Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

David in one of his posts this week puts forward a plea that educational conferences should “reach out more” citing the Web 2.0 EXPO last week as an example. Here’s what he says:

I would love to see more education technology conferences adopt this sort of out-reach. Conferences have never been an integral part of the job for most classroom teachers — and with budget cuts already starting to snip their way across the fabric of our education institutions, fewer educators will likely be packing up and driving or flying to the city convention hotel for three days of shared learning and energy-generating friction.

It’s all the more reason why education conferences need to shine more, to radiate ideas rather than rattle them in a box. Here are some ideas:

Consider a social network for your conference. Although I remain skeptical about social networks, social networking is essential, and a few conferences have made brilliant use of them.
Give presenters a wiki page to spread out their session descriptions, post presentation commercials, and generate discussion through the commenting feature.
Give exhibitors a wiki page to spread out their description and to add special offers, schedules of booth presentations, and codes for door prizes.
Establish and CLEARLY advertise conference tags for bloggers and photographers.
Either aggregate photos and blog entries, or set up a conference page on Hitchhikr and link to that. (I’m considering doing a major rebuild of Hitchhikr.
Generate a tag cloud that represents the conversation that is the conference.
If you have a social network or are connecting to profiles in some other way, ask attendees (physical & virtual) what’s on their radar, and post that, perhaps as a tag cloud.
Keep the conference web site going. Continue to maintain it. Post videos and audio podcasts of sessions. It’s good for your community, and good advertising for your conference.

Some interesting ideas indeed, and having pushed first for an online presence, and organised such presence at Naace conferences over the last two years, I can empathise with his motives. There are however real dilemmas for conference organisers adding out-reach to their events.

The point of organising a face-to-face conference is to bring people together. Online features can enhance interaction between delegates and therefore add value to the networking and social interaction. Interaction with those not at the conference can also do this, and of course provide value to those that are not there. To achieve this the balance has to be right. If you are organising an annual event, and the out-reach is so effective, it might provide a reason for not going the following year, and the event dies!

Online outreach activity requires additional support, effort, and cost both pre and post conference. You can rely on volunteers for this, but to be consistent and totally professional, you can’t. This means someone has to foot the bill. The nature of the web suggests that charging non-delegates is a non-starter so, is it the delegates who pay with higher fees, sponsors (who of course want to tap into the audience you draw), or soaked up in general the general costs of the organisation organising the event? If it is the latter, then it could be justified as part of the marketing for that organisation.

The answer is not straightforward.

Image credit: Outreach Box on Web 2.0 EXPO in San Francisco April 22-25

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