StigmergicWeb

Dave Winer explains What is an unconference? Here’s the pithy quote:

My guess is that if you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter, because they didn’t have the time to get nervous, to prepare PowerPoint slides, to make lists of things they must remember to say, or have overly grandiose ideas about how much recognition they are getting.

How absolutely true. With some exceptions, I’ve always found the conversations amongst the audience and with the presenter after a conference presentation are far more engaging than the presentation itself. An unconference is a nice technique for changing a presentation back into a meaningful dialogue. I also think that the change from a traditional presentation to an unconference is similar to the change from an instructivist approach to a connectivist approach in learning. Our classrooms should also be unconferences.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 10:21 and is filed under teaching, education, communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.