God bless conference planners

Most places I go to speak, I get a warm reception, but Florence, SC, was an exception. It was the chilliest group of librarians I’d ever met. Oh, the people themselves displayed the Southern graciousness, hospitality and charm for which they are rightly famous, but, damn, the ice arena where the general sessions were held froze almost everyone out. (I personally lost three toes to frostbite, but it was interesting to watch the zamboni clear the ice before the keynote.) Lauren Hammond, who chaired the conference, I am sure, is still getting comments.

Every member of a professional organization should be a conference chair at least once in his or her career – preferably early on. It’s a wonderful lesson in just how illusionary control over much of anything actually is.

Our MEMO (Minnesota Educational Media Organization) Fall Conference will be here in Mankato this fall and I am once again the chair. (Fourth time as either conference chair or program chair for MEMO.) It is a labor of love – labor being the operative word. My wonderful, dedicated committee and I start planning the event a year in advance – selecting a theme, special speakers, food, tours, workshops, etc. The venue itself was chosen years in advance. As the conference gets closer, we’ll worry about ribbons, signs, equipment, transportation, nametags, exhibit locations, speakers gifts, etc. But despite our best planning and attention to details, I am sure there will be a few surprises.

Like most conference organizers, we want and need feedback for future conferences, so we ask attendees to fill out evaluation forms for both sessions and the conference as a whole. Most folks are honest, yet generous, in their appraisals of the event. Conference planners, exhibitors, and presenters do take suggestions for improvement to heart and use them. However, there are a few comments I would love to see banned on evaluation forms.

1. The room was too hot/cold. (The person who invents perfect climate control in large buildings should earn a place in paradise.)
2. The dessert was too small/too big/not sweet enough/too sweet/made of ____ which I am allergic to. (Hey, at least you got dessert.)
3. I didn’t agree with the keynote speaker. (You mean s/he made you think?)
4. The workshop wasn’t what I thought it would be. (Did you read the program description or just the title?)
5. I didn’t like the color of the bags/program/t-shirts, etc. (Well, the hospitality chair is a fall and you’re a spring – live with it.)
6. From vendors – There was too little time for attendees to do nothing but attend the vendor area. (Is there ever enough time from an exhibitor’s perspective?)
7. There was a snow storm/rain/heat wave during the conference. (No comment.)
8. I had pay for parking. (Next time we’ll try to have the conference at a shopping mall instead of a convention center.)
9. I misread the program and missed the session I really wanted to go to. (And you have a college degree?)
10. There weren’t enough handouts. (You’re saying you came late to the session?)

Here’s all I’m saying – if you’ve ever written a comment like the one above, please volunteer for next year’s conference planning committee. So much planning work is done online now, geographic distance is not really a limiting factor. You’ll learn very quickly that you can’t guard against the arbitrary.

If you attended the SC conference in Florence last spring, take a minute and send Lawren and e-mail telling her how much you appreciated all the hard work that went into the event.

Conference planners, any other comments you’d like banned from evaluations?
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My comment is based on 8 years of attending a conference at Mohonk. We have a 2-hour downtime scheduled after lunch the second day and each year someone complains because 1. they don’t need the downtime and think we should still be in sessions or 2. nothing was scheduled for the downtime.

Comment from Laura Pearle:

Last year in TN, we had a conference chair for the first time run the conference instead of the state president. YIPPEE! Still, I didn’t get to attend a session until the very last one. There are so many details for the conference chair and for the president to oversee. Unfortunately one of our beloved keynote speakers had her laptop stolen while we were at lunch. I spent hours viewing surveillance film in the security booth. Then it was well-deserved time consoling our speaker and being there for her. Earlier in the conference, we discovered the group working with the bookstore didn’t order the author’s books to be autographed and it was off to discover how to overnight books from Oregon to Chattanooga. I am greatly looking forward to attending AASL because I am not in charge of anything. What a heavenly concept. Go to a conference and enjoy being with the professionals, chatting with the vendors, and contemplating “stuff” in sessions. Hooray for the planners!

Comment by Diane Chen — September 13, 2005 @ 11:10 pm

The Techiest Person in a Three State Area

I spent the weekend in Aberdeen, a surprisingly nice little city in northeastern South Dakota. I somehow got talked into giving a workshop on creating websites to a bunch of Kiwanians attending their 3-state district convention there. Believe it or not, I am considered one of the “tech gurus” for the district - a genuinely frightening thought.

The folks in Kiwanis* (and I assume Rotary, Lions, Sertoma, and other service clubs) are by and large very, very nice people. They undertake fund-raising for and volunteer in lots of projects that better their communities. These are people with a social conscience that they actually use in concrete ways. The average age of this group of convention goers was about 105, but a good number of them were quite insistent that their clubs should be moving into the 21st century (or at least late 20th century) tech-wise.

We met Friday afternoon at a local university computer lab where all 30 attendees could have some “hands-on” experience using a web-generation program specifically designed for Kiwanis clubs. The object of the workshop was useful, the technology itself worked just fine, and the following day, I overheard attendees sharing what they had learned in the workshop. All in all, a successful event.

What amazed me though was just how technologically-illiterate wonderful, involved and intelligent people still are in this country. I was thrown back 15 years and more to teacher inservices when I could not count on learners knowing how to use a mouse, click, or even find the enter key. I’d not worked with such a group for an awfully long time. I actually had a nightmare about the training that night. The experience told me:

1. As educators, we may be the MOST technologically-knowledgeable people in our communities. Staff development has paid off. So we don’t know everything. Isn’t everyone a life-long learner?

2. We cannot assume our kids come from homes that include adults who can guide their technology use. For so many students, schools are their only source of technology skill acquisition and librarians are often their only teachers of those skills in the schools.

3. Many adults don’t realize their public libraries can provide them technology access. When folks complained that they don’t have a computer at home to practice skills and I suggested they use the terminals at their public library, they seemed genuinely surprised. Was this ignorance or willful ignorance? I wondered.

One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen a librarian do was to ask parents to bring their children with them to a PTA meeting, during which the KIDS taught their parents some of the online research skills the librarian had taught them. Parents learned skills, students had those skills reinforced, and the stature of the librarian in the parents’ eyes grew tremendously.

To what extent should we in the schools be educating not just kids, but parents and the community as a whole? Any good ideas about how this can be accomplished?

*Potential prejudice alert - I am president this year of our local Kiwanis Club here in Mankato.

 Kiwanians get techie.