The SYNERGY 3.0 Virtual Conference: to Infinity and Beyond

by Mark Draper, Ph.D., Chief Education Officer, Knowledge Media, Inc.

 A prominent and distinguished academician, scholar, researcher and author, Dr. Draper  earned his first degree in psychology from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana.  The author of over a dozen books and dozens of scholarly articles, many of his speeches have been selected for publication in Vital Speeches of the Day. Former Chairman of English and Humanities at the University of Charleston, he is considered an authority on high technology in higher education. He currently serves as Chief Education Officer of Knowledge Media, Inc., developers of Synergy 3.0 KnowledgewareTM. The Synergy 3.0 system is featured at Booth # 2346 at the ASTD International Conference and EXPO, May 31-June 6, 2002 in New Orleans.

As an enthusiastic early adapter, Buzz Lightyear would agree with me that traditional conferences need a stiff jolt of high technology. Both Buzz and I regard conventional conferences as magnificent failures. Each year, U.S. businesses spend tens of billions of dollars a year on them. Unfortunately, nearly all of this money is wasted.

Everything about conferences is wonderful, except for one thing. True, they are exciting, stimulating, satisfying. You interact with new people, friends, and colleagues. You learn all kinds of new ideas, innovations, tips, tools, techniques.

Everything about them is wonderful. Except for one thing: the results. Because after several exciting and exhausting information-intensive days, you go home. And you forget almost everything you learned.

The answer to these problems of the traditional conference is to combine the best of the conference with the latest knowledge management, learning management and e-learning technologies, to produce a virtual conference. By combining these technologies with the traditional knowledge assets of a conference, we can realize a partnership between human and machine that promotes organizational learning, and creates a permanent, evolving and dynamic knowledge asset and community of practice.

Traditional Conferences: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

 As professional trainers, we all know that just one day after hearing a lecture, typically, our students retain only about 5 percent of what they heard. A conference simply has to be even more inefficient. After two or three days of running around madly, trying desperately to take in everything, we surely suffer from information overload and take in even less.

 It seems reasonable to estimate that maybe 98% of what we are exposed to in a normal conference never becomes part of our intellectual armament. Sadly, as great as they are, traditional conferences are monumentally inefficient as a mode of communicating information. Conferences are enormously exciting events, but come with a number of inherent design flaws.

 First is their contribution to info-glut.  In the space of just a few days,  one is subjected to a non-stop barrage of confusing, conflicting, buzz -- information and sensory overload.   What is great about conferences is that they are informationally intense. That is also their chief defect.

I agree with Mae West’s observation that too much of a good thing is wonderful -- and conferences are lavish banquets for the brain.   The problem is that conventional conferences -- as stimulating as they are -- simply are poorly designed from the point of view of learning efficiency. They are too much for our poor, linear, one-thing-at-a-time brains, with their notorious inefficiency in transferring information from short term to long-term memory.

We carry away from these conferences only a tiny fragment of all we are exposed to.

Real world conferences are very wasteful and inefficient.  At these huge extravagant banquets, everyone eats all they possibly can,  but no matter what, at the end, the vast majority of the food is thrown away.

We believe our new experiment in form can change all this. Beyond that, we think we can present information in such a way that we actually change the nature of the conference, redefine what a conference is. Inevitably, the old style conference must end.  Future conferences must become launching pads for great intellectual adventures.

The second design flaw of the conference is that it ends. It gushes out information and interaction like a fire hydrant on a Brooklyn summer street.  Then, it just stops. A big, busy event, it booms and buzzes for days and then suddenly stops dead in its tracks. We propose to make it immortal, or at least limitless.

We will give it unlimited life. This new form means that if you missed something or forgot something while you were down there in New Orleans, no problem, you go back and get it without leaving your desktop.

The third problem with conferences is that they are necessarily centered on individual presenters, the “sage on the stage.” As long as you have a great presenter, this is good, but it cannot possibly be great because this model ignores the wealth of knowledge about the topic spread out among the practitioners listening to the expert hold forth.   As a collective consciousness, the audience knows more than the presenter, yet the information flow is one-way and from the one to the many.

