This may be about publishing, but I think it applies just as well to meetings, and any other type of learning for that matter. (Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.)

I just read this quote from Jamie Notter and wow did it ring for me: “when you help me to love this whole community, you will open the door to possibilities not yet imagined.” While he’s talking about ASAE’s Great Ideas conference and the Young Association Professionals group, this should be the goal of every conference organizer — to help attendees love the whole community.

Once again I find myself swearing that one of these years I will make it to Great Ideas.

People think they’re being polite and attentive by turning their cellphones to “vibrate” mode during conference sessions, but that isn’t enough to keep their attention. According to Fast Company, the sound a vibrating phone makes is the third most-addictive noise there is (behind only a baby’s giggle and the Intel dum dum dum dum). As the article says, “When we switch our phone into silent mode, we think it cannot be heard. But the vibration has its own sound, and almost immediately the test subjects stopped whatever they were doing to attend to their phones.”

The whole article is well worth a read, especially to those of us who wonder where marketing will go next. Which should be every conference planner, because no one puts more time, money, and research into how people learn and how to make learning stick than marketers. Now that they’re starting to look into how to reach people through more than just their visual sense, here’s hoping we do as well (and we’re not even selling anything other than good ideas, right?).

While the rise of social media also gave rise to the level of trust we put in the great unwashed (aka, friends, peers, and other people just like us), that now seems to be leveling off, according to this LA Times article. It looks at the Edelman Trust Barometer’s latest findings:

According to the survey, since 2008 the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of consumer and business information dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%. Similarly, in the past year, the number of people who view peers as credible spokespersons also slipped. Even more strikingly, however, after a precipitous decline earlier in the decade, informed consumers have regained trust in traditional authorities and experts.

Blame the increasing professionalization of social networking sites as companies have climbed on board, and way too much irrelevant noise from just about everyone (myself included — sorry!). Also from the article:

After indulging the thoughts and opinions of anyone who was “just like me,” it seems that people are now looking for a firmer guarantee of clarity, objectivity and accuracy.

I’d like to add to the mix that social media has also spawned a whole new crop of experts who have risen above the “just like me” level while still feeling more like a friend and peer than an aloof expert (think Jeff Hurt, for just one of many in this business).

Does this mean that people now will translate this to the face-to-face environment, with participants wanting fewer peer-to-peer sessions, unconferences, and roundtables and more expert-delivered lectures? Geez, I hope not, but it does make me wonder. (Thanks to Lisa for the pointer!)

Jeff’s at it again over at Midcourse corrections, putting out yet another great post. This one is his top 10 myths about adult learning at conferences. Commenters have added a few more; it’s starting to remind me of something I wrote ages ago: My top 10 reasons for bolting.

The funny thing is that a lot of the myths he’s busting aren’t really myths — I mean, does anyone actually think that learning can only occur while people are seated? Common sense says otherwise. I think that’s just a crowd-control thing we got pounded into us from kindergarten on and just don’t bother to change because, well, it’s practical to jam 2,000 people into a ballroom and have them sit quietly while someone yaps at them. It’s a lot harder, and likely a lot more expensive and labor-intensive, to create a learning environment that works for all the different types of learners represented among those 2k folks. So we don’t do it.

Ditto for several other of the “myths” he points to. I guess my follow-on question would be: What are 10 ways to combat the status quo and create better learning environments at our meetings? Keeping in mind, of course, that some of the most ardent fans of the status quo are likely your organization’s leadership and your attendees.

Once again, Jeff Hurt hits it out of the ballpark with this post: Four Principles For Planning Brain-Friendly Annual Meetings. Not only are his suggestions things I’ve been stumping for forever, but he includes some great, if a bit gross, metaphors to hammer his points home (how does a goose being raised to provide pate liver resemble today’s meeting attendee? Read his post to find out).

Just now finally getting caught up on my RSS feeds, and ran across this must-read post by (who else?) Jeff Hurt: 8 Ways to Provide Remarkable, Purple Cow, Unique Conference Experiences.

Read it. Then do it. On behalf of your attendees, I beg you.

When in doubt, map it out? Hey, it worked for Matt Moore at actKM 2009, a knowledge management conference. After hitting the wall on a few other ideas on how to make his session more interactive, he says:

Then the thought struck me. Get the participants to draw maps. So that’s what I did. Six tables, six maps. In each case I asked them to map out knowledge management as an imaginary nation and then identify who else this nation might interact with (through trade, war or something else).

The results were really interesting, and made me wish that someone would do something like this for sessions I go to. Johnnie Moore, who I got the link to Matt’s post from, adds,

I have sometimes found getting people to express their ideas through a medium or metaphor seems to unleash more refreshing, often less refined/polite ideas and observations. It’s as if it bypasses some of our defenses against stepping into riskier territory.

And then goes on to tell what happened when he used a similar technique for a meeting he was facilitating. It’s fascinating.

Did you know that sipping a hot cup of tea might make you literally feel more warmly toward the person you’re with? That’s among the thoughts proposed in “Thinking Literally: The surprising way that metaphors shape your world”, in today’s Boston Globe. Could this have implications for meetings? Oh yeah. And there’s now research to back it up, at least preliminarily. From the article:

A new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how ”warm” or ”cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how ”weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.

What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature–or position, texture, size, shape, or weight–abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.

Go read the article. It is fascinating. (And the English major in me feels vindicated, too! Or maybe it’s only because I was drinking coffee when I read it that I feel so hot for this idea?)

During the ASAE and The Center annual meeting, I ran into a situation that made me wonder if social media actually is making us antisocial, at least with the people we’re actually in the room with.

So I asked Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder of Principled Innovation LLC, and the association community’s leading voice for innovation, what exactly might be up with that. Here’s a podcast of our conversation, which did not go anywhere near where I thought it would, but ended up with Jeff asking us to question our assumptions about just what “social” really means these days, and how meeting organizers can rethink their meetings to be more adaptive to our changing ways of sociability.

It’s a touch shy of 20 minutes long–I hope you find it as fascinating as I did.