Gearing Up For Learning Live

A few months ago Don Taylor  asked me to facilitate a session at the IITT’s Learning Live conference, a request that (as always) I jumped at  for a number of reasons; there are the obvious ones:

An opportunity to meet up with colleuages who I have only ever interacted with onlineTo meet new people and further enhance my networkTo attend (for free!) some fantastic looking sessions facilitated both by people I know, trust and respect as well as some people who I do not (yet) knowTo showcase my skills amongst the wider industryBut there is an additional reason that may not be obvious and may not be everybody’s ‘raison detre’ for speaking at conferences and workshops and it is this
It challenges me to ‘do‘ and ‘be‘ something different. As regular readers will know the opportunities for me to show my passion and interest in this area are restricted within my organisation so any opportunity to do so to a like-minded group of people is not only seized upon, but I guess it also acts as a testing ground for all the things that I am unable to do within my normal working day.Not only do I want the content of the session to resonate with the attendees who have (very often) paid good money to attend these conferences, but I also want the audience to leave with some additional ideas as to how to facilitate sessions and workshops in a different manner, a ‘meta’ session within a session if you like. I always find that a reliable way of doing this is to add a great deal of interactivity within the session and in particular within the navigation of the session. Now this can be a little tricky to do as you are essentially stepping away from the linear type of presentation that we all know, that is easier to put together and to a large degree is ‘safe’. I have in the past even managed to tell a story using a non linear approach and allowing the audience to choose wether they wanted the beginning, middle or end bit and in what order – and it worked!!!For Learning Live I have once again chosen to take a non linear to the session but this time I have decided (or as I have never done this before it may be accurate to say ‘gambled’) to take the navigation  off the screen as I have previously done and bring it physically into the classroom, but to then take any decision that the audience makes and put it back onto the screen……  Well actually it isn’t and if you’re attending my session at Leaning Live then you’ll see (fingers crossed) how it all works – who knows it may give you some ideas in the future???As a little clue as to how I’m going to work the navigation aspect here is a short video that I have made to ‘set up’ my forthcoming session

See you in Brum?

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