| 20 Observational Recommendations From Being Back At Conferences
April 4, 2022
1) Ban the camel hair jacket for men at conferences. (Thank goodness, I didn't decide to go with mine.)
2) Hand out really cool swag that diminishes spreading of virus.
3) Speak up, even if you have a microphone.
4) Don't place wall designs that look like my beat-up furnace filter behind speakers. Especially when speaker is not following #3.
5) Pump us up to be innovative and revolutionary in the keynote sessions.
6) Beat the revolution out of us in the concurrent sessions.
7) Have me leave with lots of good books to check out: I Won't Learn From You; Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers; The Boy Who Was Raised A Dog; Bowling Alone; The Great Upheaval.
8) Employ the practices of audience engagement that our industry preaches. Don't read your PowerPoint. When you do, you make me want to go across the street and jump from one of the balconies of the 50-story apartment building.
9) Remind people that ambiguity can be o.k. Boy, academics can be the worst for wanting definitive answers.
10) Give me great material to take back to my job: "digital native students are being taught by digital immigrant faculty at analog colleges."1 Mic drop material.
11) Have me travel two hours to see the great work being done by faculty as close as Battle Creek.
12) Give me great dinner options, even if the pizza is now only take-out.
13) Re-connect me with colleagues I haven't seen in 12 years.
14) Remind me that those colleagues and I can still use standards for descriptions like "bat-shit crazy" that go back those 12 years.
15) Give me time to socialize with the colleagues whom I have only been seeing in Zoom meetings for over two years.
16) Up the quality of the food even within the conference. Did we bank all that money from two+ years of not conferencing?
17) Don't bring back the vendors. Sorry, I just have to admit, I didn't miss you all this year.
18) Um, make SPEE101, um, a lifelong, um, learning, um, credential. Um, yeah, that's my, um, point.
19) Honestly, don't let me see firetrucks from outside my 19th floor window.
20) Force me to get away from my home campus, even if it is Spring Break and probably really dead. Might as well be vacation.
1Arthur Levine.
|
