The sage on the stage…

I have been reading a website called Nature Bats Last (hat tip to Leaving Babylon). I have just stumbled across a bunch of excerpts that the author, Guy McPherson, had posted from a book he wrote on education.

The phrase which initially struck me was “the sage on the stage“.
And I inevitably tried to come up with similar memes –
“the tedium from the podium”
“the platitudes from the platform”
and (this is where I jumped the shark) “Lecter at the Lectern” (as in, brilliant, but cannibalistic).

Other ideas? ” Disempowerpoint” instead of powerpoint? Or maybe “energysuck”? Truth in advertising…

There’s heaps more meaty/tofu-y goodness in McPherson’s post, and across his site generally.

Anyway, at about the same time, my friend Viv McWaters was posting a couple of really interesting posts about education and play and interactivity. They are here and here.
And a chap called Adrian Segar commented…. Where to begin? First, where has this man been all of my life??
He has a wonderful concept of “Conference 1.0 versus Conference 2.0” Normally I run several miles from web analogies that have been shoe-horned into real life/meat space, but Segar is absolutely onto something, and has anyway been doing his “Conferences that Work” shtick since before the seriesoftubes really got going.

You MUST go and read his stuff. The two posts I’ve read so far have been very helpful. One’s the conference 1.0 thing linked to above and the other is about the anatomy of name badges (make them big, print the agenda on the back, stick them in a re-usable and then recyclable plastic pocket with a lanyard).

[Edit: I had mis-spelled Mr Segar’s name throughout this piece. Apols]