While we’ve seen considerable experimentation and exploration scattered across the educational landscape, one of the holdout areas often untouched by the transformations of recent technologies is the standard conference presentation. Think about it: because of their logistics and their average venue — an auditorium with a stage facing row upon row of chairs or a rigid constellation of tables packed together to maximize attendance — most conference sessions focus primarily on a leader delivering information for an audience’s consumption. If that ‘delivery & consumption’ model is something we’re working to transform in classrooms, couldn’t we also work to transform it at conferences?

This is why it was especially exciting to team with the Bett content team this year to explore ways to do just that. You can read more about our rationale for the experiment and some of the outcomes we were hoping to achieve here. Did we succeed in helping people move from being passive consumers to active partners? We’re still collating data and following up with participants… I’ll post the results here once they’re available. But today, I wanted to consider some of the complexities of the challenge… Continue reading →