Q & A: a Onetime Librarian Talks About the ‘Unconference’ Movement

November 22, 2011, 2:02 pm

The word “mob” usually carries a negative connotation, but in Michelle Boule’s new book, Mob Rule Learning: Camps, Unconferences, and Trashing the Talking Head, the mob acts as the protagonist, freeing the jaded conference attendee from the shackles of the traditional conference.

The book, in exploring the unconference movement, walks the reader through the pitfalls of the traditional conference, the idea of an unconference, how to plan one, and case studies from the movement. And taking it one step further, Ms. Boule, a blogger and former librarian at the University of Houston, talks about how the movement can influence higher education and spice things up in the classroom.

Ms. Boule expanded on these ideas in an interview with The Chronicle.

Q. What was your impetus for writing this book?

A. I was at a point in my career where I learned that red tape and bureaucracy aren’t always what get things done. So I got involved in the more subversive side of my profession—attending unconference-type events and finding different learning opportunities for librarians. These opportunities weren’t created by professional organizations but were created by librarians for other librarians to help us on the front lines. After attending and planning a couple of unconferences, I realized there wasn’t much information out there about them, especially in paper format.

Q. Describe an unconference.

A. An unconference can be a lot of things. At its most basic form, it’s a group of people getting together to talk about something that they are passionate about. So it could be a problem they are trying to solve, or a topic they care about. It’s the kind of thing that a regular conference does except that people just show up and you talk about what is important to those people in that room. And what is important is driven by the consensus of the group. You use the wisdom of that group to solve the problem or discuss the issue. Most unconferences end with some forward motion, such as solving an issue or creating a new task force.

Q. How is this different from a traditional conference?

A. Regular conferences are good for their mass appeal. A lot of people don’t know what an unconference is so they are hesitant to invest in them. Traditional conferences are still important because people believe in that structure, and as long as people believe in a structure, that structure has meaning. Even though I talk a lot about how talking heads are not the only people who have value for learning, they still have value because they are at the forefront of our professions. For a lot of individuals, seeing that top-tier person only happens at a traditional conference. Getting to see those people in person can be very powerful and inspiring and you can still learn things; I just think that the kind of learning that lasts longer and has a greater impact on you individually happens at a setting like an unconference. When the goal is learning and creating, unconferences are best.

Q. Where did you see the “unconference” movement going in the future in terms of higher education?

A. What the wisdom of the crowd and the mob can do for higher education is to take the idea that our students’ knowledge has value, and that there’s value in the knowledge held by people outside the classroom, and bring that into our classrooms through different types of media and different types of teaching. It can show us that students, and not just teachers, can bring great ideas to the table, too. Allowing students to be a part of the teaching process gives them a sense of ownership, which makes learning a lot more meaningful.

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manoflamancha

I suspect you will have a long risk-free career, Parrish, cuddled in your fur lined rut. There are too many like you. “A coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man dies but once.”
manoflamancha

As a research-type who also had high teacher ratings, it is time to take teaching off the back burner. I agree with some that often purported research is just pathelogical science, in short, rubbish, and is done to “give PhD students a research experience”. This happens most often at the second tier universities, filled with strivers hoping to make the “first team”. They are the folks who bring in big bucks for research centers using wit and BS, and are known for their politics of insider trading. Usually, such people are regarded with contempt from their colleagues, because they can neither teach nor actually perform research, but of course, they “do” research. “Doing” research in America has nothing to do with getting dirty in the lab. It has to do with writing grants and recruiting grad students, mostly from Asia, since they are the easieist to get, for the cheapest stipend. They build up big resumes very fast, full of publications that have their name affixed on them, but that they understand not a whit! In time, their padded resumes are used to gain prestigious awards, and eventually, a new endowed professorship at places like the U.Texas, Austin. BTW, this new type of so-called “Researcher” rarely writes textbooks. Why, you ask? Because they know nothing. They are just hustlers, and our system of education produces far too many of them. How to expounge them from the system? Now, there is the rub…no university will give back money, not even dirty money!
salchaktoka

sand6432: I’m sure that as long as UT-Austin maintains the “greek” party/social scene and prominent varsity athletics, these “reformers” will be happy. I haven’t seen any indication they have any interest in, or understanding of, either teaching or research.
bfrank1

