I can’t say enough good things about this session, either. Susan Fox, VP, The Forbes Group, who seemed like a mild-mannered academic until she showed us her World of Warcraft avatar, explained how we digital immigrants differ from the digital natives (she put the dividing line between the two generations at the invention of Pong back in 1972).

People who grew up with online gaming process information differently, she said. They pool knowledge into a collective intelligence to work better in teams, and are experts in networking, negotiating, and seeking out/synthesizing/disseminating information. They’re great at sampling and remixing media and content, working with simulations, and adopting different identities to adapt to situational challenges.

One interesting point was about how those who grow up with online gaming (I think the figure she quoted as 75 percent of people under the age of 34 are familiar with the language of games, and the average number of hours they spend gaming per week is 22). Currently we look at leaders as those lone visionaries who will lead us into a shining future. But that’s not how the digital generation works, she said. “It’s going to shift, depending on the circumstances. Leadership for the digital generation is situational and fluid, and those who are leaders in some circumstances will be followers in others.”

While she placed most of the emphasis in her presentation on incorporating gamers into the workplace (i.e., on staff at associations–watch for online gaming guildmaster skills to show up on a resume near you soon), she did touch on how the gaming mentality could be the next big influence on the training and adult education you offer.

Called serious games, more organizations are going to be able to adapt gaming technology for their adult education, either by building their own or by (the much easier route) using game engines like wildpockets.com, which is coming online soon. “Engaging the imagination is what’s important,” she said, “not necessarily having great graphics.” She pointed out a few examples that are already out there, though not all are developed by associations:

My U.S. Rep (a Congressional role-playing game I’m now going to have to try)
America’s Army, where you can role-play being a soldier
Darfur Is Dying, which delivers a serious message through a role-playing game

I spoke with Fox briefly after the session, and she said she was planning to do more research into the adult ed aspects of gaming, so expect more greatness from her to be published probably in the Journal of Association Leadership (drats! I was hoping we could score this one).

If you want to learn about learning, human intelligence, and all that jazz, Wired has been pumping out some fascinating articles lately: Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower. When it comes to meetings and adult learning, this one might be particularly useful: Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

This is pretty off-topic, but interesting nonetheless. Have you seen this video yet? If not, take a few seconds to check it out–it’s fairly mind-blowing.

Want to know why we are so selective in our vision? Here’s the science behind what’s called change blindness.

Makes me wonder if there isn’t a mental version of change blindness as well, where we only grasp familiar concepts, or those we expect to see, or those we are looking for. How much gets caught in our mental filter and never makes it to our conscious minds?

Maybe this isn’t so off-topic after all: Not only could a demonstration along the lines of that ad serve as a great waker-upper for a keynote, but the concept is something planners, and presenters, should think about when designing a session or a meeting. As a cost-cutting measure, what will never register with your audience and so can be omitted painlessly from your budget? From an adult-learning perspective, how is this perceptual gap helping or hindering your efforts to educate your participants?

I’m just finding it really interesting to think about this morning.

Peter Hutchins posts an interesting result from ASAE and The Center’s Technlogy Conference today:

When asked in today’s Technology Conference Town Hall Meeting how many people had been to any form of technology training in the last year, a startling percentage of the room indicated that time had prevented them from taking advantage of any technology learning opportunity.

Do you buy that? I don’t, for reasons I outline in a comment on his post. If you are jazzed about the technology (or aardvark farming, or whatever the topic is), nothing will stop you from learning more about it, on your own time and in your own way if need be. The information’s out there on the Web to learn about pretty much anything, for free in most cases, so why not dive in? But, if you’re not interested, your employer can shove all kinds of training down your throat and you still won’t swallow. The excuse may be that you don’t have time, but the reality is that you don’t have the interest.

I would argue, hard, that these days, if you have the will, you’ll find the way (including time) to learn. If you don’t, any excuse will do, and time is a good one since everyone is so starved for it these days. Funny thing is that time spent learning usually ends up providing you with ways to make each of those precious minutes count a bit more. As Alanis Morissette would say, isn’t it ironic?

