After the Conference, Some Lunchtime Learning

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At many organizations only a few people attend conferences while the rest of the staff is left behind to "hold down the fort." How great would it be if they returned from their travels and presented a lunch-time session on what they learned, as Jim Salinger of Threshold Interactive did for his co-workers. And with this format, it's one more thing to add to the organizational wiki or to post on your blog. I'd argue that even if no one actually attended your lunchtime session, taking the time to pull together a list of things you learned would be time well spent. Maybe this should be the price of admission to the next conference?

Comments

[LaDonna Coy]

Michelle, as always the post is really great. Back when I worked for a University department we discussed how we might be able to learn more from each other about our conference experiences - although, we seldom took the time for the conversations much less taking the step to produce our learnings in this unique way. With new technologies e.g., wiki, screen capture, podcasts, even enhanced PowerPoint it is much easier to produce high quality learning sets. What great learning and professional development tools. Tagged well, these could go serve staff further.

I would love to see a conference host provide a post-conference wiki space for participants to post learnings (like you've done here) as a follow up to their conference/event? What a great way to harvest and seed!

[Michele Martin]

What a great idea, LaDonna, for conference hosts to provide some wiki space to post conference learnings! I'd love to see that, too. The big challenge, as you point out, is time--how to get people to take the time to do this? That's one I'm always working on an answer to. :-)