I wish more in-person conferences would adopt shorter talks. There’s a big difference between what I can cover in ten minutes and one hour, there’s very little difference between ten and twenty minutes. For academic conferences, I’ve found that I usually get more out of lightning talks than full-length talks. Neither is a substitute for reading the paper, both are adverts for the paper, but a two or five-minute talk is enough to distill the key points from a paper and convince me that it would be interesting to read how they got there. A 20-minute talk is enough to pad that with some rambling.
My favourite bit of conferences these days is the poster session. I really like that some conferences are asking every accepted paper to give a poster. The poster lets me spend a minute looking at the high-level summary of the paper and then talk to the authors. That’s far more valuable than any talk.
Online at least means you can skip bits of talks. Pre-recording talks for people to watch on the flights and then making the entire in-person conference a poster session with round-table discussions would probably be my ideal.
In my experience pre-recording just means nobody would watch the talks! The nice thing about conferences at least for me is pre-allocating the whole day to go sit in various talks and take chance on something new. Pre-allocating the whole day to watch youtube videos to prepare for talking to people just doesn’t have the same vibe; it faces the same problem as MOOCs. You can probably get a whole college-level education from all the MOOCs available online now but the attrition rate is astounding.
While I agree that online conferences differ from the on-site ones, I think that what’s not taken into consideration is that most of on-site conferences are not accessible to a lot of people and tend to be quite expensive. It’s fun that the author has a choice to decide which one to attend, many people don’t have that choice and still want to participate to conferences.
I wish more in-person conferences would adopt shorter talks. There’s a big difference between what I can cover in ten minutes and one hour, there’s very little difference between ten and twenty minutes. For academic conferences, I’ve found that I usually get more out of lightning talks than full-length talks. Neither is a substitute for reading the paper, both are adverts for the paper, but a two or five-minute talk is enough to distill the key points from a paper and convince me that it would be interesting to read how they got there. A 20-minute talk is enough to pad that with some rambling.
My favourite bit of conferences these days is the poster session. I really like that some conferences are asking every accepted paper to give a poster. The poster lets me spend a minute looking at the high-level summary of the paper and then talk to the authors. That’s far more valuable than any talk.
Online at least means you can skip bits of talks. Pre-recording talks for people to watch on the flights and then making the entire in-person conference a poster session with round-table discussions would probably be my ideal.
In my experience pre-recording just means nobody would watch the talks! The nice thing about conferences at least for me is pre-allocating the whole day to go sit in various talks and take chance on something new. Pre-allocating the whole day to watch youtube videos to prepare for talking to people just doesn’t have the same vibe; it faces the same problem as MOOCs. You can probably get a whole college-level education from all the MOOCs available online now but the attrition rate is astounding.
Glad to see https://zulip.com/ chat advocated in this post! It’s a great piece of software (that I’ve been using for more than 6 years)
While I agree that online conferences differ from the on-site ones, I think that what’s not taken into consideration is that most of on-site conferences are not accessible to a lot of people and tend to be quite expensive. It’s fun that the author has a choice to decide which one to attend, many people don’t have that choice and still want to participate to conferences.
Doesn’t the author cover this in the last paragraph, which is about the advantage of “Affordability”?
…and also the previous point the author makes about “Accessibility” (transcription of talks can be provided since they’re available beforehand).