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

[Mark Chen]

I agree with danah; Alex was amazingly awesome at improvising, being
energetic, and making a coherent point about adaptability and innovation!

Coincidentally, at last year's DML, the panelists of the mangle of play
session (which I organized) agreed to keep our talks to 5 minutes, letting
us have a full-room discussion for most of the time instead. I wanted us to
push at the traditional conference format even further and present each
others' work, but they wouldn't have it. :( It went very well, and as far as
I know the only complaint was that I swore (trying to frame it as an
informal space with my language) too much. :)

mark

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Elijah Wright <elijah.wright at gmail.com>wrote:

> I've heard "Powerpoint Karaoke" also referred to as "Battle Decks"
>
> --e
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 11:52 PM, danah boyd <aoir.z3z at danah.org> wrote:
> > 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
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-- 
Mark Chen | @mcdanger | markdangerchen.net
Post-Doctoral Scholar | Games Ethnographer
LIFE Center | UW Institute for Science and Math Education
This was sent from a PC with a full-size keyboard; misspellings and brevity
are entirely my fault.