So, here’s a quick skip on the session I just went to about making meetings relevant to Generation Y, aka Gen Why, as speaker Eric Chester called them.

But first, his best quote: “It used to be you’d say, ‘if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.’ Now it’s, ‘if you do what you’ve always done, you’re out of business.’” Loved that one.

Anyway, the Whys are impatient, because they’ve grown up in a world where people are rewarded with speed: fast lanes, fast delivery, express check-in for hotels’ preferred guest members, etc.

Another good quote: “We’ve given birth to a generation of type A++ stress puppies.” The older generations tend to be analog, chronological, like a reel-to-reel tape player, where the Whys are more like iPods who are used to random. “If you make a bad choice, it’s not a matter of consequences anymore,” said Chester. “It’s control, alt, delete.” And he’s right.

And meetings are pretty analog, we have to admit. One thing follows another, we have a template we use so we know what to expect. But for Whys, who are impatient, he said, this is boring. He said one study found that Whys would rather have pain inflicted on them than be bored.

They’re also used to active learning, lots of breaks, lots of interaction, and they want to be entertained as well as enlightened. When they don’t get it, they get bored and disengaged.

Ways to connect your meetings with the youngsters (and doesn’t that sound like an oldster word?):

Invite them to be a part of everything in the meeting, including acting as speakers.
Give them mentors to show them where the cool stuff is.
Let them be a part of the entertainment (karaoke in the lobby? Not so sure about that suggestion!).
They’re skeptical, so don’t overpromise and underdeliver.
Be honest and truthful with them.
Make it relevant to them, and explain why the meeting matters (I’d say if they can’t figure it out on their own, you’re not making it relevant enough).
Create community (can use Facebook, MySpace, etc., to connect them with your meeting).
Level status barriers: This one is interesting. He said ribbons serve to isolate the new from the experienced. He had a cool suggestion: Instead of ribbons, have people write down something like what their best rock and roll experience was, or something related to your meeting’s theme. Then people can talk about that; your experience and committee membership etc., will come out in conversation. You don’t need to wear it on your chest.
Shorter sessions, shorter meetings.

All of which left me thinking I’m a Why in a Boomer body. So I went up afterward and asked him what the difference is, really. We all lived through what they grew up with and want the same things. His answer was, I thought, profound and profoundly simple:

“The difference is you’ll both get bored, but you’ll put up with it. They’ll leave.”

Update: Chester had mentioned during the session that the PowerPoint he was showing us that we thought was way cool (oh yeah? Not me) is something he’d never show during his sessions for young people; he had something much more dynamic for them. While I was waiting to speak with him after the session, I overheard him say to someone that actually he has found it useful to show this version to kids, because they have told him that it helps them understand how their parents and other older people look at/feel about their generation. Talk about a reversal.

I may not be able to say it, but I am now a big fan of this new presentation format that four intrepid presenters tried out as an experiment in which the audience got to take part. (Here are some YouTube examples of the format in action). The facilitator, Joan Eisenstodt of Eisenstodt and Associates, was as much at sea as the rest of us, which made exploring the new format (do not ask me how to pronounce it!) really interesting, IMHO.

The presenters had never used this 20-slides-with-just-20-seconds-per-slide format before, and we in the audience empathized with them as they rushed to get to the end of the slide before the next one came up. In the debriefing after the presentations, the presenters talked about how uncomfortable, yet challenging, the format was to work with. One really didn’t like it, while the other three thought it was an interesting way to make them cull down their topic to just its key points. I think it worked best when it was focused very, very narrowly. The guy who was most frustrated by the format bit off a huge chunk of information to try to get across, rather than one or two ideas.

While we pretty much all agreed that it wouldn’t work for all situations (and it made one guy in the audience absolutely nuts because one of the presentations in particular was such a tease, and he was frustrated he couldn’t get more information), we also agreed that it could be fantastic for some applications.

A few we came up with:
-Have each panelist in a panel discussion use it to get their main points across. Then it could break up into a Q&A to flesh out what they said, or into roundtable discussions (I like the idea of giving each person at the roundtable 20 seconds to recap one point that resonated with them or that they wanted to elaborate on as a way to get the conversation started).