There are a lot of things to criticize about higher education in the US – but I for one doubt that there will be any kind of ‘big fix’, particularly one imposed from above by ideologues of one stripe or another. Having worked at several universities, public and private, as professional staff, I can certainly see room for improvement. But there are two things that give me the willies – One is the idea of letting students determine the rating and ranking of their professors. The second is the view that universities should be nothing more than a sports franchise with a degree mill attached (usually at the back).

As to the first, I propose that parents consider how they would feel being evaluated by their offspring as a condition for …well, almost anything. Anyone who can reason should be aware that these are not the best hands in which to place the task of judgment, UNLESS one is desiring of a mass of inconsistent, arbitrary, sometimes irrational and/or emotional responses that can be interpreted and manipulated at will. Even more mature students will mostly approach the task from a position of self-interest, understood in a limited way. I was a student myself once, and I have since witnessed the bad faith that goes into student evaluations, and the havoc that can come out of them.

Students are customers of the institution, but they are not JUST customers. When they pay their tuition and matriculate, they are at least in some sense temporarily surrendering their autonomy with the expectation of long-term gain, but evaluations cannot reflect that. Faculty I disliked the most or struggled under the most have remained in my life as guideposts and models in one way or another, and it is the SUM of my experiences that made up my education. Faculty that have the greatest impact on students are not necessarily the ones students ‘like’ the most, or even show the most short term progress under. That impact can be positive or negative a well, but it takes more than one line of evidence to make such judgments. Student evaluations can play a limited role, but there is no way a rational system will rely on such ‘data’ to draw meaningful conclusions without completely corrupting the entire system.

Meanwhile, in the process of ‘cleaning up’ higher education, we are threatening to toss out the baby with the bathwater. Universities in our society are so much more than classrooms and laboratories (and football stadiums), but to look at the arguments with an eye to the way they are framed, the main strokes are at the expense of everything universities do by way of only measuring one or two factors and ignoring the larger culture. Universities in the US have taken on the cultural baggage of our society – they curate, preserve, disseminate, provide a reliable and dependable locus of investigation and consideration, and serve as the one place in America where the almighty dollar is not the end all and be all of existence. Not perfectly, not even consistently, and, as it turns out, not even that expensively, compared with many other areas of our lives and considering what we all get in return. I think those who compare the quite egalitarian role of universities (taken as a whole) in the US with the way that culture is handled in many other nations will see that, for all its flaws, universities in the US provide more benefit to the average citizen, at a better price and with less corruption, than the average US citizen has any right to expect.

Be careful what you ask for, sometimes you get it…
dr_arthur_ide

With the advent of Rick Perry when George Bush took the presidency, education in Texas has continued a downward spiral–I had lived in Texas for 30 years and was a part of it–until Perry entered stage right. The Texas Board of Education has been estranged for years, with its leadership controlled by those who home-schooled their children, where elections put uneducated evangelicals in places of import, and where teachers were appraised not on merit or quality but on popularity. To determine a teacher’s scholarship is not a beauty contest nor one requiring student approval, but in Texas it is the rule now that students determine competency despite their own incompetency, and education in most schools is a farce with teachers shackled to politics and false premises such as the absurd teaching of Intelligent Design as science when it is a religion, and history ignores reality as it is rewritten by the least competent. Texas used to be a state with quality education, but today it is a backward third-world state devolving into a cesspool of poorly trained and poorly educated “teachers” who continue the audacity of ignorance in their classrooms. Rick’s rubric is to return to the 18th century where education was not the pursuit or knowledge nor the conduct of inquiry but the memorization of what leaders wanted the pawns to know. Education is not a marketplace but a place for free inquiry and debate; the way Texas is going it would not surprise me if Glenn Beck and Fox News with Rupert Murdoch’s attack on education became the law of the land. I am as glad to have left Texas as there are Texans that are glad that I left, for I have a cousin in Amarillo who has a degree but cannot state the century that the US Constitution was written, but knows what year Mickey Mouse first appeared on film.
katisumas

Perhaps you might go chase some windmills? I have on good authority (The Onion) that the coal lobby is concerned that too many wind turbines will throw the earth out of orbit….

