Media: JohnnieMoore on Getting away from Boring Conferences

You may or may not be following the occasional article on UN that considers what makes a good academic/learned event. I guess I consider event design to be worthy of notice in the context of writing about endless events on user-centred design...

And so does Johnnie Moore. His "Unconferencing" podcast (linked below) is a discussion between himself and some choice others about getting away from 'unsatisfying conferences where the audience is often bored, towards much more engaging learning events'.

An example of the conversation that you can listen to on his blog: 'Chris: "Conferences offer these amazing opportunities to link people who are in the room, and we rarely discover that kind of interaction except randomly and through coffee breaks... and that's a shame... and there's no reason for it." We have the means to make things better. Chris goes on to describe conference tools to help set up learning journeys for people in conferences, to really bring people's awareness to the fact this could be a quest for them.'

Associated Link: JohnnieMoore: Unconferencing

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HCI for Community and International Development
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Caroline's Corner: Usability of Content is Plain Language
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An exciting thing happened in the USA on 14th April 2008. It didn't quite manage to make it onto the national news - that day, we were mostly hearing about the Pope's visit to the USA. Any ideas? Any clue from my title? Give up?

HP Labs opens doors to Academia
Source: VNUNet, 10 May 2008
 
HP has unveiled an initiative allowing academic institutions to collaborate with HP Labs in joint research through an open and competitive process.

Email: is it time to get some Training?
Source: UN, 9 May 2008
 
How hard can it be? Apparently lack of email training is costing employers dearly.

Book Review: Mental Models by Indi Young
Source: UN, 8 May 2008
 
A practical, readable and relevant account of key processes in the vital task of researching, building and applying mental models to product design.

CHI '08: What makes a really Great Designer?
Source: System Concepts, 7 May 2008
 
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Source: UN, 5 May 2008
 
BSI and Magus have released Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 124 to help organisations manage website standards efficiently and harness their full potential.