For many years I have secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) fumed at conference speakers whose main role seems to be entertainment rather than enlightenment. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy a good "show" as much as the next person, but there does come a point when I start to think, "Is there any substance in any of this?"
But having watched a few presentations recently via the web, I have to say that I think the fault lies not so much with the speakers, but with the uncritical audiences that indulge them.
If a conference is good, there is definitely a fantastic feel-good factor that comes from the "buzz". There is also the great feeling that comes from meeting people whom you have previously known only in the virtual world. I have written about these things already. However, I think there is a danger that the euphoria can blow away any semblance of (professional) sanity. Indeed, some such gatherings remind me of a large meeting I attended many years ago extolling the advantages of selling a particular range of cleaning products -- and that meeting reminded me of a revivalist religious meeting. The thing is, though, the sort of faith and joy in evidence at a religious gathering is one thing, but to my mind is totally out of place at what is supposed to be an educational event.
What happens when people suspend their critical faculties whilst they are basking in the glow of a charismatic presenter or even one that is not innately charismatic but knows how to work the crowd? It is that they forget to ask that all-important question: so what?
Here are some cases in point:
"My kids' work has been viewed 20 million times and had 15,000 comments."
So what? Unless the comments are critical they will not help the student progress, and so are all but useless.
"We collaborated on this presentation whilst I was floating on a lido in a swimming pool in Australia and my partner was eating a cheese sandwich in a cafe in Chicago."
So what? I was doing that 10 years ago. I agree that it is amazing: I'm amazed by it all the time. But I'm still not sure why it's important for me to know those details.
In fact, there are some presentations I've watched recently, and that I attended at NECC, in which the speaker said absolutely nothing that I could, as the current UK jargon goes, take away with me.
By contrast, I've attended events recently (a Naace think tank on building schools for the future and a Westminster forum event on PR and journalism) which, by some standards, would be considered very boring. No razzmatazz, no "gurus", and very short presentations. Yet they were extremely good because they afforded a chance to hear experts (by qualification or experience) give their views about key issues.
Members of a critical audience are, I think, characterised as follows:
- They are interested in attending a talk because of the topic rather than the speaker.
- They regard good entertainment skills as a bonus rather than the main point of being in the session.
- They ask themselves, if not the presenter, difficult questions, like "So what?" and "How can I use this information?"
- They consciously consider how what they are hearing chimes with their own experience -- and if it doesn't, they do not dismiss their own experience.
- They feel frustrated when a presenter has spent 45 minutes telling them what could have been summarised in half a dozen bullet points.
Taking that last point, it explains why for several years now I have liked the idea of very short presentations, like two minutes. A bit like the spoken equivalent of Twitter, which affords you 140 characters in which to express yourself. When I was asked to present at the Westminster Forum some time ago on the skills gap in the UK, I was given 4 minutes in which to present my views. It took me a day and a half to prepare it, because saying everything you want to say in 4 minutes is hard -- but it can be done. The benefit for the people listening is that they get the nub of the issue very succinctly and very quickly.
In my opinion, if conference presentations are superficial and more or less pointless, it is because the audience is prepared to indulge the speakers. As Cassias said in Julius Caesar,
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
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