As for the university of Texas at Austin it is –or was?– an outstanding university…. I wonder if the people who want to “reform” it and other institutions of higher learning in Texas are linked to the people who took Thomas Jefferson out of the state’s public schools US history
textbooks?

No policy, no decision exist in a vacuum. You need to look at the context to get a handle on their meaning.
dr_arthur_ide

The problem is that education over the past thirty years has slid dramatically. Today anyone can research the reality that 7000 students drop out of high school every year. Clarity of thinking is as nonexistent as quality cursive writing, for the USA (like the dying world around it) has turned to the computer so that students can plagiarize from Wikipedia with cut-and-paste thesis and papers.

We are our own worst enemies, Teachers are rewarded for popularity. Subject-matter experts who are not entertaining are demeaned, rejected, castout and overlooked for tenure and promotion. Students want easy answers and no homework.

When I was young (60 years ago), we worked no less than one hour at home for each hour spent in class. We knew and used the rules of English grammar. We did all levels of mathematics in our head. Languages had to be exact (not vulgar street based) and fluency required to pass. Science was centered on research, analysis, and detailed reports. We knew that corn was not a vegetable. (I am old. My time has passed, but I would never let a medical doctor under 50 operate on me as his computer might go off-line.)

When we were teachers, we had to take summer classes. In universities we had to publish or perish. Publications had to pass peer review. Although I am past “retirement” I still read, translate, send out my material for scruutiny. I publish far more in a few years than my younger colleagues publish in their academic lifetime.

It is not just the social sciences nor the humanities that head into idocy, but so do the the sciences with Stephen C. Myer passing religion off as science (Intelligent Design) because he took a PhD from Camrbidge. Myer ignores what he was taught as Cambridge has become more interested in the money than in education as when it inaugurated the IB Programme that further dumbs down learning the English language by encouraging theft of intellectual property (as read in their FCE book and heard on their disk) as well as hail vulgar (street or common) speech. Education is a dying art. The loss of quality of standards in education will give birth to a new Dark Age of superstition. Michele Bachmann will not debate Zach Kopplin. Bachmann heralds the self-ordained drummer in the Heavy Metal band Junkyard Prophet Bradlee Dean who is critical of serious scholarship and quotes 2000 year-old texts. Indiana has deleted the requirement of mastering cursive so the next generation will be unable to read anything written before World War II. It will get worse.
dr_arthur_ide

Actually, Maurice Moshe Eisenstein, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University Calumet has a stated interest in religion, and all of his education from the BA through the PhD is from Purdue–which seems tantamount to inbreeding and comes with results similar to those experienced by the Hapsburg monarchy culminating with Charles V. How much Eisenstein knows can be seen in his comment on the book The Case for Israel: ”Norman Finkelstein has no more credibility than Holocaust deniers” that is rejected by Jim Hulston (SUNY) who wrote: “Some people have suggested that Norman Finkelstein is a Holocaust denier — a desperate bit of polemic, since Finkelstein is the child of Holocaust survivors and speaks with something approaching idolatry about Raul Hilberg’s magisterial” (http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/alan-dershowitz-and-peter-novick-in-chronicle-of-higher-education-on-tenure/) which makes me wonder about Eisenstein’s objectivity.
dr_arthur_ide

“Downgrading research”? We are to accept the findings of years ago and not continue the conduct of inquiry? Why not just return to the Ptolemy period of flat earth, or accept Aquinas as being a spokeman for god, or read the words of Luther demanding that Jewish synagogues be burned and Jews who do not convert be slaughtered? Why not agree with Sarah Palin’s ideas on Paul Revere (there are five separate copies of the original story–but they were written long after the event)?

