I’d be remiss to not point out one of the eternal phrases to come out of this years Etech conference: “Rub the Felt.”

View the video, but be forewarned– it does involve Beck, Yahoo hack day, and puppets in compromising positions…

A lot of things were improved at Etech this year… particularly the logistics. The rooms were properly sized for sessions and much more accessible (no more gigantic geek gridlock between activities), the wireless was pretty much rock-solid, and there was adequate power available. But there is a lot of room for improvement.

As far as facilities go, an immediate and useful improvement would be to have spaces set aside with power and long tables for people to just gather and mingle. Almost everyone will agree that the best part of these conferences are the people you meet, and that often stems from backchannel, twitter, and other online interactions– providing space(s) to facilitate those meetings would be great.

More importantly, the presentations could be handled a lot better. I understand why a conference like this can’t go un-conference… I think that format is best for smaller, more intimate gatherings. But given that the presentation format remains the same (a long bit of presentation only then some Q&A), why not require that all the presenters make the presentation part of their sessions available a few weeks ahead of time online? Then the sessions themselves could be much more interactive– more like BOF discussions than presentations. I don’t need to fly thousands of miles to watch a narrated slideshow… give me that information in advance, then let’s get down to the business of talking about the ideas and material. That’s where the good stuff is. It’s very rare to want the Q&A part to end– it’s always too short, while the presentation section can seem endless. This would have the welcome side effect of ensuring that the promise of “I’ll make my slides available soon” comes to fruition.

This would also allow more time for those sessions where the presentation value is heightened either through the experience (watching the mathemagician live is a must) or through interactive presentation content (debates, panel discussions, group activities, etc).

Selection of speakers is also something that needs to be reconsidered. Putting together a conference of this size is difficult, and kudos to Rael and others for all the work they out into making sure Etech is a good experience. But there is just something wrong when the topic of the conference evolves– or even changes radically– and the speaker list remains 75% (maybe more) the same. It would be like holding a conference on networking and then one on gaming and having the same list of speakers.

A lot of innovation happens on the edge, and the edge is hard to reach, but that should be where Etech organizers really extend their search. The whole concept of focusing on “emerging” technology is problematic because there isn’t necessarily a gigantic amount of obvious, discontinuous, innovation happening every 12 calendar months. So in addition to reaching to the edge, don’t be afraid to follow up on past topics more closely. This doesn’t mean the same people, but the ideas. Last year, with the topic of “The Attention Economy” the way was paved to follow up with more cognitive and neural science, for instance, but instead we got abstractions about those fields from people who are not necessarily specialists. It’s the cyclical nature of emergence that people create something new and then what they have created is picked up by others, not just themselves.

On a very personal level, the representation of the educational technology sector was at an all time high and I think it might be time to recognize that the education area is an ever more important domain for technological happenings, particularly given the growth of participatory culture and youth-dominated social networks.

I always get a lot out of Etech, so these are not really complaints. But as technology evolves, so should the conference itself!

The domineering theme at this year’s Etech conference was magic, as in “sufficiently advanced technology.” And I mean domineering– except for a few sessions that were literally about magic and magicians, the theme turned out to be an elusive abstraction that many of the speakers had to really stretch (if not engage in embarrassing contortions) to reach. I see how the idea of the theme was attractive, but it really didn’t work very well.

There were two real themes: fun and games (aka pleasure and happiness) and the re-emergence of philosophy and humanities as an integral part of the technological progress. How’s that for abstraction?

Last year was about attention– a lot of the talks about gaming and game mechanics were about why we pay attention. Which leads inevitably to something we need a lot more of, and may see next year: cognitive science and neuroscience. We might pay attention to increase productivity, but ultimately we are pleasure-seeking organisms. We want happiness. We want satisfaction. Educational gamers tend to focus on the information, leading to game horrors like the Unreal Tournament based Chemistry solving game I once saw. We need to get back to remembering why people play games– and there is a lot of research out there that is very specific about those mechanics– and figure out how we can apply them rather than adopting top-level conventions based on appearance and sticking academic content in the midst of it.

I also enjoyed the resurgence of the humanities– and philosophy– into the discussion. I believe more than ever that we are in the middle of a culture-change that is on par with the emergence of science and rationalist thinking and then the industrial revolution and mechanical apparatus. Orienting ourselves to this radically changing environment in which we will have ubiquitous smart objects, ambient networking, promiscuous presence demands rethinking the very foundation of our thought and approach to the divide and connections between us and the world. “The New Animism” was an apt title– after many thousands of years of treating inanimate objects as if they were alive, then forging a solid divide between “us” and “things,” now we are faced with things that are much like us and our presence mediated by and represented by those very things. It’s fascinating.