In contrast, the virtual conference unlocks the composite wisdom of all participants.

With the virtual conference, instead of just learning just what each presenter has to say, we get to learn what everyone has to say. Here is how that works.   First, we present the best presenters of the real world conference.  Then we make it possible for everyone to react to the presentations using email to post to a threaded discussion.  Then we preserve this email as a permanent discussion. In essence, it is the equivalent of a thread from a list  serve.

The virtual conference offers something terrific that no audience sitting in a room has ever experienced.  What happens with the virtual conference is that people don’t just get to react to the presentation; they can also respond to the reactions to the presentation!  The presentations and the exchange they spawned are a virtual version of a conference session. But we believe they can be much more.

The forms of the past have always exercised a strong and limiting hindrance on new technologies. Thus, the first published books, like the Gutenburg Bible, looked just like the handwritten manuscripts they  replaced and early movies tended to be stage plays recorded on film from a camera sitting in the audience.

We are resolved to harness the full potential of the new medium by using it not as it has been in the past but as it is capable of being used in the future.

As the web allows the quick and easy storage and retrieval of material, we included additional material to enrich and enliven the discussion. We included background information: each presenter is identified through a link. Additionally, we have constructed a forum for each topic. Here you can read and respond at your convenience 24/7, following a threaded discussion.

Businesses desperately need to get more bang for the bucks they spend on conferences.

Now they can.  In light of advances in technology, we that it is time to rethink how we learn, create, and communicate our ideas. We feel a need to go far beyond traditional presentations and publications.

So, at Knowledge Media, Inc., we have launched a new experiment in form to explore a new way for teachers and trainers to use new technologies. This new form is known as a virtual conference, but what we envision is something much greater than simply a cyberspace version of a conference.

The core of this experiment in form is centered around what we judged to be the best talks and presentations made at the ASTD International Conference and EXPO. Such presentations are normally the alpha and omega of a conference. But we are pushing the “omega” out to new limits. Using the virtual conference module of our Synergy 3.0 knowledgeware, we are  transforming  the conference from an event into a process and continuously evolving, dynamic knowledge asset.

The result is a powerful new communications tool that is like an ordinary conference that has died and gone to Heaven.  It is immortal, dynamic, and intensely interactive. It becomes a seamless component of the organizational knowledge domain.

 "Virtual conference,” is a dreadfully inadequate term, because it suggests a mere simulation of a real world event when, in fact, it is much more.

 What is a "Virtual Conference?"

Indeed, at the most basic level, a virtual conference is simply an emulation of a conventional real world conference. Like any conference, it provides information, interaction, entertainment, and a sense of participation and community. With the right platform, it is an interactive virtual conference environment that closely emulates the “feel” of the actual physical event.

But our virtual conference is no more a mere “virtual conference” than a Ferrari is a “horseless carriage.” It is a powerful new learning, communications, and knowledge management tool that transcends the ordinary conference.  An ordinary conference is to a virtual conference as a shot put is to a Frisbee.

Only this Frisbee, you can freeze in mid-air and walk around it and examine it, discussing its aerodynamics with colleagues all around the world. You can click on it and access everything ever written or said about it.

An ordinary conference is an event, a one‑time affair. You go, you experience it, and it's over.   A virtual conference is not a single time-constrained event but a limitless process, an ongoing, interactive, dynamic and growing undertaking offering limitless learning and sharing opportunities.

A virtual conference offers enormous value. In our implementations of virtual conferences using Synergy 3.0 knowledgeware, we have found that very typically the greatest value is not in the presentation itself but in the comments, insights, and suggestions that others make. Thanks to the sophisticated software that supports the virtual conference, the presentation becomes merely the beginning of an ongoing conversation and endless learning adventure.

That the greater value is in the accumulating contributions rather than the initial presentation is easy to understand. After all, none of us knows as much as all of us know. Today, so much is known that even the world’s greatest authority on a topic cannot know it all. 

