How do you go about planning your own conference experience?

Early in my career sessions were important to me. Less so now. The most important thing for me attending conferences in recent years has been the face to face hallway conversations with colleagues that I see once or twice a year. Recent sessions at Educause have “shut the doors” once the talk has begun which discourages one, whose hallway talk ran long, to get into a session. Also if the topic as advertised turns out to be not relevant or poorly presented, escape mechanism should be presented...and by that I me a courteous, quite path to leave the venue…there is little sense wasting ones time, but no sense disrupting what may be relevant to others.

I definitely use the online version of the agenda.  I look over the tracks and determine if a track contains my area of interest.  If not, then I search by title…subject throughout.  If so (and most times it does), I focus on that track.  I first build my “schedule” from this.  Many times there are open “slots” when I’m done…so I look to fill those times by then looking at the agenda for those days/times to see what is being presented.  The first thing at this stage that catches my eye is normally the title of the presentation.

So:  I like to build an agenda for myself (long before the date of the conference), based first on the tracks and then on filling in my open slots.  This way I focus on my needs/job-related presentations and fill in with interests.

I also listen to friends and colleagues – if they think a presentation is worthwhile.  Finally, I also check for any of my colleagues who are presenting and check if I can attend their sessions for support.

Hope that helps,

Marty

Ellen,

The University of South Florida has been planning the Higher Education Enterprise Mobile App Conference since early last year. The conference is less than a month away at this point (you may have seen an earlier email about it).  Feel free to take a look at our program and info; we’d love to have you come down and see it www.usf.edu/heemac.

Hi Ellen, I answered inline below.

Best,

-George

I follow the same process as Martin….