So you were annoyed you did have an opportunity to offer your perspective …

This is the week of the big ISTE conference. I have attended this conference for many years and planned to go this year, but I encountered a medical situation that prevented me from attending. You can now really follow and I suppose participate in a conference, especially a tech conference that supports this opportunity, even when you cannot attend. I have done a little of this and the following observation surfaces from this effort.

The “back channel” offers physical or virtual participants to voice comments in reaction to a common experience. So, if you teach in a FTF setting, the students in your class might tweet, text, or use some more specialized tool to comment on your presentation or you. One would think were would be great educational potential in this additional source of input, but often the comments are derogatory and I do not mean just to state a different interpretation or point of view.

One of “themes” I have identified in my external perspective on ISTE (the back channel) is the complaint that presenters limit engagement with their audience in some cases implying that this results in a boring experience for the “learner” and models an old and ineffective style of “instruction”. Let me frame my counter position in this way. I probably saved close to $2000 by not attending this conference. The conference is expensive and time available to watch quality presentations is very limited. Often sessions I want to experience are filled before I can get into the room. I am looking for efficiency. I select sessions based on the topic or knowledge of the presenter and it is the presenter I want to hear. If the presenter is filling the available time effectively, I find it annoying that someone else feels the need to take much of the limited time that is available. If the presenter does not have enough content to fill 20 or 60 minutes or whatever, I also object to using valuable time for little break out discussion groups. I would prefer a shorter, but focused session. There are plenty of ways to discuss and follow up. If a presenter, at least  clearly describe your intent as a discussion leader and not a presenter.

In the online discussion I have observed, the concept of “flip the session” was described. The idea, as I understand it by comparison to some similar proposals for the classes we teach, is that the “presenter” will in some way offer content ahead of time (a paper, video) and the FTF will be used for discussions. I think this would be an honest approach and might appeal to some, but I am skeptical. My personal approach would likely be to consider the pre-session content and that would be the end of it (good content or poor). Again, this would simply be a matter of efficiency for me and I would certainly appreciate the quality materials I had been given access to consider.

A couple of final comments:

  • Do you think this a learning preference (I tend to avoid the more troublesome term learning style)? I want to control what I think about and how I think about it. I want concentrated doses of information that I can consider and follow up on in whatever way I feel would be constructive. Discussion may be a part of the second phase of the approach I prefer, but I find it wasteful when it is part of the first phase. I understand that others enjoy the social component. So do I, but that is for the bar afterwards.
  • I think there are so many differences between classroom learning and conference session learning that it is inappropriate to imply anything about the type of teacher a session presenter might be. This is not a teacher-center vs. learner-centered issue. A conference is a situation in which motivated adults make personal decisions with options under some significant time pressure. This about understanding that all learning results from “information input” and additional processing. For the sake of efficiency, I would prefer that presenters provide the maximum opportunity for information input and leave the additional processing up to me.
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