-Use it for a point-counterpoint discussion

-Use it to highlight different aspects of one topic. I like the idea of having one presenter try to evoke the emotion behind the topic, another the facts, another a humorous poke at it, etc. Try to hit people’s emotional buttons as well as drop kick some facts at them. I’d love to see this tried, anyway.

-Use it for promos on the Web site. We all agreed that it whet our appetites to hear more about the topics. Why not have presenters do a 6-minute and change quickie on their topic as videocasts online?

-Similarly, one person in the audience had the great idea of having six-minute pecha kuchas of each of the day’s sessions during the opening general session so people would get an idea of both the topics and the presenter’s personality/style. I love this, and put it down on my evaluation as a suggestion for PCMA to try next year.

-Also could be great for staff retreats, might encourage those who don’t usually speak up to get their ideas in.

-And for staff meetings, to keep things on track.

-I think that, if done well with just words and using the slides for visuals that serve as the punchline to the words, this could be a great teambuilding/we’re all in this together type of tool (one of the presenters did a funny presentation about the travails of meeting planning, with visuals and words on her slides. With a little more practice, this would be an awesome presentation to kick off a general session. Are you listening, PCMA?)

-Use it to get through the boring stuff you have to do, like the year in review, president’s address (though the crowd kind of laughed at the idea of telling the president s/he would have to keep it to six minutes and 20 seconds per slide).

-Exhibitors could use it somehow, either at their booths or, in an idea I thought was brilliant, at a pavillion at or near the entrance that ran continuously so people could drop by and get a quick hit on which booths they really wanted to go to. Also could be perfect for an online tradeshow promotion, or even for virtual tradeshows.

While not everyone was an enamored of the format as I was, the session itself was the most energizing, interesting thing I’ve gone to so far (barring evening activities, of course). I loved that the audience was really a part of the session, that we were exploring this new format together and deciding where, how, and if we would want to use it ourselves.

PCMA, please, please, I beg of you, do more of these kinds of sessions! Planners need safe places to explore new formats, and this was incredible.

OK, now I think I’m caught up until today, which is good because it’s time to get off the laptop and get over to the convention center for more sessions this morning. I’m looking forward to learning how to make my life more Google-licious from James Spellos of Meeting U to start.

From Phil Dourado:

“A Harvard Business School study looked at job satisfaction. Orchestra players came just below prison guards. Chamber musicians came in at number 1. What’s the difference? The presence of a conductor.”
Boston Philharmonic Conductor Ben Zander, speaking at Leaders in London 2007

Something to ponder not just when it comes to leadership, but also to how you conduct your meetings (pun intended&@8212;sorry about that). Satisfaction, not to mention learning, may be coming from something other than great keynoters and well-orchestrated events (oops, did it again). Another argument for open-space meetings?

Thanks to Johnnie Moore for the pointer.

Check out this great idea Jeffrey Cufaude used in a recent session he led at ASAE and The Center’s Great Ideas Conference:

I had the 60+ people in my session on Beyond Brainstorming: Facilitation Tips and Techniques for Generating Great Ideas crumple a sheet of paper into a snowball and pelt me with it when they got a good takeaway from the session.

Being trashed in public has never been so satisfying.

Why does that sort of thing never happen in sessions I go to?

Now that we’re starting (finally) to understand that lectures aren’t necessarily the best way to go for educational sessions, some people are confused over how to use the expertise of presenters and still get people participating. Check out Mickie Ropps ideas on how to make it work.

Tech guru Corbin Ball has written an interesting new article on how technology is impacting adult education. The upshot of many of his points is that the Web is making us more impatient with some of the typical meeting problems, like PowerPoint abuse and talking head lecturers&8212;it’s about time we just said no to this stuff! But new tech tools also are giving us lots of ways to augment learning through audience participation, from real-time Web-based audience polling on cellphones to blogging and Web archives of conference sessions. He doesn’t break any really new ground, but it’s a good wrap-up of what’s going on technologically and how it is shaping the learning environment.