I do agree that any PhD program must be rational and accountable, and that dissertations must be solid, publishable contributions to their discipline, but the idea of standardizing a dissertation is suspect since it depends on the definition of standardization. Just because my committees could not read all of my dissertations because I used Attic Greek, pre-Isamic Arabic, and old Hebrew does not mean that the research is wrong, but that the committee needed to incorporate a linguist–not that I dumb down my finding. Funding students directly? fine if all students are reputable and use the money for acdemics, but I have seen students with scholarships use the money to go on vacations, visit discos, etc. and then petition for additional funds for tuition, books, and so forth.

It appears you want larger classrooms. Larger classes merely students and few have any direct interexchange with the teachers–usually they only have teaching assistants who are not fully trained. It is time to have smaller classes and more teachers who are subject matter experts, not graders or place holders. The last time that the USA did anything of note was put a man on the moon in the 1960s (we also have the shame of Abu Gharib prison, but that was an attrocity by the least educated).

Education must be available for all those who have the talent, desire, apptitude and willingness to study. Those who come to centers of higher education looking for friends, spouses, sex, good times, should be expelled. Funding must go to students who have aptitutde and perform, not merely repeat what a teacher wants and thus, like the theological Stephen C. Myer who took a PhD in science from Cambridge, declare that Intelligent Design is science when it is religion as defined by the 2005 ”Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District” decision. What I do agree with is that all teachers are tested by their peers–but that traditionally comes with publications.
katisumas

Social Security retirement age is 67. Medicare elligibility is 65 –that is so far while we still have Medicare. We all paid for social security and Medicare through ss taxes taken out of our paychecks throughout our working lives. The Social Security trust fund is flush with cash (I’ve read the figure is 3 trillions but I haven’t checked it). Problems that will need to be tweeked will only arise after 2035, and they can be tweeked easily with some minor changes such as slightly raising the maximum income subjected to social security tax.  The money in the SS trust fund is making Wall Street and the rest of our financial elite drool with concupiscence. And it has made some administrations drool as well. After all Reagan was the first to use the Social Security Trust to pay for general governmental expenses. As time went by, there is now the illusion that Social Security payments come out of the general budget. How absurd but predictable is that!

There’s no “either /or” here. The government can easily fund pure research, without robbing the Social Security Trust, and not only that, it –we– can also easily afford grade K-12 librarians which are in danger in some states of being wiped off the face of our –oh so wealthy– country. Surely that wealthy country can also afford nutrition programs for pregnant women and babies?  etc etc etc

Surely, you don’t believe that brains capable of making breakthroughs in pure research drop down fully formed from the sky? To use the quintessential example, would Einstein have been an einstein if he had lacked in proper nutrition while an infant? What if he had been deprived of books or of someone guiding him to books?

What our country can’t afford are tax breaks for the super wealthy among us, letting our corporations set up fake headquarters in the Cayman Islands so as not to pay any tax at all this even those deriving just about all their income from government contracts. We can’t afford giving money to the incredibly profitable oil industry, some of which in addition to not paying taxes actually got a check from Uncle Sam i.e. from the rest of us patsies. We can’t afford tax loopholes to stand unchallenged, remember the Repubs are opposed to all and any refore of tax poopholes. We cant afford tax breaks for private jets (that’s jets, not little airplanes), etc etc etc. And of course, we coulnd’t afford waging wars on credit even while we lowered taxes (since you don’t seem to be not very big on interdisciplinary studies, you might not be aware that the Bush wars are the first ever this country fought without raising taxes to pay for at least part of them, particularly taxes for the moneyed elite –even Bush Sr had to raise taxes….)

So what’s the good of a banana republic even if it somehow manages to fund some research in some (you’re very selective) hard sciences?

