Given the fact that nothing looks sexier than a giant plasma screen showing delegates what's going on at a conference, why would anyone even consider having a paper bulletin?At the recent Naace conference, delegates were kept updated at the start and end of keynote sessions, with some information projected onto a giant screen and some of it announced. So what would be the advantage of having updates on paper?
By 'paper updates' I mean a daily bulletin or newsletter, perhaps only one side of paper. I think there are 8 advantages of producing them.
1. Not everyone can get to keynotes. So, if you don't manage to get to a keynote, and at the end of it something essential is said, how would you find out?
2. If the bulletin producers can get suitably organised (and don't mind getting up early), delegates could pick up their bulletin first thing in the morning and read it over breakfast if they wanted to.
3. With a paper bulletin, you don't have to read it all at once. When announcements are made, you have either remember them or write them all down; a paper bulletin saves you the trouble.
4. A paper bulletin provides a very handy way of highlighting, or reminding delegates of, key events or other things. "Remember to pick up your goody bag straight after lunch.", or "The afternoon sessions start at 1:30 today."
5. A paper bulletin can report on things which would simply be too inappropriate or irrelevant to announce at the end of a keynote. For example, there might be included a snippet like "Overheard at lunch yesterday...".
6. That's another thing about paper bulletins: they allow you to interact with and engage delegates in different ways from announcements. For example, you can run a competition or include a themed crossword.
7. I recently lamented the absence of youngsters from most conferences I attend. One way of engaging young people would be to invite students in from a local school to run the conference press office and produce the daily bulletin. Sure, it would take a lot of organising and negotiating and paying attention to health and safety issues, but think of what a fantastic work-related learning experience this could be. They would be working with and for a real audience, with hard and fast deadlines, and be using technology to produce the bulletins and using teamwork, self-management and collaborative skills too.Look at the list of personal learning and thinking skills, and the specifications for Functional Skills, and see how many boxes would be ticked over the course of just a few days.
8. Nobody could ever accuse me of not being passionate about technology -- my wife jokes that if anyone is stumped about what to buy me for my birthday all they need do is look for something which has a plug on it or takes batteries -- but there is something about a daily bulletin that lends an air of excitement to the proceedings in way which, frankly, computer-based updates don't.
When I attended the NECC 2006 conference a few years ago, there was a daily Conference newsletter available first thing in the morning despite for each delegate, despite their being over 13,000 of us. Until relatively recently, the Naace conference used to have daily bulletins. They have gone the way of the dodo, and in my opinion that's a mistake. We love new technology, but there is still a place for the old.
This is #10 in a series of 25 reflections on the Naace 2009 Conference.
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