Social Conference Tools - Expect Poor Results

I saw a post by David Warlick - Reaching Out With Your Conference where he suggests that conference organizers should:

• 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.

A lot of these I think are really good ideas in theory and I'm constantly waiting for them to take off. Actually, I'm continually trying to figure out how to make conferences more effective use of time. And I've actually talked about this quite in posts such as:

• More on Better Conferences
• Making the Most of Attending a Conference - Ideas Needed
• Better Conferences
• Better Conferences - Response Needed
• More posts on Conferences

I think there are some really good ideas in David's post and in some of these other posts. And, I've been happy to see various conferences about some of these practices - and I encourage them to keep it up.

However, ...

My basic feeling is that there's a fundamental flaw in all of these ideas that lead to poor results. The flaw is that it appears that people are quite willing to attend conferences without any up-front effort, back-end effort and probably the minimum effort during the conference. I posted how to Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee, but the requirement is to do some work to figure out what you really are trying to get out of the conference. It takes some time (but not a lot). Do attendees do this? It's rare.

In addition to the lack of effort, there's another big problem - lack of skills and experience. I've questioned before Conference Networking Tools - Do They Work?
and the answer is that most of these tools are not very good. I've recently tried to use the one associated with the ASTD conference. It's not going to help me connect with people. I feel I'm relatively adept at networking via online tools, and have talked about how I use tools ahead of events Secret for Networking at Events - Prenetworking it's still really tough.

Based on what I've seen, I question whether it makes much sense for organizers to spend time on these things.

Let me try to summarize - these ideas are great, but they are social solutions that require participation and we don't get participation because of lack of effort and lack of skills.

Blog Learning

Something I (probably too often) talk about is learning via a blog. It certainly is a great lens to have in viewing the world. It puts you into a learning mode. It naturally builds a network of learning cohorts. Simply put, it's a wonderful learning tool.

But what struck me recently is how great the feedback and interaction can be. In other words, I'm learning via blog comments and blog posts by other bloggers - likely much more than anyone reading the blog itself.

In some cases, I've set out with a specific information need and asking for input:

• Where to Find Old Comic?
• Move to Front?
• Small Group Breakout Sessions at Conferences?

On the last of these, I was steered away from a particular approach to a session. This was great learning. Come to find out, people don't like those small break out sessions at most conferences either. I've seen them so often, I just assumed I should be doing them also. Blog learning!

In many cases, I post my thoughts and someone comes in to correct me or redirect my thinking. Take a look at:

• eLearning Design and Development Training Course
• Bad Course on Instructional Design

I started with a kind of inquiry and found myself realizing that one of the citations I gave was an example of a badly designed course teaching about instructional design.

But one of the best kinds of examples comes out of discussions such as in the following:

• Life is an Open Book Test
• Life is Mostly an Open Book Test

I originally posted a thought. Then people came in to clarify it and redirect my thinking. I was originally thinking of a pretty limited case - looking up a phone number. How that's changed. And I may still use that. But consider how rich the problem is as described by a comment over the weekend:

I'm running through the same questions in regards to a certification desk of help desk technicians in my office. What is more valuable to the company - a technician that knows the answers, or a technician that knows how to look up the anwers. I'm coming to the point where I am leaning in both directions, and it's kind of making me angry internally for not being able to come to a conclusion.

One one hand - a person who knows the answer immediately sounds more professional (gives a sense of knowledge when speaking to the customer), and resolves problems more quickly.

On the other - a person who knows how to look something up is generally more capable of finding the correct answer, at the expense of a) time spent looking up the correct answer and b) looking like they do not know anything because they constantly need to go for help.

I have a similar issue when it comes down to people who 'understand' the material vs people who look up the answers. I can train almost anyone to fetch an answer from a database, but what is more valuable - a person who truly understands the material and understands why doing action A leads to result B, or person who looks up action A, gets result B, and then has to go back to the answer book to find next step C?

My superiors think that people who can answer scripted questions are more valuable to my industry, yet they consistently rely on people who understand the theory of problem resolution to actually fix anything important. I think that having 2 people who are able to think with logic and resolve issues correctly beats 5 people who can only read from a script.

How do I figure out what is the best situation and how do I convey this to managemnt.

Incredible insight. It's not nearly that simple as the phone number example. And I completely understand what Alan (the commenter) is saying here. And certainly, waiting for someone to look up the answer or finding out that they need to look it up can seem wrong. And not knowing why something is right worries me as well. Certainly, I would worry about hiring someone who always looked up answers and didn't seem to "know" anything.

Blog Learning!

I'm not claiming this is anything new (see Blogging for Learning and Networking) but the comment this weekend gave me new appreciation of the value proposition.

Larger LMS Audience Means Lower Satisfaction

I just pulled a report as part of an LMS Evaluation and saw an interesting pattern:



The pattern shows that the larger the audience the lower the satisfaction scores. My guess is that Learning Management Systems that target enterprise solutions and larger audiences will come out lower in LMS Satisfaction surveys.

Other posts around Learning Management Systems:

• LMS Selection Presentation
  
• LMS Team Size and Time
• LMS RFP
• LMS Selection Presentation Reformulated
  
• LMS Selection Team and Stakeholders
• LMS Selection Process
• Learning Management Systems (LMS) Gotchas
  

Bad Course on Instructional Design

I just posted about eLearning Design and Development Training Course listing two examples of courses that talked about instructional design for eLearning. Whoops. I should have looked more closely.

The course from MyUdutu ( http://publish.myudutu.com/published/courses/140/Course867/v2007_5_9_15_41_...)
may talk about it, but it is a classic example of what not to do in eLearning. So while it talks about Instructional Design - it hardly is something to review.

As Chris pointed out in a comment and I talked about in Audio Narration vs. On-Screen Text
you should never have voice-over that's the same as the text on the page. That's just annoying and slows you down.

Other bad aspects included having choppy narration (people are not very forgiving around narration and other audio). Further, there was no audio control to let you know what's going on with the audio.

Later in the course, they used narration much better with a graphic. Still, this probably should not have been a course to point people to. Oh good, it looks like other suggestions are coming in.

eLearning Design and Development Training Course

Someone on LinkedIn asked:

Can anyone recommend a really good e-learning design/development training course?

This is for a colleague who is new to instructional design & development so something that covers the basics at an introductory level would be best. Thanks!

The responses pointed me to a couple of resources I hadn't seen before:

• MyUdutu
  

A simple course that describes some basic principles of online training course design, and will serve as a template for a simple course if you copy it and substitute your own content.

http://publish.myudutu.com/published/courses/140/Course867/v2007_5_9_15_41_...

• RPI

An introduction to instructional design and course development and guidance on selecting the right design and development tools.

http://www.rpi.edu/coursedevelopers/DesigningInstruction/DI_index.htm

I know that I've seen others.

What else is out there?