The form of the forum
This third day of the Berkman conference is dedicated to four tracks of group discussions about this and that. This is clearly a better format than the panels and speakers we had yesterday. (See Jeff Jarvis on the same point.) As one particularly articulate guy said this morning, “Our panelists suck!” No matter how smart they are, most have failed to adequately prepare. It's hard to speak off the cuff and well. And the presentations haven't been mapped to one another — there's X, and then Y, and then an off-topic Z.
It may be, however, that this crowd is impatient with anyone talking at the front of the room. We're willing to listen for, oh, maybe 10 minutes — at the most. But after that we want to hear from other people in the room. We're enjoying the IRC back-channel, we're reading email — we're all over the place.
Maybe some of this is just “conference ADD” — another catchy phrase. We're able to scan text so quickly now, reading a zillion blog feeds, deleting email at a glance, that a voice is just too slow and mono.
Theater in the round — that's what we're willing to engage in, as long as part of the theater is Us. This has deep implications for classroom learning. Focusing by doing, by creating and editing, may be a more powerful way of learning than listening to the front of the room. Is this too individual-centric? Perhaps.
Attention is more expensive than it used to be.
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I just came here from the buzz machine.
He was talking about the “death of the lecture.” One can replace “lecturer” with “panel member.”
Here's what I said about the buzz machine post:
Though I have a passion for the format of speeches and lectures, they are torture when you, or worse, the lecturer, are not interested.
The internet, I expect, will play an important role in this “death of the lecture” in bringing video lectures on demand.
What's really happening is the “death of” time and space.
This is what has motivated me to create Free Speeches: the goal of having many video speakers that talk about interesting things all accessible any time of day from anywhere in the world, for free.