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10 Top Tips for Unplanning the Perfect Unconference

What's the secret of some of the unconferences in recent years that have had educators and learners excited, enthralled and changing their ways of working and thinking? Well, I'm not sure there is a secret per se, but having unplanned a good dozen or so unconferences and visited a score more there are some things that keep cropping up from which we can all learn.

As we head hurtling towards an online-offline unconference at the Scottish Learning Festival, that is, TeachMeet07 on the evening of September 19th (sign up now!), I've also been preparing some of the ground for another year of TeachMeet Roadshows in East Lothian, informal, funky training events which have already proven highly successful in getting some swift and sustained adoption of new technologies in our classrooms. Both use the following ten top tips.
 
 

1. Get started on your (cool) terms
   "Right, if I can have your attention please. Just a minute. Great. Now, I would like to introduce to you..."... Oh dear. We all know it. It's like being back in the rows at school, waiting to see someone very important attempt to hold our attention for an hour with more bullets than you could point at the Sundance Kid and that drawl we remember from the adults in Charlie Brown (it was actually a trombone, did you know?).
   
   If you want people's attention before you get started proper, don't let someone else bring you down before you even get started, and don't start by effectively telling off your participants. Learn from the way jazz musicians get started. Make the opening to the presentation enticing, using some video or the cadence to some quieter musak you've cued up to grab attention or mark the beginning of your spot.
    
    
2. Conference participants, not bystanders
   From the weeks before the conference even takes place get your attendees to suggest topics, spread the word and market the conference to their friends, by displaying a logo or taking part in Facebook groups, for example.
   
   The worst thing that can happen for a conference or training event is for people to go home actively disagreeing with what one (or all) the presenters had to say. You've got to provide an opportunity for people to make their views known and give the presenters a fighting chance of bringing them around.
   
   Q&A is one way to do this but people haven't really had time to digest and come up with a good question. By far the best thing to do is get people up presenting themselves. Back-to-back shorter presentations of soapboxes are often entertaining, always interesting given the divergent views and let people get it off their chest. It also opens up the conversations in the more informal parts of the conference, since people know who they want to go to talk to.
    
    
3. Make the conference the coffee break
   We all know the best parts of conferences are, of course, the coffee breaks and social events, where you get a chance to pore over someone's laptop for 15 minutes and learn one new really cool thing you can actually use, have late-night discussions over serious stuff, helped along by a few drops of amber. Why not just make this the conference itself? Provide coffee and tea all day long, lots of muffins and biscuits like they did at Reboot and, even better, open a bar like we do at BarCamp.
    
    
4. Flat pack your conference
   Let people make up their own conference. One of my favourite parts of BarCampScotland and Reboot9.0 were the large blank sheets of paper as you walked in - the participants plan what they want to hear and when, by putting up what they are going to talk about next to a time and a location in the venue. Make sure you offer a number of large, medium and small rooms for the large, medium and small egos ;-)
    
    
5. Don't hold yourself to one sponsor
   A good unconference does cost some money although if everyone pulls in it needn't cost a fortune: food, drink, space, projection facilities, audio visuals, publicity beyond the web... Getting a good sponsor might seem the answer to your dreams, but it might end up being a noose around your neck. Do not take all the funding from one place, and then be held to their publicity, their terms and their way of doing things. Some BarCamps put an upper limit of £150 ($300) per contribution to have a feast of many, not a gathering for one. Once you've had a successful event or two under your belt the sponsors will come to you.
    
    
6. Encourage speaking at the back of the class
   It's cool to have a place where people can extend the discussion beyond whatever the presentation is about. This is called a backchannel. You can use a blog set up to receive mobile phone messages, but it's easier to get everyone onto a Jaiku channel, or display messages left by people from the mobiles or computers on Twitter (Twittercamp is lovely to do this).
   
   At LTS, because the digital savvy of many attendees at the Learning Festival won't stretch to Twitter, we've set up our own text service, for launch on Sept 7 or thereabouts, which will display comments on keynotes under the blog posts that talk about them. Clever, huh?
   
