IDEAfest, Democamp offer alternative to lecture format

Two recent events on campus showcased condensed presentations and social media in an effort to diversify the spread of knowledge

To the current generation of Internet users, a little means a lot.

Technology and social media have placed a growing impetus on brevity in communication among today’s university crowd, and the University of Alberta is no exception to the trend.

Two events took place on campus over the past week—IDEAfest 2009 and Edmonton Democamp 6—have adopted this less-is-more philosophy with increasing popularity.

“The face of how we share information is changing,” said former U of A Students’ Union President Michael Janz, who organized last Saturday’s inaugural IDEAfest over Facebook.

“IDEAfest is a chance for students and citizens in the community to come and present ideas with one another. Every half hour there’s three different rooms with three different presenters, and they rotate, so you’re able to go to a subject that interests you and get a little taste of it, and then go to something else,” he added.

Over 100 participants attended IDEAfest to watch U of A students and other Edmontonians give 30-minute presentations on subjects ranging from breast cancer research to atheism to improvisation techniques.

“This is an opportunity, like Wikipedia, where everyone has the opportunity to come back and to share their knowledge with one another,” Janz said.

“This is all grassroots; no one’s being paid. It’s all volunteer, anyone can participate, you don’t have to be a PhD.”

The second such event to hit campus, Democamp Edmonton 6, is a gathering that takes place about every two months and gives local tech entrepreneurs the opportunity to demonstrate new projects such as software applications and websites.

About 150 people gathered in the Engineering Teaching and Learning Complex (ETLC) for Wednesday night’s event, which saw five presenters give overviews of their work for ten minutes each, followed by a brief round of questions.

“It’s kind of a range between just hacky things that people have thrown together and thought were cool projects or were working on on the side, to major projects like startups and [...] big, large project launches,” explained Cam Linke, one of the event’s organizers.

Both events made heavy use of social media tools like Facebook, wikis, and blogs to advertise the events and generate discussion.

“Different people use different segments of social media to find out their news, so some people use Facebook, some people use Twitter, so for us we’ve kind of had to hit each one,” Linke said.

The condensed form of knowledge-sharing exhibited by IDEAfest and Democamp seems to be catching on with the university and wider Edmonton community, reflecting more general changes in the way people receive information.

“I think it’s mirroring what’s happening in print. We go from a week-long process to write a two-and-a-half page article that appears in a physical paper, to something a little shorter and more concise on a blog, to now things on Twitter and Facebook that are even shorter than that,” said Mack Male, a speaker and organizer of the event. During the presentation, Male demonstrated his new local event aggregator, shareedmonton.ca.

“We see this progression from really large amounts to smaller amounts so people can consume more easily and so that they can share, which is the other thing I think that’s important about it,” he continued.

According to Janz, these forms of mini-presentations probably won’t replace traditional lectures anytime soon, but are gaining in popularity for the sheer breadth and diversity of what they are able to expose
students to.

“I don’t think maybe this will be the death of hour-and-a-half long lectures. I think though this is the educational equivalent of the wine tasting, where we get to try a little bit of everything and people can find out subjects that they’ve never encountered,” he said.