[Air-L] i have to share.... [aka: why we need to introduce fun talks to our conferences]

[danah boyd]

At the Digital Media & Learning conference, we decided to host Ignite talks (5 minutes, slides auto-forward).  One of our speakers failed to show up (which we later learned was because he was ill).  Lacking a presenter and not wanting to redo our deck last-minute, we asked Alex Halavais to do Powerpoint Karaoke.  In short, Alex was asked to jump on stage and give an impromptu talk to a set of slides that he had never seen before.  While the entire talk wasn't captured on film, a decent amount of it was: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqmJoIS29F4

As we all know, Alex is a lovable huggable and HYSTERICAL person so I spent the entire five minutes crying with laughter.

Now... why am I telling you this other than to embarrass Alex?  Ignite talks were the highlight of the conference.  And Alex's rendition of one topped all charts.  People were excited and energized. Shaking up the speaking structure radically changed the tenor of the conference.  I know many of you out there are planning conferences (including AOIR).  Can I strongly encourage you to shake it up some?  I mean, we're academics... we all love to give long drawn out talks that go 10 minutes over the allotted time.  But constraints have value.  And they add value.  They force people to really bring energy to the table and think differently about how they present information.  And Ignite talks get an audience super engaged, giving them a sampler of awesome research.  And even when they don't like one talk, they just wait 5 minutes and have a new talk to munch on.  

If anyone wants to think about adding a new format to their conference, I'm happy to give a run-down of what we did at DML.  But please, for the fun of all (and to contribute to my ongoing effort to turn Alex into a full-fledged improv comedian), can I encourage y'all to consider adding Ignite (or Powerpoint Karaoke) to the schedule?  <grin>

danah