(incidentally, the boundaries between chemistry and bioscience are becoming pretty permeable….  )
katisumas

Sand, you’re so right! Another old and tried way of expressing it would be “cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face”.
11144703

A librarian meeting other librarians in a less structured setting than a conference to help each other is “subversive”?
MarjoryMunson

The “unconference” can work well if the facilitators are skilled in listening – which is often NOT the case. It has been my experience that when “questions from the audience” are solicited, the answers given often do not respond to the real question. Sometimes the question was well stated but the presenterchose to expound on something additional they want to say. Sometimes the question was phrased in such a way that it was simply misunderstood, but the questioner usually does not say, “But that is not what I wanted to ask,” and then try to restate the question. In either case, I often rephrase the question and ask it myself. Often the original questioner will come up to me after the meeting and thank me for understanding what they really wanted to know. Listening is the most difficult part of any communication process.
richsc

Sounds a lot like a break out session or “birds of a feather” so common at tech conferences. “ad hoc” also sounds descriptive.
mbelvadi

I’ve never attended an unconference, so I may be misunderstanding what happens, but from this description it sounds like a waste of time for many people. If a bunch of people go to a room with no fixed topic/theme, and they talk about what some of the people in the room want to talk about, then there are probably some people in the room who aren’t interested in that topic and may find themselves socially “trapped” into not leaving until the session time is over, although the topic is not of relevance to them. In theory there might be an intent that the discussion move to the interests of the majority in the room, but in my professional experience in situations with similar parameters (like meetings without agendas) there are usually a small handful of people who speak up forcefully and control the direction of the topic, and most sit back quietly whether they are interested or not. Like a classroom discussion dynamic, it takes more than a merely good facilitator to prevent that from happening; it takes an extraordinary one, and that particular skill set is pretty rare in the library world at least.
juris_prudence

As others have suggested, there’s nothing new or original here. Ms. Boule is just slapping a new label — “unconference” — on a common practice, and trying to elevate the practice beyond its usefulness, all for the sake of selling a book.
http://amandafrench.net Amanda French

I coordinate a popular unconference, THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, so naturally I’m biased. But I’m really surprised at the resistance expressed so far in the comments. marjory_j_munson is absolutely right that Q & A sessions at regular conferences aren’t real discussions, but that’s not at all what unconference sessions are like.

An unconference is to a conference what a seminar is to a lecture, and, despite juris_prudence’s comment, it has been extremely uncommon in academia to get to talk in a non-hierarchical, explorative way with people you don’t actually work with on a day to day basis. Students do it all the time, but once you’re no longer a student, the only people you get to talk with as a grownup professional are your colleagues. When you get librarians and faculty and students and K-12 teachers and people with all kinds of different jobs and experiences in a room talking about a problem they all face, one of the main benefits is just learning, over and over again, that other people have different perspectives, useful perspectives.

And, mbveladi, there are usually at least 3 or 4 separate sessions happening at the same time, so, just as at a regular conference, people don’t go to what they’re not interested in. Sure, sometimes you get dominant speakers in a discussion, but much less so than you do in a college classroom, because the issues are real and the participants are experienced, intelligent professionals.

You can check out our evaluations at http://j.mp/thatcampresults. After more than 60 THATCamps internationally in the last three years, 57% strongly agreed that THATCamp was useful for them, 38% agreed, and only 5% disagreed or were neutral.
http://micahvandegrift.wordpress.com Micah Vandegrift

I’d like to weigh in here in support of the unconference model. Officially, I’ve attended two; one at ALA Annual earlier this year and the other at THATCamp at George Mason University in June. As an early career professional unconferences have had incredible value for me to not only participate in but also contribute to the conversations that are defining my field, and related fields. For example, I proposed a session at THATCamp, as all attendees are encouraged to, and had the opportunity to co-lead a discussion on the topic of digital humanities in academic libraries, and sit in the same room as people I respect very much and have them listen and challenge and encourage my ideas. Another valuable point that I think THATCamp has over unconferences at field-specific conferences like ALA is having the variety of perspectives from folks who may not otherwise have the option to really engage in conversation; students, faculty members, librarians, educators, technologists, journalists are all treated as equals in the conversation.

