Tag Archives: conferences

What is a Conference Venue For?

My Day 1 #ALTC24 conference shoes, Black DM brogues embroidered with skulls, union jacks, and lightning bolts, against the backdrop of a striking hotel carpet.

Last year and earlier this year i wrote two different blog posts reflecting on aspects of conferences I would be attending, each of which I was also on the program committee for.  The most recent one was about OER24 in Cork, Ireland, and was a rumination on my relationship with the city, and how my experiences there made me excited for people who had never been in Cork to experience it for the first time,  In the first post, done for ALTC23 in Warwick, I was writing about what I thought conferences were for, and what my own personal journey through academic and academic-adjacent conferences meant for my own practices.  I presumed to give a bit of advice at the end.

“I think it takes multiple opportunities to engage before it’s possible to get to the point where you can move away from broadcasting and focus on engaging with, experiencing, building your network of people as the content of any given conference…

…If you are a first-timer at ALT-C, when you are there, I hope you think about what could be different the next time you attend.  I hope that you return, to be able to experience your own arc of development around conferences, connecting, and the balance between broadcast and engagement.”

Conferences require multiple modes of engagement from participants.

I think what is not often considered enough are the ways that the spaces conferences are set in can shape, facilitate, and hinder those modes of engagement.

This year, unlike any other year, ALTC was at a hotel.  Specifically, an airport hotel in Manchester.  Previous venues have been university locations, with the various kinds of conference activities spread across classrooms, lecture halls, atriums, and interstitial spaces such as mezzanines and lounges.  This year we had a pretty standard hotel conference set up.  I’ve been at conferences (especially large ones like the American Library Association and the American Anthropological Association) set in large hotels or conference centers, and I know that sometimes the logistics or size of the conference requires these corporate spaces as settings.

Doing meetings in conference hotels means that the connections and technology are set up for conferences as a default.  It means that you are guaranteed rooms for the delivery of your sessions, with plenty of chairs for attendees.  It means you know at least one room will be perfectly set up for large plenary sessions as well as (if necessary) a conference dinner.

But the contrast with past ALT conferences that had been at university campuses prompted me to think about what the University settings brought to the meetings that a corporate setup did not.

  • An opportunity for the university to act, alongside the organization, to  host the meeting.  In the past I have seen university presidents kick off the opening keynotes.  I’ve seen special venues used to great effect to showcase the physical plant of the University.  Specially set up classrooms for active learning, or maker spaces, or renovated (or very old and still amazing) library spaces can all contribute to the content of the conference, in their own way, by grounding the conference experience with local details.  
  • An opportunity for local staff to showcase their work to their colleagues coming to the meetings. I’ve seen local staff acting as helpers and moderators and facilitators at the meeting so that attendees were surrounded by people who knew where things were and why, and who were happy to tell you the history of it all (good and bad!).  It was also an opportunity for them to share their institutional practices with off-campus colleagues in a concrete way, not just in the delivery of their presentations in sessions.
  • An opportunity for the local community, not just the university, to be a part of the conference experience.  This is more “local color,” and also cafes, pubs, museums, restaurants, and parks can all serve as third spaces to conference session rooms and lecture halls, places for people to connect and also rest and recover before they have to connect some more.  Having access to more than just meeting rooms and conference center/hotel venues also accommodates the need for places that allow for varied modes of engagement, not just broadcasting of ideas via presentations.
  • In the case of ALTC23 and OER24, it was a chance for local teams to invite their academic colleagues to witness the conference, its content, and the network of people who constitute the conference community.  It’s an opportunity to make visible the professional identity of people who are often not visible enough in their own institutions.  

I get it, I do, there are financial reasons to locate events in places that are corporate and containable.  I also think that the loss of the kinds of things I describe above might not make the conference experience as rich, or as likely to encourage people to come again the following year.   

So if you are organizing a conference event, I would say it’s worth considering carefully:  what is a conference venue for?  I would recommend tying the answer to that question to what you think conferences themselves are for.  Conferences require not just spaces to fill, but meaningful places that are configured for people to be human in a variety of ways with each other. They are for people.  Just like Universities should be.

