A couple of weeks ago I presented my first Pecha Kucha, at the Informatology unConference. According to Wikipedia, "an unConference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered on a theme or purpose. The term has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations." I'm not sure if this session really qualified to be called an unConference, as it consisted entirely of pre-scheduled Pecha Kucha presentations, which are about as structured, pre-prepared and one-way as any format I can imagine. But, to be fair to Informatology, who try as hard as anyone to break the mould, any attendee could have put themselves forward to deliver a presentation and some very interesting characters did; apart from myself, there was Charles Jennings, Mark Bethelemey, John Ingham, Leon Benjamin, Karyn Romeis and Patrick Dunn.
Mark Bethelemy summarised the situation nicely in his post Ideas for an unConference process. He suggests that, instead of using Pecha Kucha as the content of an unConference, it would act better as a stimulus:
- Capture the Pecha Kucha presentations and make them available online.
- Use a forum or social network to discuss before the event.
- Follow up with more free-form discussions at the event itself.
I've made my Pecha Kucha - Enjoyable E-learning: is it an oxymoron? - available as a YouTube video, where the condensed format works well. But for those who want the opportunity to explore the ideas live and face-to-face, I will be delivering two less chronologically-constrained presentations of the same content in the next fortnight:
Learning Poool Public Sector Learning Conference 2010, London, May 12 (that's tomorrow!)
The Second European Articulate Conference, Leeds, May 17
I'm delighted to learn that you chose our informatology unconference to break your Pecha Kucha duck!
ReplyDeleteThis was our first unconference.
It benefited from great content presented at speed; but it suffered from insufficient time for conversation. I will remedy this for next time.
I agree that it would be great to enable presentations to be viewed and voted upon ahead of time. But I would be uneasy to rely on this in case many presenters would not submit their slides until the day of the event (as happened this time), and many attendees would not make time to view them.
Any thoughts?
Stephen
I've subsequently learned that Jane Hart and Barry Sampson have got their unConference under way. It's called Learning Camp 2010, and it takes place on July 10th in London (and only costs £49) - http://www.london2010.learningcamp.org
ReplyDeleteStephen. If you really can't get the discussion going in advance, I would schedule at least 20 mins inbetween each PK presentation for discussion.
ReplyDeleteHI
ReplyDeleteThis is my last full day in Buenos Aires. I'll miss this city, its chaos of 11 million people swirling around, building, growing, shaping, creating, living, surviving, and hanging on. As always, I won't know what I've learned for weeks, even months. As always, my last full day was my fullest, as seen through these striking photos of La Boca and the Riachuelo shipyards. Take a slide show view of my wandering today, and see the world, briefly, through my eyes. Stephen Downes,
A nice post
I saw your Pecha Kucha and it was good. But I've noticed that some suffer from over-scripting - a kind a 'PK anxiety' that I haven't seen since small groups of students stood up and delivered alternating sentences of their group work. Maybe the slides should be displayed randomly - or maybe only for periods which average twenty seconds. Or maybe a firework should be lit at the beginning of the presentation...
ReplyDelete