At conferences, whether online or not, I have enjoyed a counter-intuitive strategy…
Rather than browsing for sessions of interest, I pick one that seems far from anything I know about. I have found there is always something I can learn from a topic I know nothing about (this worked in my undergraduate education too, hence as a science major taking an elective in Art History, which turned out to be one the best courses I had).
Yesterday I was browsing and saw Post COVID Classroom Management - why and what shall be done differently to be able to manage kids again. I mis-read the language, I thought I was entering a session in Spanish-- yes sometimes I watch sessions in languages I don’t speak, but the presenter was speaking in English.
Also, I am not involved in elementary education, but am interested in the longer term implications on the upheaval of education over the last 2 years-- what happens in 10, 12 years when the elementary students enter higher education?
The other thing was when I got to the room, I was one of two attendees. Now we may always want a good sized audience.
Yet.
At one of my first conferences in the 1990s I walked into a room, and found I was the only attendee! The presenter seemed hesitant to present, but I wanted to listen. So rather than do a formal presentation, we had more of a conversation.
Years later, I wish more presentations were like this. When I am seeing screens of slides being narrated, it feels like this is all stuff I could read/watch on my own.
So in this OEweek session hosted by Oldiko Gyori, she was sharing parenting strategies aimed at addressing student behavior in/after the pandemic shutdowns (available from her web site, which is in Hungarian but Google translates as “Coaching Based Tools in Parenting”).
What was valuable is the other audience participant was an elementary teacher (I forget where she was based, but that does not matter), but it was obvious this conversation and topic were extremely relevant.
There was helpful classroom tools and strategies shared. Yet it reinforces my awareness/worry about how little we know about what the long term impact of the pandemic will be on us as a society.
But my takeaway is that we know the learning is not a knowledge transfer process (filling buckets with content), I think we need to factor that more into our conference activities- we seem still very presentation (aka content) focused. I find the conversational, discussion approach is more valuable… but that is for me.