   In some conferences it's displayed behind the speakers. Much better, in my opinion for what it's worth, is to equip the stage with a large monitor so that speakers can take a peak and have a chance to respond to criticisms or misunderstandings before they're picked up by too many other people. Presenters also need to be aware that there is a public backchannel in the first place.
    
    
7. May the wifi be with you
   You need wifi. Ideally you have electricity in abundance, too, for bloggers to blog, photographers to Flickr and for the backchannel to survive. Good wifi is a must, but make sure everyone knows about it so that they actually bring their laptops and cameras.
    
    
8. Tag, tag, tag - and tell people about it
   Make sure that everyone coming to the conference, everyone who wanted to and couldn't and all the major events sites (e.g. Upcoming.org) know what the conference tag is, otherwise all that online coverage is going to be lost. Tags need to be short, memorable and mean something to the people there.
    
    
9. Cover the event yourself - but get young people to do it
   At every nearly every conference I organise I make sure that I have some young people producing the podcasts, the videos or some blogging. This isn't because I want cheap labour, it's because of the angle they take on it and what they are able to contribute in this way to the arguments given in the conference. Their legacy is also far more long-lasting than that of the adult participants this way :-)
    
    
10. Don't give a giveaway
    People increasingly don't need a memory pen, a linen bag, a pen, a pad (they're blogging, remember)... What's more, people are beginning to become more conscious of the environmental impact of all those wasted products and paper. Far better to make your giveaway on the web or via Bluetooth to people's mobile phones.

Here are some more hints and tips for budding unconferencers:

• Different types of unconference
• Some photos from BarCampScotland that give some clues
• The Unconference Blog
• Open Space Events
• What is speed geeking?
• The BarCamp way
• The BloggerCon way
• ...and, of course, Wikipedia

and some ideas for those wanting to create education training events around the same ideals:

• TeachMeet07
• TeachMeet Roadshows

East Lothian (secretly) forms large basis of Becta report

The latest Becta report, The impact of ICT in schools - a landscape review features some of the sterling work we were doing in East Lothian in the field of social media as long as three years ago and has good words to say on the Modern Foreign Languages Environment (MFLE).

While no schools or Local Authorities are named in particular this major review was carried out by researchers at the Quality in Education Centre, University of Strathclyde, including Dr Rae Condie from Strathclyde University who observed some of my French and German classes getting stuck into blogging and podcasting (back when the average age of my 'colleagues' was 13 ;-)

The report is in PDF but there's mention of some of the MFL antics (pp.33;39) and live moblogged school trips (p.50) we have run at the Grammar since 2002. The podcasting East Lothian was amongst the first to do in Europe also flavours the report, with citations from Steve O'Hear's Guardian story on Musselburgh Grammar's podcasting of 2005 (p.89).

The MFLE, the online service I manage with LTS's Annelie Carmichael and Robert McKinstry at Scottish CILT, has since gained a significant mention in the research, too (pp.34).

There are some interesting points for future development in Scotland. A need for systematic development of information literacy is highlighted, which is something the new Learning and Teaching Scotland Info Lit resource will go some way to starting off (esp. once we get the blogging content a little more in line with current thought) (p.13).

The MFLE, it rightly suggests, is due some independent research to guage its impact on MFL teaching and learning in Scotland. Judging by the MFL-heavy uptake of social media and exemplary teaching which is in line with A Curriculum for Excellence, coupled with great conferences like Communicate.06 (.07 on the way) and some impressive usage stats that land us as one of the top performing LTS online services, I think the impact is there to be discovered.

Finally, the report notes that there are considerable difference in the approaches to using hardware in schools North and South of the Border (p.16). In Scotland there are considerably fewer labs for whole-school use, with more individual classroom computers. Is this a shortfall in space and equipment or is the report's inference correct, when it states that in Scotland we are learning through ICT instead of learning about ICT?

