The best two sessions you described sound like they were teaching in a Harkness Method environment. We could all go a LONG way in teaching our students how to learn if we adopted some Socratic and Harkness teaching styles. Too bad we cannot do that in a conference preso. Or can we?

I think the real issue here is how we issue criticism. I don’t have any problem with anyone’s criticism of my work so long as the criticism is a) clear and b) actionable. Under those two conditions, it doesn’t matter to me how high someone’s expectations are. I may regret not having more hours in the day to assimilate that criticism but I’d rather have more to work on not less.

For example, Tom Hoffman disagrees with my writing 90% of the time. His only appeal to me is that he (usually) outlines his criticism with clear writing and actionable follow-up, criticism that is in unfortunately short supply. cf. Darren Draper who, at one point, called my writing “pointless blather” without qualifying that with any specific disagreement or follow-up. I hope that my criticism falls into the first category more often than the second.

Go out RIGHT NOW and get Nancy Duarte’s book
Slide:ology

Obviously you can wedge in a few tips for the first-timers, but that intro-level stuff was the rule and not the exception in the sessions I attended at ILC.

Mike, the best two sessions I attended at the only two conferences I have attended in the last year both proposed sending students home with the textbook or a podcast to learn on their own and then, the following day, class time was spent dealing with the unGoogleables: meaty problems, complicated labs, that sort of thing.

It’s compelling. Here is one session summary.

As a presenter, I find that if your synopsis is very clear, there won’t be as many false expectations. I’ve done a couple of sessions on the basics of multimedia production, and I’ve had questions like how to select multiple cells in a table in Dreamweaver… fortunately, everyone in the session was on the same wavelength (or at least if they weren’t, they didn’t say anything – I had pretty positive feedback).

Alice, I like the idea of providing your own evaluation for your session. ILC08 was the first conference at which I have presented where there were no evaluation forms. I live off feedback and I am disappointed not to have more than the few comments and emails I received over the weekend.

Another thing amazing me, there were NO eval forms at ILC for concurrent presenters, so I only have ONE person who used my online eval form at my training blog (http://mercertraining.edublogs.org/)

This is JUST WRONG! I have one person, who gave me a very high rating, except for organization which is “okay” I can’t figure this out (which is a comment on my poll, not on the person responding, thank god she did), and an “n” of 1 is way too small. Maybe I should bribe folks with chocolate, I don’t know?