Turning buzz into honey
Conferences, seminars and other events can be inspirational and almost rejuvenating at the time. But a few days back in the “real” world can often cause the buzz to dissipate in the drone of mundane responsibilities.
While checking on the resources for the education.au seminar series via the tag eduausem2007, I came across an unrelated post by Beth Kanter (sorry, lost the thread and can’t seem to find the exact post) about a blog by Kathy Sierra (what a tangled web!) called “Why are we still going to conferences?”
I have to admit that I thought all the twittering, tweeting, live blogging and quick turn around podcasting made going to conferences rather passe. Why spend time and money and $6 on a coffee when you could wait a week or so and get it all online?
Kathy makes two fantastic points in her post: 1) the face to face interaction is still important and enriches the connections you make online and 2) the materials posted about conferences and events can and should (if the ideas are important enough) evolve into COPs so the discussions and buzz of an event can live on and really make a difference to people’s personal and professional lives.Â
By the by — I’m new to this, so please let me how to create proper trackbacks to blog posts so I can share the link love to greatest effect…
This is the challenge for professional organisations like CEGSA. Since my playing with RSS and so on, I have been able to involve myself with discussions broadly. I now have the ability to track new ideas and technologies making me independant of my employer and professional organisation in these matters. More recently the main gain from these conferences has been meeting others F2F.
I like the idea of these conferences being the trigger for building COPs. I wonder what needs to change in the structure of the ‘conference’ to facilitate achieving this?
PS – Great to meet you on Monday