Sure, maybe its a fad, or a new label on an old practice, but regardless the unconference has provided me with real professional development, in a very different way than a traditional conference could.
nadinecohen

I’ve been to too many traditional conferences that suffered from the complaints listed here – untrained facilitators, participants feeling trapped in irrelevant sessions, lopsided discussions. I haven’t been to an Unconference yet, but I’d like to. Like any conference there’s plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong, but I think there’s also more opportunity for lightbulb moments. Loose doesn’t have to mean disorganized.
mottgreene

The humanities are, among many other things, an attempt to share our inner experience of the world. In the sciences we share only the “outer” experience – a focus on data, a judgment of right and wrong. Thus scientific meetings are almost always, whether talk + q and a, or working groups, focussed on some set of empirical results and the function of the meeting is to decide to what extent these results ought to be incorporated into the body of “what is known.” Thus the “blue sky” aspect of unconferencing doesn’t serve the sciences very well. Even open source, highly democratized pursuits of science retain the framework of right/wrong , include/exclude, and envision highly segemented communities of expertise, rarely committees of the whole. The right to speak is based on the data available to be examined, and the right to be heard is a matter of expert judgment in a sequence of knowledge producing operations which are different in many ways ( but not completely different) from the humanities. With regard to what students know, there is also a profound difference. Students in humanities and social sciences are already at a point to say something important and original when they are still undergraduates. In the sciences, they are still apprentices genius polymaths and science talent seatch prodigies notwithstanding, and very unlikely to say anything novel or significant about matters of concern at the “research front” – the theater of significant novelty – for years after graduation.
lys2000

This sounds very similar to break-out sessions we have in the College & University Archives Section meetings of the Society of American Archivists. Section members vote in advance on four to six topics for simultaneous break-out sessions. One member volunteers to lead each session and attendees “vote with their feet” at the meeting — those choosing a particular session are likely looking for answers to problems relating to these topics, other more experienced archivists may choose a session because they are interested in the topic and feel happy to contribute and help their colleagues. Having been in many of these, I know even us old dogs learn new tricks in these informal sessions. And while they are informal, I would probably call them semi-structured; there is always a recorder in each session and the next section newsletter will carry a synopsis of what was said for the benefit of those who could not participate or even attend. They’ve been a feature of our conferences for more than 25 years. I leave to you to decide if they constitute an “unconference” or “Mob rule learning,” but subversive they are not.

Lee Stout, Librarian Emeritus and former Penn State Univ. Archivist
http://amandafrench.net Amanda French

Interesting that it’s the word “subversive” that many seem to dislike — it’s not one I’d necessarily use myself, but I’d say that in this interview, it’s not the unconference format that Boule is calling “subversive,” but the fact that unconferences tend not to be organized by professional associations. Or at least they weren’t at first: more and more professional organizations in academia are following SAA’s admirable lead (one of the very first THATCamps was organized by archivists to happen just before SAA) and adopting looser formats for at least part of their meetings. Unconferences actually work very well as pre-conference events before standard-format meetings. Like rock and roll, unconferences might use subversive rhetoric and still be quite easily coopted by the Establishment. :)

And actually it’s important to note that librarians and archivists were and are definitely ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting looser meeting formats. Even the “roundtables” at academic conferences like AHA and MLA and the hundreds of smaller meetings were never very round. Most academic subject conferences (in the humanities at least) could still definitely stand to take a look at what unconferences are doing.
mbelvadi

So the separate sessions do have a pre-announced theme or topic of some kind? And facilitators that prevent the discussion from getting too far off it?
http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

We’ve published several posts about THATCamps (the unconference referred to by @alfrench:disqus ) at ProfHacker: check out our archives.
voltaire75

Anything is an improvement on most traditional conferences…no learning, tedious, frigid and pointless, let’s be honest.
kosboot

I think what Alexandra Rice means by “subversive” is that, unlike a typical conference where the topics and speakers are all chosen well in advance by an administrative committee, at an unconference the topics and speakers are chosen pretty much on the spot (perhaps with suggestions made in advance, or web signups made in advance). The subverise aspect is that the “power” to organize is not made at the top (usually months in advance), but by mutual agreement of the attendees.

An unconference is not a disorganized group of disparate people, but rather a group of passionate individuals who want to pursue a topic of interest (that may not be adequately covered by other conferences).

