One down, two to go…
it’s 6:30-ish pm, and I’m killing time waiting for my sound check for tomorrow’s keynote, and thought I’d do a quick brain dump of today’s tutorial session.
Today’s session was “Alan Page: On Testing” – which is a pretty wide open topic. For the slide handouts, I slapped together slides from a bunch of things I could talk about, but my plan all along was different. In a perhaps risky move, I decided that I’d take the first 10 minutes of the session to collect as many questions from the audience as I could, then I loosely grouped the questions and put together a few impromptu talks to cover the answers. I took questions as I went, plus a few ad-hoc questions at the end, and filled the 3.5 hour session.
The problem with this sort of thing is that it exhausts me. I’m wiped out, and I’ve lost half of my voice, but I should be good to go for my keynote in the morning.
The other drawback of this sort of session (and the few pieces of feedback I glanced at reflect this) is that this sort of session is polarizing, Attendees either got a ton of value, or little value – comments like “Love the unstructured format – tons of great information” were contrasted with, “Didn’t like the unstructured format – too much information”. I’m not too concerned, since the conference circuit isn’t really my thing, but I feel a little bad I didn’t set up the people in the “don’t like unstructured” group a little better with expectations.
More tomorrow after my (structured-ish) keynote.
Wow – a 3.5 hour session? With two more to go?
Maybe the other sessions need to include more pictures, and less talking.
(I bet the session was good, if exhausting)
Today’s session is just an hour, and Friday’s is a panel discussion, so it shouldn’t be so bad.