The closing keynote session in Pecha Kucha format was a first for me and the experience was instructive. Listening, it seemed people managed to get an awful lot into six minutes, even if they were reading their notes (though you just have to love Candy Schwartz meta-tweeting in real time from the stage). Talking, it seemed the minutes flew by much quicker before I could make my point. Maybe that IS the point — when we talk, we think we need more time to say what we want to say but we really don’t. Anyhow, it made me wonder if we should not ask all conference presenters to limit their talk to 10 mins and force the matter when they go longer. And maybe it’s time to ban powerpoint or limit people to 5 slides. I was surprised that the format did not create lots of questions among the panelists (especially when Gary Marchionini was pushing video as panacea) but all I can say is that we all felt it was time to hear from the audience. The questions, like the presentations, went everywhere, and I found a couple of them to be interesting in unexpected ways e.g., did our graduates who studied new media, digital diversity, and information filtering get jobs? Really, you have to ask? But the cheer that went up when I suggested, in response to Toni Carbo’s question of how ASIST might engage more international members, that we drop “American” from the name, really impressed me. Maybe it was the Canadian audience 😉 I’ve always believed would could keep the acronym and the journal but call the society something like the “Associated Society of Info Sci and Technology” or the “Association for the Study of Info Sci and Tech”, it doesn’t really matter as long as people keep using the term ASIST. Anything’s got to be better than SLA’s proposal to become ASKPro.
Not sure what was captured or will be made available, but it was a novel experience, and how many of those do you normally get at an ASIST conference?