While I’m looking forward to our Professional Development Day this coming Friday, I wouldn’t be being honest if I said that I wasn’t missing conferences. I’ll be attending from my laptop, alone in my office. I won’t be going to a large auditorium for a keynote, sitting next to friends, making lunch plans, geeking out in conversations with people I don’t usually get to see, making podcasts between sessions… there is a lot of appeal to engaging with connections beyond the sessions you go to at a conference.
For me, it usually includes meeting ‘digital friends’, people that I know from online/Twitter, whom I’ve never met before face-to-face or whom I have met, but less times than I can count on one hand. These connections invariably make the conference great for me. And not only do I get to meet these wonderful people, they tend to be people that like geeking out with me about what we’ve learned. If I go to a mediocre session, no problem, I can chat with someone who went to a better one. Go to a great session, and now I’ve got someone to share it with out loud, to help me solidify what I’ve learned.
But beyond the learning, there is the human connection. There is the opportunity to be with people I don’t get to see often but I enjoy their company. It’s about being with my tribe. I’ll enjoy the sessions on Friday, but I really look forward to a time in the future when I can once again go to a conference, pick up my swag, and connect with people that make the whole conference experience great!
Somehow I love the irony of the photo in this post. No one is sitting face-to-face…
You just single out what makes a conference “presential event” (can I say that?) important: connections. Strong and weak. Permanent or casual, but people…
Yeah, sollidify learning and trigger new waves and directions for it.
Funny insight about the image. I use a site called Pixabay to select a photo to go with my posts, and commit to selecting one in under 2 minutes… one way that I keep my morning writes timely. Perhaps I should have taken an extra 30 seconds choosing this one? 😃
I like your play on the idea of being ‘present’ at conferences. And while the connections are both strong and weak, I often feel many of those connections upgrade to stronger and not-as-weak.
I hope one day to meet you at a conference, it has been almost 15 years now that we have ‘known’ each other online and I feel we would enjoy the time being present with one another.
So nice to hear from you Claudia, thanks for commenting!