Twitter has become a pretty great tool to help with socializing at conferences. Here are a few of the things we've been doing Twitter as Social Chat At both DevLearn and TechKnowledge , we created a hashtag and created a specific Twitter account that was the hub.... Through twitter search you can see the various conversations going on. DevLearn was more successful because of the free Wifi. You can find various relevant posts via Twitter at DevLearn . The overall effect is a nice backchannel, constant conversation with attendees.

2009 will be the year when we realize that we should be justifying any in-person training. #11 - Micro Virtual Conferences The move towards acceptance of virtual classroom means ... acceptance of online conferences ... we won't have time to go for several days ... in between a full online conference and something that's a few sessions. Already this year, I'm seeing a lot of this ... And I think there's a fairly substantial implication for workplace learning organizations...

I saw a post by David Warlick - Reaching Out With Your Conference where he suggests that conference organizers should: Consider a social network for your conference. Although I remain skeptical about social networks, social networking is essential, and a few conferences have made brilliant use of them. Give presenters a wiki page to spread out their session descriptions, post presentation commercials, and generate discussion through the commenting feature.

Conferences have been on my mind quite a bit lately. I will be presenting a session on mobile learning at the Corporate University Summit in a couple weeks in Chicago, and I’m getting ready to submit a proposal or two for DevLearn . So you can see why I was pleasantly surprised today when I ran across an excellent blog post on how to get the most out of a conference.

IF..that is..the conference organizers have figured out some way to supply WiFi to the audience. WHICH THEY SHOULD!!!! Now here's the thing. I figure its going to hard enough for presenters to adapt to a living, breathing back channel - like that smoke monster from LOST - but what about trainers? Teachers? Anybody up for figuring out how a vibrant backchannel figures into instructional design?

ASTD TechKnowledge 2008 is coming soon in San Antonio. Now that it's less than a month away, I thought I'd sit down and try to do some conference planning. To help me prepare, I went back to a few previous posts on related topics...

As way of introduction to this topic, let me start with a typical scenario that you will recognize if you've ever attended a professional conference... It's noon and you are heading into the lunch area. The conference organizer has put signs in the middle of each table with a topic. One of the topics is LMS and there's a seat available, so you sit down. You introduce yourself to the people sitting to your left and right.

I'm helping George Siemens to organize a free, online conference - Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations , Nov. 15 - 20, 2007. The conference will be held fully online (with live presentations and asynchronous discussions). There's an exceptional group of speakers/discussion leaders including: David Snowden Jay Cross Rebecca Stromeyer Richard Straub Clark Quinn Donald H.

Just read a great post by Clive Shepherd - Cutting the Pie - where he discusses what the appropriate balance is at conferences. As you know creating Better Conferences is something that very much interests me. Check out that post, the poll results and the discussion for lots of ideas on how to make conferences better.

You may have seen them before and will likely remember their scatter plot: There are other applications aimed at helping you to network at conferences: CMC Central - Tradeshow Appointments , Eveni Meeting Matching ExpoMATCH , eXtreme Networking , Introplus , Leverage Software , NetworkingMatch , and PowerMingle.com.... Based on my personal results, I've not found a lot of value in these tools.