From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Wed Sep 29 1999 - 16:38:19 MDT
Thinking further about my earlier post on how boring and useless
live debates were and how one might improve on them, it occurred
to me that the same might be done for conference presentations to
make them more useful and entertaining.
Here's the setup: The speaker, instead of being required to
create a 60- or 90-minute presentation, creates both a 10-minute
presentation and a more detailed but unconstrained paper with
more details on the same topic. This is published before the
conference on the web where all attendees can see it, mail the
author comments and questions, etc. At the conference proper,
the speaker hands out the latest copy of this paper (or perhaps
it is part of a for-sale program), gives eir 10-minute overview,
and spends the rest of the allotted time on Q&A or otherwise
interacting with the audience. This is the great value of most
speakers anyway: most are experts in a field, not orators, so
why waste their valuable time on oration and short-change the
always popular audience Q&A? If it's a topic that organizers
fear won't generate an hour of audience Q&A (I've never seen a
topic like that but I suppose we should plan for it) they can
designate someone ahead of time who has read the paper and who
has interest in the topic to ask questions and stimulate
discussion after the short presentation.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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