Playing With Possibilities

Let's say you need to learn something. How might you go about it? j You could search online, culling your way through Web sites, blogs, podcasts, and other free information sources. Perhaps you would con- tact colleagues to see if they might be potential knowledge sources. Hopefully you have a few "mavens" in your professional network, a term Malcolm Gladwell coined in The Tipping Point to refer to individuals who are sought out for the vast amount of information they seem to accumulate.

Attending a training seminar or a conference on the topic you seek is a good bet. You might even register for a college course. Buying a book on the subject is another option. And if you really possess the DIY gene, you might do some reading on your own and then try to implement your new-found information. For even more insight, you might hire a personal tutor or coach for some on-the-job training.

Here's the big question: How many of these options are readily available at your meetings?

Can a participant get personal coaching on a topic? How current and well stocked is your bookstore or resource display? Are ample Internet stations available with bookmarked sites related to your conference content to encourage further exploration? How about audio stations that give participants the opportunity to listen to podcasts made by your speakers?

You might already plan meetings for people who learn in different ways, what Howard Gardner describes as multiple intelligences in his classic book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Yet most of our conference design and individual session formats have not truly taken these different ways of learning into account. We are now attracting meeting attendees from the tech-savvy Millennial generation, who have caused our educational institutions to rethink how they facilitate learning. We would be wise to do the same for how we design meetings.

Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, suggests that learning styles in this new generation are characterized by:

• fluency in multiple media and in simulation-based virtual settings
• communal learning involving diverse, tacit, situated experience, with knowledge distributed across a community and a context as well as within an individual
• a balance among experiential learning, guided mentoring, and collective reflection
• expression through non-linear, associational webs of representations
• co-design of learning experiences personalized to individual needs and preferences.

He suggests this shift will cause faculty (think meeting planners and conference speakers) to become more capable in co-design, co-instruction, and guided learning experiences. When you are used to customizing how you consume popular media (blogs, Web sites, MP3 files) and your exploration of new content is guided by peer recommendation, you will expect to be able to co-create your conference learning experience to some extent. In other words, learning in the future increasingly will involve breaking down the traditional separation between teacher/student, meeting planner/participant.

It is not going to happen overnight, and it will not be the preferred option for all conference attendees. But for a significant group, this type of meeting experience will become the reason why one professional development option is chosen over another. We need to start playing with the possibilities and learn what works - while the risks and expectations are still low.

Jeffrey Cufaude is a former higher education administrator, meeting planner, and association executive. He currently writes, speaks, and facilitates on a variety of individual and organizational leadership issues.

Learn more about his work at www.ideaarchitects.org. To submit topic ideas and feedback on the Leading Learning column, e-mail jeffrey@ideaarchitects.org. Convene's Leading Learning series is sponsored by AVW TELAV. Visit its Web site at www.avwtelav.com.