Tired, aching... but boy am I happy

We pulled it off - and judging by the comments and emails Communicate.06 was the conference I had hoped it would be. We've got at least 12 blogging and podcasting projects underway after just 4 hours, covering a third of the country. There are another two definite filmmaking projects that are in embryonic state, after witnessing the incredibly professional media team at work - average age 16. Creating the film guide is my next big piece of work. Countless others who couldn't make it to the Comic Life session have immediately seen how making comics is a great way to a) get some creative photography into a languages lesson and b) get kids writing more and more original, demanding material - without them even realising it.

I've even seen a comment on the forum saying that Peter Ford's keynote reminded a teacher why she wanted to teach. I'm sure she's not alone. We've already got some classic Fordy moments on the mflePodcast. His cracking keynote from Communicate.06 will be podcast this Wednesday on the mflePodcast, too.

I am pretty shattered 24 hours after the end of the conference, but will post on the MFLE blog, and here, throughout the next week. The MFLE will provide all the details of each session too, over the next wee while. John's started blogging about stuff already. He was a complete star on the day and helped sort out one or two technical problems, not that any of the participants would ever have noticed.

The best thing? Teachers in Scotland are already asking for help and getting their projects off to a start with the guidance of our seminar leaders in the MFLE forums.

The free conference that lasts at least two months, where you can talk to the seminar leaders as long as you want? This is a real unconference conference.

Conferences give growth

If anyone wonders how and why we are giving away the Communicate.06 conference for free, both offline and online, I can reveal the answer today.

In the last week the MFLE has had at least a 10% growth in its membership of Scottish teachers. Many, many more have applied from outside the country, wanting to take part in the forums, which for the next two months are going to offer expert support for educators in their blogging, podcasting, digital video, animation, eTwinning and web projects (more online guides after Saturday).

If a conference with only 100 attendees invited along can generate this much buzz and desire to learn something new, in one of the busiest times of the year, it makes me even more tempted to run another conference later in the year, during a quieter period. I'd much prefer to spend marketing budgets on providing this than on leaflets nobody reads. It obviously has a huge effect on our membership and on those taking up new technologies in their classroom.

Would educators outside Scotland make the trip if the course was available for a nominal fee ($50 / £30)?

Communicate.06 - the conference begins

Communicate.06 is ready for action, starting March 18 2006. This is an ICT Conference with an emphasis on language teaching and learning, whether that is English or a foreign language. There is a limit on the number who can attend in person and this is close to 'selling out' (we're giving the conference for free to state school teachers). I'm overjoyed to see so many teachers opting into sessions on Blogging and Podcasting.

But the whole conference will be made available online. That means that anyone can access the conference podcasts, notes and overviews of different technologies in the Conference Website. Through our Newsblog you can ask for help or offer your own ideas for lessons. Subscribe to the mflePodcast through iTunes to get the conference as it comes out.

After the conference day any teacher working in Scotland can gain online support through the MFLE Forums (you have to register first).

Much of the conference will be blogged here, and on the blogs of participants and speakers. The speakers include:

Peter Ford: Our keynote speaker
John Johnston: Primary blogger and podcaster extraordinaire
Lynne Horn: Head of Language Faculty in a rural area, blogging with the ECML
David Muir: Teacher trainer exploiting the web's secrets
Mark Pentleton: runs digital video and animation projects in the West of Scotland
Shona Stables: Interactive Whiteboard Wizard
Maureen Gilchrist: MFL teacher who pioneered use of MP3 recorders in the classroom
Vivien Bruce and Kay McMeekin: Two experienced teachers within the PiE project showing the uses of ComicLife for language learning.
...and me.

The word 'speaker' is a bit grand. All these sessions are collaborative and should offer plenty of chances to discuss issues of using the technology in lessons.

We'll have a conference-wide WiFi network and laptops available to borrow throughout the day. And lunch is free.

Ain't we nice?
If you're talking about the conference please tag everything communicate.06

Download the Communicate.06 programme as a pdf