I’ve attended a few of unconferences and they can be very refreshing and inspiring, depending on the attendees. I wish nearly all conferences would have “unconference” portions that would be able to harness the enthusiasm of the attendees and the knowledge they bring.
salchaktoka

In all fairness, conferences of the American Library Association and its daughter associations are less than worthless — they’re dynamic lemming multipliers.
livebythegoldenrule

Interesting that the writer is a “former” librarian, as so many of us are. Hopefully, not due to the downsizing and slow disintegration of the profession. As a former and unemployed librarian, I am all for “unconferences” as they probably do not cost near as much as formal conferences, and in this economy, a welcome, fresh breath of air.
lchow

If you are not interested, learning or contributing to a particular discussion session, you are encouraged to leave and go to another one. The law of two feet or motion – Any person neither learning nor contributing to a group discussion must walk to another one.
lchow

Unconferences are about the collective knowledge of the group. There are other similar and related terms used like birds of a feather as mentioned by richsc, as well as open space technology, barcamp, etc. As someone who has organized 2 and attended 4 unconferences, the unconference format does offer opportunities for learning and sharing, that may not work as well in traditional events like conferences. My favorite unconference so far is HealthCampNYC, a regional health unconference that brought together librarians, health literacy professionals, medical professionals and others working in nonprofits and community based organizations. More info about HealthCampNYC at http://healthcampnyc.wetpaint.com. If you want to learn more about unconferences or how to DIY unconference, check out our recently published guide – http://libguides.metro.org/unconferences
ulyssesmsu

The first thing Ms. Boule could do for the future of higher education would be to correctly render her book’s title. It’s _Mob-Rule Learning_, with a hyphen. It matters.
mbelvadi

But by the time you realize the discussion in the room you’re in is going the “wrong” (for you) way, then it’s too late to join another discussion – you’ll have missed so much that you can’t meaningfully contribute without fear of saying things that were already said before you came in, and looking like a fool, and a latecomer probably won’t be very appreciated in the new room (everyone I know in academe carries their “classroom” sensibility about the rudeness of being late to class over into other contexts). So you’ve lost that entire “time slot” in the event.
11144703

That fact that unconferences tend not to be organized by professional associations is ”subversive”? The use of this word here is almost as laughable as Judith Butler’s use of the word concerning gender performance.
11144703

Again, kosboot, that an unconference with the topics and speakers chosen on the spot should be characterized as “subversive” is almost as laughable as Judith Butler’s use of the word concerning gender performance.
mbelvadi

That’s really sad. I hear that on the CHE boards a lot about humanities (eg MLA) conferences. I’ve always found the scheduled sessions at librarian conferences to be stimulating and thought-provoking, and I almost always leave with a huge checklist of ideas, projects, and products to follow up on with my colleagues back home. But then, I take the time to carefully plan out, even before I get on the plane, exactly which sessions in which time slots I plan to go to. Once in awhile the description is misleading and a session is a waste of time, but I find that to be a rare exception.
marka

Unfortunately, one of the premises here is demonstrably false: ” … what is important is driven by the consensus of the group. You use the wisdom of that group to solve the problem … .”

A fair amount of research suggests that ‘crowd wisdom’ only really works when each contribution is -independent- e.g., large economic markets [NYSE, etc.], secret ballots, anonymous surveys, etc.

The problem with ‘consensus’ driven processes are evident with the multiple biases that open social gatherings engender – group think, bandwagon effects, etc. – because the contributions are -dependent- on group dynamics.

While such gatherings -might- be helpful in individual (anecdotal) cases: there is no guarantee that they actually gather whatever ‘wisdom’ might be present in the group, and plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the concept.
http://amandafrench.net Amanda French

Yep. Though when you say “pre-announced,” the “pre” can be very short. Different unconferences do it differently: we encourage people to propose stuff on a blog in the weeks before the event, and then we finalize the schedule when we get there in the morning, which means that some proposals might get axed or modified or combined with other sessions. But it’s not as though you’d go into a room not knowing what would be discussed there. And, yes, whoever proposed the topic facilitates the conversation. Or work, or whatever.