Lessons in learning: Don't do as I do, do as I say

Oh, the irony (well, I think it is irony)….

For the last few days I have been attending two teaching and learning conferences that were on at the same time in different parts of the UK (it was only due to the discovery of the Higgs Boson this week that I managed that). One of the conferences was being held at Newcastle – Learning and Teaching Conference 2012, and the other was being held in Manchester - HEA Annual Conference 2012 - for some of the presentations at Manchester have a look at http://www.policyreview.tv/video/714/5605.

Now obviously I've not been attending these conferences as it is not possible to be in two places at once (despite what my teaching timetable sometimes suggests). What I have been doing is following the conferences on Twitter using the hashtags #ncltl and #Heaconf12.

This method of 'being' at the conferences had worked well, I've managed to get a real feel for what is going on, plus I have picked up a number of useful ideas and links to papers, PDFs of presentation, and videos. However, one thing has been apparent and that is the conference on Twitter is only as good as the attendees that are tweeting - so I would like to say a big thank you to all the attendees that have taken the time to tweet.

Having followed the conferences two things struck me as being ironic, first was at the Newcastle Conference where they had a session on the use of social media and tweeting given by Jonathan Gallowa, Sue Dobson, David Peck, Franck Michel and Helen Lowther - and yet very few people tweeted about the session, or even about the conference in general.

The second was at Manchester where there seemed to be number of sessions on, for example, "Student expectations and the learning experience" and "Supporting staff to deliver student learning experiences of a lifetime" that were advocating a move away from traditional lectures to a move student focused form of learning. (This was summed up in a great tweet from @UoEChangeAgents which linked to a very interesting video - A Vision of Students Today, which has had over 4.5 million hits). And yet, it is fairly obvious that the material at the Manchester conference seemed to have been delivered as standard lectures.

So this brings me to the title of the piece "Don't do as I do, do as I say". Why is it at these two conferences they didn't appear to be following their own advice? Why wasn't the Newcastle conference engaging with social media after advocating its use? Why were the sessions at Manchester being delivered in a traditional lecture format?

If you have any thoughts on this then please give them below....

(If you are wondering about the backward question mark above it is symbol that has been proposed to mrk irony in text - wikipedia)