back to knowledge base menu

Much of the breakthrough knowledge at the 2007 Professional Education Conference-Europe focused on the Learning Meeting—on how adults learn, and what meeting professionals can do to maximize the learning experience at every event they touch.

While much of the discussion at PEC-Europe entered on the tools and techniques that contribute to onsite learning, participants also heard about the broad societal challenges their clients are likely to face in the near future. Many emerging trends suggest an unprecedented need for collaborative learning and creative solutions, all pointing to an increasingly important role for learning meetings and the professionals who organize them.

Read the whole wite paper

"Meetings are an extremely complex phenomenon where many aspects of everyday
life play a part and come together. Meetings are often inefficient and expensive. Factors of meeting success relate mostly to the extent to which the meeting expectations that exist beforehand are achieved. Meeting preparation, control and the willingness to contribute are central. Meetings should be balanced and not be monopolized by one or two dominant people as this inhibits the participation of others and the creativity to generate ideas or solutions. Technology has improved meetings ever since the invention of telegraphy in the 1850's. It was shown that the ability to interact remotely is thus far perhaps one of the greatest technological achievements for the meeting process. Several applications have been shown that are benecial to meetings, before, during and after their occurrence."

This is just one of the findings of Rutger Rienks.

Read the full paper

Music’s power has been both recognised and documented, certainly since the time of the Ancient Greeks. The power of face-to-face meetings, as opposed to communication by various other means - even aided by a battery of technological developments – is also widely accepted. 

The social and cultural identity of teenagers is largely intertwined with their music; music is capable of providing joy and interest right through to the grave, soothing the sick and enhancing the lives of the elderly. Why, therefore, is music not extensively used before, during and after meetings?  This paper explores the effects which music can have in context such as meetings, and in its presentation, practical demonstrations will be given, and sound examples played, from a wide variety of genres.

Read the whole paper

ABSTRACT of a PAPER to be published:

The typical conference is brimming with PowerPoint presentations that leave very little time for participant involvement. Students of learning have long abandoned the transfer model that underlies this massive show of one-way communication. We propose an alternative theory of the conference as a forum for learning, mutual inspiration and “human co-flourishing”. We offer five design principles that specify how conferences may involve participants more and hence increase their learning. In the research and development effort reported here, our team collaborated with conference organizers in Denmark to introduce a variety of simple learning techniques related to the design principles at thirty real conferences of some 100-200 participants each. We present twelve of these techniques and the data evaluating them and conclude that by spending a fraction of the time at a conference on involving participants in various forms of reflective conversation and knowledge sharing, conference organizers may enhance the satisfaction and learning-related outcomes experienced by their participants.

(45) 28 95 95 01

Ib Ravn and Steen Elsborg, Learning Lab Denmark, The Danish University of Education, Copenhagen

www.dpu.dk/fv

The Magical number Seven, Plus or Minus Two

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information is a 1956 paper by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller. In it Miller showed a number of remarkable coincidences between the channel capacity of a number of human cognitive and perceptual tasks. In each case, the effective channel capacity is equivalent to between 5 and 9 equally-weighted error-less choices: on average, about 2.5 bits of information. Miller hypothesized that these may all be due to some common but unknown underlying mechanism.

READ MORE :

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two : Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information

http://en.wikipedia.org/

wiki/George_A._Miller