In more than one way I was disappointed with this year’s conference, which I will write about later, not just to bitch, but with ideas for making it better. It might just be a function of having been to three of them; it might be an inevitable fact that innovative conferences have a lifecycle just like many other activities. But I still got a lot out of the experience, and while I will look closely at the schedule next year before opting to come again (some other conferences are looking pretty attractive: Web 2.0– or whatever it becomes, Supernova, TED– if I could wrangle an invite), it remains a good option. As usual, the most valuable aspects of the conference are the connections made with other attendees… and my yearly chance to let my inner geek free and mingle with others like me, which isn’t something I often get to do within the academic context.

The trend seems to be: managers and accountants and investors have PCs, the hackers have Macs, the Ubergeeks have Linux.

A nice analogy to flawed project management practices regarding innovation: it’s like assuming that since it takes a woman 9 months to have a baby, all you need is 9 women to have a baby in a month.

Broke a cardinal rule of wintertime travel from Alaska– never underestimate how hot it will feel even on a cool day in the Lower 48.

Another rule broken: never enter a ballroom with a mob of laptop wielding techies without at least a multi-outlet adapter if not my own extension cord… talk about “when geeks attack.” The outlets become like African watering holes with predator and prey.

Another nice project management thought: schedules are a shared hallucination.

Scott Berkun feels the word innovate is over used. So we’re now going to use the word shiny instead. Shiny happy people. A very shiny idea. Shinenfreude.

Worst presentation opener I’ve heard in a long time that turned out to be a compelling analogy: “imagine you have a pigeon in a box.”

In defiance of everything that is holy in America– land of the super-size fries, the extra jumbo burrito, and the mini-keg of soda– everything in hotels is shrinking. The bottles diet coke are 8 ounces instead of 12, the coffee maker is 3 cups instead of 4, I think they even have their own definition of a King-sized bed. What’s next, toilet paper the dimensions of adding machine tape?

Shouldn’t a medication that helps men stop having to go the bathroom dozens of times a day be called Flo-Min rather than Flo-Max?

Amy Jo Kim of ShuffleBrain provided a lot of good information. Unfortunately, her voice is one of those that almost immediately makes me want to go to sleep.

The most interesting thing in this session was a framework for applying various game mechanics (each of which she explained) to one’s own application, including: collecting, points, feedback, exchanges, customization, leader boards, content-sharing, accessible tech, and syndication.

Most of the participants formed into small groups to work through an application exercise using the framework and– surprise– there was an education group (in fact, I’ve met three higher ed folks here, which is two more than ever before) which was fun to watch, particularly when one of the people repeated a bunch of things I had talked to her about at lunch about presence, avatars, and community building. Clearly the education cabal is on the same page… and this should be useful at CDE.

The slides, which will hopefully be made available online, illustrated all of the mechanical concepts with existing applications. I’ll link to them if I can.

I’ll probably say more about this when I get a copy of the slides Scott (Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management and the upcoming The Myths of Innovation used, but the emphasis of this session was on being an innovator and integrating the art and creativity of innovation with the real world demands for schedules, milestones, and fiscal responsibility. So, my scattered notes of things that I found particularly interesting:
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The first day of Etech is tutorial day. My first session was supposed to be Kathy Sierra on “Creating Addictive User Experiences.” As you probably know (since the blog world is going crazy about it), Kathy had to cancel her session and her keynote because she has been receiving anonymous threats of death and sexual violence as well as some truly horrid attacks from a few other well known bloggers. There are plenty of entries out there, so I won’t get too far into it except to add my voice in support of Kathy and to counsel some caution before seeking excommunication of some of the bloggers who are tangentially involved, including one who has clearly and directly apologized for his role in facilitating the attacks by known entities.

Watching the responses reminds me a bit of the old Julian Dibbell article “Rape in Cyberspace” about the effects of sexual violence in a MOO community. These threats are much more “real” in some visceral way, but what makes me think of that article is wondering if the blog community will actually take some kind of generalized collective action against the bloggers involved. The death threats are criminal and rightly being dealt with by the police. But the other hateful words and images appear to be attributable to specific people– will they be “punished” by the A-Listers? Will they be delinked and stripped of their Google juice? Can the A-List echo chamber actually perform a punitive action?

I hope Kathy returns to blogging– if she doesn’t, she “lets them win” to some degree. It’s a sad irony that some of those involved are also loud complainers about the lack of female representation at tech conferences. Not much is uglier than people jealously savaging one of their own. Equally sad are those who wish to minimize the very real effects of violent sexual threats and imagery. How can those people look themselves in the mirror– or sit in front of their keyboards– if they really believe words to be that weightless and images that meaningless?