reflect, and connect with others near and far in the moment. I’m so use to this anymore that regular old sit and get learning just isn’t the same.

And then I started thinking about our students. Our students who spend there day not just in front of screens but connecting with people, learning in the moment and creating content.

I thought that maybe it was just me…but then this new study from the Nielsen Company was just released this week showing amoung other things that adults are spending 8+ hours a day in front of screens (via nytimes):

Among other surprises, the research found that young people aren’t the
only ones dividing their attention among multiple screens and machines;
people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and early 50s essentially multitask for
the same amount of time. People over 55 are markedly less likely to be
multitasking. “That’s where the generation gap, if there is one, may
exist,” Mr. Bloxham said.

So it’s not just me (thank goodness!). You mean I’m just like the rest of the multitaskers out there? Multitaskers who expect to be able to connect with people, content and ideas in a moments notice and who find such value in connections that without it learning becomes boring? Not that you can’t learn without it…it’s just so much more engaging when you do!

Once again the best part of the conference was meeting people outside the conference. After having the Twitter Meet-up bust on me in Portland at NCCE I wasn’t sure how it would go over here at a teacher’s conference. But I was impressed when we had eight people show up for a Twitter Meet-up. Some people I had met before, but most of them new faces and even some who came to set up their Twitter account for the first time.

Of course there was only one official Twitter Meet-up but I had a couple great spontaneous meet ups with mscofino, klandmiles, Skardalien in the lobby.

Once again I found that it was the face to face time that was the best part of the conference. Meeting new people, connecting with old friends, and talking about education from different angles.

So, my big take away from the conference was this: Conferences are about people and connections…and not about content. If the content is there and there is no way to connect with people around that content…then learning is boring. Learning is being social and without that social interaction I feel disconnected from the content.

I just keep shaking my head and truly feeling for our students who every day have to disconnect to learn. Even worse….they don’t get to choose which session to go to…they just have to live with it day in and day out.

Learning should be social…and in today’s world being social means being connected while you learn. Do we help create these social connections or are we to worried about the time students might waste being social and being connected?

So the first full day of NECC 2008 comes to an end and I find myself thinking more about conferences, how to create them, manage them, and make them relevant to participants then I thought I would. Have I mentioned the conference we’re doing in Shanghai? 🙂

I’ve been thinking a lot about spaces and how important it is to create spaces for learning and conversing at the conference. Today I ran into cognitive overload. Ewan McIntosh does a beautiful job of explaining exactly how I was feeling today.

At one point I literally had to find a quiet corner in the Hyatt to just take a breathe and relax. I felt like calling a time out and just pausing everything for a second.

So here are my thoughts on designing and organizing a conference.

Pace: The pace of the conference is an important aspect to consider. Chris Lehmann and I talked about this for a bit yesterday. How much time do you give between presentations? How many presentations do you have during a session? Both of these help to determine the pace of the conference. At NECC this year the feeling of many (including me) is that the pace of the conference is just to fast. Many sessions are closed to participants 15 minutes before they are do to begin. One person in the Blogger Cafe today talked about showing up 30 minutes early to get into a session and the line was already forming outside. Here at NECC the sessions run 60 minutes with varying start times in between sessions. With sessions filling up so fast, people feel an urgency to get to sessions quickly and then once there, feel like they can’t “vote with your feet” and leave a session because there is no guarantee that there is another session with space.

Scale to Size: I talked about this in my last post and I think it is something you must make a priority if you are planning any type of conference. Your conference venue and the number of sessions you run per hour are two factors that you need spend time thinking about. At NECC this year I saw a sign that stated there were over 13,000 participants. A quick count of the number of presentations that were offered at 11am this morning was 33. A little simple math 13,000/33=394 people per presentation. 394 people per presentation means you need to have a venue that can hold 33 sessions at a time and each room must hold 394 people….good luck!

I don’t know what the perfect size of a session is but close to 400 people per presentation seems a little big to me, and some of the rooms here were never made to hold 400 people (some have been closed to participants due to fire code violations).

There is such a thing as to much: We get excited about trying new things, trying to expand these conferences to meet the needs of everyone. 13,000 educators have a lot of needs, and us in the edublogosphere have needs we want met as well. Last year NECC set up the Blogger’s Cafe for us and it was an amazing area where conversations flowed, people connected, and ideas were spread.

This year the Blogger’s Cafe has not been that for many. The placement of the Cafe this year has a lot to do with it. Last year (as many of us in Atlanta will recall) the Blogger’s Cafe was out of the way, down a long hallway. You had to make an effort to get there, you had to want to go there to engage in conversations. This year the Blogger’s Cafe is on a many thoroughfare. People are coming and going constantly and many people grab a chair real quick to check e-mail as they are passing through. In between sessions the space is very crowded and over flowing with people. Twice today I went and couldn’t find a place to set my bag down. Could NECC have put the Blogger’s Cafe in another spot? I’m not sure, from the looks of things they are pretty crammed into the conference center here the way it is.

Secondly, NECC Unplugged is also being held in the Blogger’s Cafe. Would it be better in another spot? I think we all agree it would…but where? The Blogger’s Cafe was never made to hold “sessions” of any type. The conversation atmosphere does not lend itself to even quick 7 or 10 minute demos of programs. The Blogger’s Cafe serves a purpose as a place to converse face to face. Trying to make the space something it isn’t adds to the cognitive overload that I think many of us are feeling at the conference this year.

There is such a think as doing to much and I think we found that this year at the Cafe. Not every great idea needs to be played out.

As I continue to think about the Learning 2.008 conference I can’t help but hope that I have learned some valuable lessons from NECC this year.

  • We’re hoping for 500 people meaning we need about 20 presentations a session to keep our numbers around 25 people a presentation
  • We need to manage the pace of the conference. We try and do this using an unconference model where conversations can go for days and there is no obligation to ever stop a conversation giving a relaxed feel to the learning space.
  • Expand without over doing it: We will use Twitter this year again, tweak the way we used it, but continue to use it as our synchronous communication tool during the conference.

It’s been great as people have come up to me during the past couple of days and have wanted to know more about our conference and how we run it. I don’t think you can directly compare Learning 2.008 to NECC between the size and the fundamental belief in conversations being the main focus of learning the two conferences are just different. But I do believe we can learn from each other on what a conference in the 21st Century needs to feel like.

The TED conference is getting ready to kick off here shortly and as it does. I know I speak for all those that post here at U Tech Tips when I say that the videos and the thinking that comes from TED is mind numbing. As I read and prepare for TED I was reminded of this video from Sir Ken Robinson. A video that every educator should take 19 minutes out of their day to watch.

Not only is TED about ready to begin. But there are some other great conferences that are ready getting ready to start. Thanks to David Warlick’s Hitchhikr site you can now follow conferences without attending.

It’s just another way that learning and professional development is changing. I can’t afford to go to every conference I want to but I still attend conferences regularly. Watch live presentations on the web, take part in conversations via podcasts and comments on blogs and can still get the feel of a conference through those that blog and write about their own learning.


What hitchhikr does so brilliantly is bring all those conference voices together on one site, and then offers an RSS feed so that you can follow the conference through your RSS reader. One site, one conference, a hundred voices. So even though I’m sitting here in Shanghai I’m right now attending 3 conferences. So excuse me, but I have some learning to do.

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