The virtual conference makes the authority’s presentation not the last word, but the first. The initial communication serves as the nucleus around which other ideas and insights crystallize. Threaded discussions, chat rooms, streaming audio and video, web seminars, links to other information rich sites, all these form expanding layers of knowledge. 

You can ask questions and trade opinions in the middle of a talk or afterwards. You are not forced into trying to drink from a firehose. You can take your time to reflect on new material. The quality of your thought and analysis improves as you interact with new ideas.        

Why a Virtual Conference?

Like a conventional conference, a virtual conference lets you:

·        Participate in presentations,

·        Talk with other participants,

·        Look over exhibits,

 But that's not all.  Participants can also:

 ·        Download and print white papers or the text of presentations

·        Follow up links,

·        Capture and react to others' responses,

·        Access anything in the conference 24/7 from desktop or laptop.

·        Never lose or miss anything

 You can have your cake and eat it too: you never have to miss a valuable talk because of scheduling conflicts.  You can pause the speaker in mid-sentence with a click of the mouse or back him up to listen again.  You don’t have to ride an airplane to participate.

 A Typical Virtual Conference

Knowledgeware with virtual conferencing capability offers great flexibility. You can organize a virtual conference as you will. A good example of how to organize a virtual conference is the one KMI is hosting for ASTD based on its 2002 International Conference and EXPO in New Orleans, May 31-June 6.

 By combining knowledge management, learning management, and e-learning components with the traditional knowledge assets of a conference, we can realize a partnership between human and machine that promotes organizational learning, and creates a permanent, evolving and dynamic knowledge asset.

 The centerpiece of the conferences is the Presentations section. Here participants can view, listen to, or read new presentations and gain full access to archived presentations. Using threaded discussion and chat, participants can respond, contribute and critique the presentation, thereby adding knowledge and value to the presentation.

In the Resources section, participants can learn more about the conference topic, or they can join a Discussion Group, learn from their peers, and offer their own observations. 

The Links section provides a complete list of sites related to the conference topic and a

Toolbox section features free downloads related to conference topics. 

Other features that the Synergy 3.0 platform offers in the interactive conference module are:

·        real time interactive webcasts

·        archiving of questions and answers

·        permanent archiving and search capability for discussion forums for each speaker

·        chat rooms with database archiving of chat activity

·        article comments

·        Follow‑up updates and alerts via e-mail

·        audio/video with power point

·        research function across all functions

·        exhibits area where members can access promotional materials and exhibitor content

·        ADL SCORM compliant so that all knowledge assets become standards-based reusable knowledge objects

For the ASTD ICE 2002 conference, we are using all of the features of Synergy 3.0 to try to a spectacular emulation of the conference itself. Hopefully, we have captured the "feel" of the conference, the sights and sounds and sense of place of New Orleans and the Vieux Carre.

In summary, the virtual conference:

 Instead of being a one‑time event, the conference becomes a continuing source of  knowledge and a continuing revenue stream for the sponsor.

All these things make the virtual conference an exciting phenomenon, providing not only access to  the proceedings, speakers, and exhibits, but also opportunities for enhanced and continuing interaction with  speakers and other conferees.

 The Practicality of the Virtual Conference               

I hope I have demonstrated here that the virtual conference offers great promise as a communications, learning, and knowledge management tool. I hope that you see the value that it offers the individual and the organization.

To me, of all the exciting features of the virtual conference, the most exciting is its affordability.  Today, thanks to the advance of technology, knowledgeware like Synergy 3.0 makes it possible for virtually any small business to sponsor a virtual conference and make a real world difference in the adventure of learning.

I am convinced that in the dynamic flux of today's knowledge economy, the virtual conference is destined to play a vital role. I hope that this brief overview suggests a way to make the virtual conference serve as a vital part of the dynamic and cumulative knowledge base that can make your organization a center of excellence, a true step towards infinity and beyond.

For more information on virtual conferences and Synergy 3.0, visit http://www.knowledge-media.com.