Digifest 2023

Bloomsbury daffodils the day before I flew home from London

I attended Digifest 2023, in Birmingham UK, and once again spent most of my time in the exhibit hall.  In years past (I’ve been attending Digifest since the first one, in 2014 when it was called the “Jisc Digital Festival”), it was because I was exhausted from presenting (either a workshop, a plenary address, or a research paper). But this year it was because I arrived the day before the event and was straight into work mode with jetlag. And, as always, while I enjoy some of the presentations, the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and make new ones is my priority. When I go to the same event over several years (as I did at anthropology meetings, and then in library contexts, and now in edtech ones), the time I can spend talking to people is the most precious part.  And what I have missed the most, over the last few years.

I want to capture just a couple of themes that I took away from the event this year.

In the main hall on Day 2, there was a graduate panel–recent graduates working at Jisc in rotations across the organization discussed their experiences and their expectations about working with the organization.  Each graduate expressed surprise at all of the different roles in Jisc, and also all of the various roles in universities beyond just lecturers.  The invisibility of the work should be concerning.  If we are going to be in a situation (as we are now) where students are told that their fees are paying for what they get at university, they should know about how all of the sausage is made.  Transparency is key to getting student awareness of the work that goes into their experiences.  And the work that might not be directly about students, but nonetheless is still part and parcel of the university.  Jisc provides and maintains crucial infrastructure (Janet, eduroam, content licensing).  Why is that a secret?  Is it that students “don’t need to know?”  Or, something else?  Are they worried that when something goes wrong, Jisc might get blamed instead of the university?  Couldn’t that be an incentive to improve on the work being done, rather than hide altogether? 

Conversations in the exhibit hall were never about the tech, but were about the human work of education. The human work isn’t quantifiable, doesn’t show up in rubrics or strategic plans or work plans or whatever, and Isn’t accounted for in teaching hours, or meeting minutes.  For example:

  • Assessment–that’s what ChatGPT made many of us think about again. All the things that many of us have been saying about assessment since before the pandemic (needs to be more authentic and flexible) and then during the pandemic (needs to be more authentic and flexible) and now that the moral panic over “AI” is happening (NEEDS TO BE MORE AUTHENTIC AND FLEXIBLE)…If we seem repetitive perhaps it’s because there still hasn’t been a widespread and resource-rich attempt to actually tackle assessment in ways that are not proctoring or standardization.
  • Labor–once again there were strikes during Digifest, and still not enough discussion about labor issues in education and the impact that labor conditions (underpaid, precarious, pension-poor) has on the sector as a whole:  research quality, student experience, teaching practices.  The theme this year was “Innovation” and what can innovation possibly look like on the backs of people who barely have time and resources to keep their heads above water?  (see our 2019 article Trust Innovation and Risk…it’s still relevant!)  Back to the theme of not being listened to I guess.  And to the previous point–rethinking assessment takes time and labor that is currently not being funded.  

So I have questions about how the work that has been addressing things like assessment and labor get buried and ignored, in favor of talking about shiny tools and tech.  And I think it’s notable that recent students were unaware of both the labor that goes into Jisc’s work AND the shiny tools and tech that they are responsible for maintaining/connecting with their labor and funding.  

In terms of plenary content, Jisc did good work here:  The opening keynote, Inma Martinez,talked about both the shiny tech (machine learning, natural language processing, and AI research) AND about the human responsibilities we have around the development of tech (ethics, transparency, deliberate decision-making independent of the venture capitalists who are trying to sell us this tech).  On the second day, Professor Sue Black OBE delivered her own personal narrative, where tech was present but not the most important part of her powerful story.  The keynote panel for International Women’s Day highlighted the need to talk about who is working with technology in education just as much as (perhaps more than) the work itself.

But I was left wondering what the impact of these human-centric presentations was, when I witnessed in the Q and A that so many of the questions that were read aloud were about “how do we get people to use this tech?”  Insert heavy sigh here.  I don’t understand the utility of encouraging people to use tech that was 1) unethically designed 2) not designed for educators or students or vulnerable people of any kind or 3) actually very good at anything but bullshit.

As ever, the human content and concerns were present at Digifest, but were not the message of the event (Innovation!).   The noise around ChatGPT in particular sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room, and makes me wonder what things people might have talked and learned about during sessions and keynotes had their attention not been captured by the AI hype.  

Education is a process full of other processes.  When we are sold products by people who make claims, we should reorient ourselves to processes.  Education isn’t the degree at the end.  Writing isn’t the essay at the end.  Learning isn’t the test at the end.  We need more places and spaces to focus on processes not products.  I’d like to see Digifest and other events spending more time discussing and illuminating processes,and the people navigating them.