DS106Radio Summer camp – the partial attention conference

I attend quite a few online conferences, and while I appreciate the ease with which you can attend these, they are often victims of everyday work creep – you’ll be reading emails, responding to queries, or dropping out of the conference to attend an online meeting. I always feel guilty about this, and not giving quite the same attention I might in-person (mind you, most conference audiences are looking at their phones and doing the same anyway). I think Tony Hirst used to talk about partial attention during conferences (although I can’t find anything now), where you split your focus between online, which might be online chatter about the talk you are in, and perking up for interesting bits in the talk.

On the whole though, conferences and events are designed around the principle of full attention. What might an event look like with partial attention in mind from the outset? Well, I think it’d look a lot like the DS106Radio Summer Camp, which Maren and the Reclaim Team have been working on. It’s an internet radio ‘conference’, (that isn’t really the right term but let’s stick with it as something we can approximate our experience to). This means there are no slides, no visual focus. It is streamed and recorded so you can listen to it while doing other things – that could be work, or walking the dog or exercising or driving. It is specifically designed for you to participate on the periphery. You can get more involved, interacting via social media, and even calling in on some shows, but there’s no need to feel guilty if you don’t.

I also think it prompts people to do different types of sessions, no relying on Unsplash pics in Powerpoint now. Have a look at this schedule to see what I mean. I’ve got my eye on Terry Green’s “Online Learning could never hip hop like this” and Tom Woodward’s “AI Cryptid Hunting” sessions, but they all look great. I’m doing some vinylcasting around 30 years of ed tech for one session (Thursday 15th, 10-11 ET, 15.00-16.00 BST), so you can tune in to hear the crackly glory of vinyl tenuously linked to the history of ed tech.

It’s free, you can do other things at the same time without feeling bad and it’ll be fun. Why wouldn’t you register? You can listen along on DS106Radio even if you don’t register, but it’s worth doing so as you’ll get emails with the schedule and recordings.

When I was a child there used to be an advert for the Milky Way bar where the catch line was “the snack you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite“. While this may have been dubious nutritional advice, I think it’s a perfect way of thinking about the DS106 Radio Summer Camp – “the conference you can partially attend without feeling guilty.”

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