A belated atta boy to Miguel

Just a public compliment to Miguel Guhlin from the San Antonio schools for his thoughtful presentation at the ISTE Bandstand in Second Life Tuesday evening. As you can tell from the good-sized group above, Miguel has quite a following.

I personally seemed to be experiencing technical difficulties that evening - low sound volume, inability to sit in a chair, spastic camera control (hence the giant blue head in the picture above), etc. I was at the entire event but caught about half of it. Darn!

Anyway, kudos to Miguel and all who take a chance working in new learning environments. HIs PPT slides for the preso are here.

Miguel next time, I expect you to have Leslie Conery's ginormous gesturing hands like she was using at the end keynote of NECC. That was pretty weird. Cool. But weird.

10 Commandments of Panel Discussions

 

Is it time for the panel discussion format of conference sessions to get some guidelines?

I commented a couple days ago:

Most abused session format
The panel. As both perp and victim of several panels this conference, I am convinced there need to be some guidelines. Too many talking heads pontificating ad hoc, ad nauseum, off-topic. There must be a better way. Ideas? I need to think more about this.

I may have been a little harsh here. I did enjoy the panels I saw and participated in. I just think they could have been so much better with a few little enforced rules. Anyway here's how my thinking goes so far...

10 Commandments of Panel Discussions

For conveners:

I. Thou shalt limit the session to a single question about a topic pertinent to the targeted attendees.

II. Thou shalt limit the number of panelists to not more than one per 15 minutes of presentation time allotted. For the math challenged, that means no more than four panelists per hour of session.

III. Thou shalt select panelists based on diversity of view, opinion and experience. Invite an outsider looking in, now and then.

IV. Thou shalt plan for at least one-half of allotted time for discussion based on attendee questions.It is a panel discussion, not sequential lectures, after all.

V. Thou shalt have a moderator who actually moderates - enforcing time limits and keeping panelists on topic. An electric cattle prod brandished now and then is advised.

For participants

VI. Thou shalt stay on topic. Period.

VII. Unless given a longer time to make opening remarks, thou shalt limit thy responses to less than three minutes per response. Wear a damn watch.

VIII. Thou shalt show the participants and fellow panelists respect by speaking directly to the question.

IX. Thou shalt not talk again until each panelist has replied. Heated back-and-forth dialogs are the exception.

X. Thou shalt understand and keep holy the right to remain silent on topics about which thou knows diddly-squat. As Honest Abe once said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

OK, folks, add your own!

Ric Murray offered in a comment what I believe is an outstanding alternative to panel discussions:

I have an idea for a different approach to panels that I would like to see... The TED Talk format of giving people 15 minutes to "do their thing." It could be scheduled (but yuck). My idea would be for presenters to sign up before the conference (as they do if the want to present a "real" session). The difference would be, first-come-first-served would fill the schedule. A room could be set aside for the length of the conference. This also might meet your 10 minutes or walk criteria.

I keep reading Tweets, blogs, and getting the impression that many attendees learn more from the hallway conversations. This would be like bringing the hallway into a room. You might even find great speakers who aren't the "big names." How democratic, huh?

Cool, huh? I am forwarding this to the ISTE Powers-That-Be.

Handouts anyone?

Truthfully, I throw every handout they give me--what's the point? If you were listening, and the presenter was interesting, it's just a waste of paper...

was the comment left to my blog post about designing presentation slides a couple days ago. I am not so sure I agree with the comment, but conference presentation handouts are something worth taking a hard look at given the ease with which information can be placed online and readily updated.

I am pretty sure I once created a handout for a day-long workshop that must have run better than 40 pages. Supporting the northern Minnesota paper-mills, ya know. One of the primary purposes of a good presentation or workshop is to stir sufficient interest that the participants are motivated to pursue additional information about the topic after the workshop is over. So my handouts usually contained:

• a rough summary of the content of the presentation
• "activity" sheets for participants to complete during the session
• articles and other information for people to read after the conference
• a bibliography of additional resources

But I was too often disheartened to see lots of handouts winding up in the trash - right outside the session room door. Obviously these people did not know that all my writing as been approved by the FDA as a non-addictive sleep aid and those handouts might well have come in handy if they ever suffered a bout of insomnia.

Let me say that simple printouts of the PPT slides are the worst! Either the PPT is too wordy or the handouts are worthless.  Mary, who also left a comment, suggests typing the narrative in the notes field and then printing both slides and notes for handouts. I guess that's better than just the slides, but it still wouldn't be my choice.

Here is my plan: 

A move from everything in print, to a single page where a many-paged handout can be found, to a single page with activities and a link to a wiki that contains links to many individual sources that can be easily updated. These sources can be read online or individually printed and used as relevant. Am I green or what? (And I acknowledge that many presenters already do some version of this, I'm sure. And my conversion from handouts to wiki-based resources is just beginning.)

At the last two workshops where I presented, I estimate that 50-75% of participants had laptops and were connecting wirelessly. How long before we can dispense with paper completely and perhaps just print web/wiki links in the conference program?

As a conference attendee, do you still value paper handouts? What content makes them valuable? Or should they be regarded as a modern day buggy-whip? 

Is there no small degree of irony in creating paper handouts for sessions about Web 2.0? 

Is there a lesson to be learned here about "handouts" in K-12 classrooms? 

 

 

Or as Dean suggests in the comment below, one could always do a bookmark. Good for keeping mice out of the barn, too,