Stephen Nold

Watered Down Technology Sessions
August 11, 2007

Is there a moratorium on technology sessions with substance? Having completed several weeks of conferences, I was surprised at the lack of substance in sessions that had promised some interesting topics. 

As a speaker, it is difficult to gauge and address the spectrum of technology expertise in an audience, but must we resort to speaking to the weakest link? Must a presentation suffer because one person selected a session that was beyond his knowledge level?

It seemed that these sessions were often a waste of time for a lot of people in the room. At one gathering, I could sense the frustration of the audience as intelligent ‘full-calorie’ questions were presented and Diet Coke responses were provided.

How to solve these problems? Offer multiple levels of tech education. Provide better descriptions of the content so attendees understand what they will be learning. Offer an audience the ability to roll up their sleeves and wrestle with topics that are difficult and worthy of discussion.

Isn’t this the point of education? Taking the audience into a place they’ve never been, something unfamiliar, something new? Without stepping above the lowest person’s proficiency level, we haven’t educated at all, but simply taken up the audience’s time to restate what they already knew.

Posted by Stephen Nold on August 11, 2007 | Comments (0)