Re-imagining the Conference

Ditch the classroom format; tech like Apple Vision can help

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In December of 2001, I wrote,

I can imagine a world in which everyone spends several hours a day wearing a headset.

No, I did not anticipate Apple Vision 20 years early. I did not even anticipate the iPhone. But I did have some ideas for new experiences that could be enabled by headsets. For example,

With a headset at a conference, you could attend a session but flip your tuner to other competing sessions. Using this approach, you could try to pick the best session or even try to keep up with more than one session at a time.

The Dancing Example

I just came back from an Israeli dance camp, held in upstate New York. The camp was a tribute to Moshe Eskayo, the recently-deceased visionary who formulated and implemented the first dance camps, starting in the 1970s.

Before video recording became inexpensive, the dance camp was the most effective way to get new dances introduced to a wide audience: dance teachers would attend the camp, learn the dances, and then teach them in local sessions. When video emerged, starting with video cassette recorders and culminating in YouTube, the main rationale for camps seemed to go away.

Then came the pandemic, which shut down local dance sessions for two years, splitting the dance community. Some dancers kept up on Zoom, but others could not stand dancing alone in front of a screen. When live sessions resumed, those of us who had kept up had established connections to dancers who lived far away. Many of those who had not kept up on Zoom dropped out, discouraged by all of the new dances that they had not learned. Leaders of regular sessions could not revive them.

But dance camps have come back in a big way. Camps allow those of us who have been dancing together remotely to join in person. While regular local sessions have lost their energy or folded altogether, the camps are now the most satisfying way to experience dancing in person.

Organizers are starting to realize that camps should be more about bringing dancers together, less about teaching new dances. Camps can now draw people based on their “brand,” without promising lots of teaching.

New Needs for Conferences: Higher Education and Business

Higher education is stuck in a wasteful, expensive model. Everyone knows that, in theory, learning could be made more efficient using computer technology, but so far it has not worked.

What I have proposed is a compromise between fully remote learning and the old-fashioned campus model. I suggest that teachers and students only meet in person at periodic conferences. Then they can go into remote mode to learn using computers, AI, and video conferencing.

One key to getting this model to work is to design an effective conference. I have never liked the standard conference format, in which a session is like a classroom, with an audience forced to listen to either a single speaker or a panel of speakers.

Instead, students and teachers need formats in which they can exchange ideas. Sessions need to allow broad participation. Above all, conferences also must include social events and activities that enable people to get to know one another.

In business, I think that remote work can have important advantages. But employees do need to bond together in person. Periodic conferences could serve that purpose.

The classroom format is also a bad use of time at company conferences. Employees need a combination of sessions for teams working on specific projects and sessions that encourage more socializing and informal communication across teams. The best format will vary by the nature of the business.

Headsets, revisited

Headsets, like Apple Vision, can play a role in a re-imagined conference. At a dance camp, you might use a headset to listen to someone give instructions during a dance. As it stands now, if you are trying to do a partner dance by copying another couple, that only works if you are lucky enough to be dancing next to a couple who knows that they are doing. Otherwise, it is the blind leading the blind. But with a headset, every couple could “dance next to” the most experienced couple in the room.

At an education or business conference, perhaps you could pay attention to a number of sessions at once. Chatbots could summarize multiple sessions for you in real time, and you could use a headset to jump into a session and make comments or ask questions.

A famous professor or business executive could be available for continuous Q&A. A chatbot would take most of the questions, but novel questions would be passed to the famous person. The famous person could engage an ordinary attendee of the conference for a while, and then hand the person over to a chatbot.

Instead of, or in addition to, planned sessions at a corporate conference, teams could form sessions on the fly, as at an unconference. Apps on headsets could facilitate this.

If I were a college president or a CEO, I would lean in to the latest technologies for learning and communication. I believe that conferences can play a big role, but we need to experiment with new conference formats and activities.