I have struggled with event related posts in the past, for example, my old blog was largely made up of blow-by-blow webinar accounts with little commentary. However, I do believe in the value of disseminating the outcomes of attending events (especially when you are doing it ‘on the clock’). The only time this ever led to a problem was when some ex-colleagues queried the logic of sending me to an international conference at a time of cutbacks – I took this as a sign to encourage a push for more transparency over internal budgets, priorities and communication.
In my current role, I have setup an in-house wiki for all members of the L&D community in my part of the business to feed back on external events and training. As a result of this, I now have a clear place for writing outcomes aimed at my colleagues/organization.
This has led me to think about how best to write my event reports…inspired by the audience/context/content paradigm of LINE’s presentation at GOSHLIC2013 I wrote that post in four parts:
- “Background” (to set the context of the event)
- What was “new to me” (content of most value for this blog when I come back to review it for my own development – the primary audience being myself but also anyone else who comes here)
- “For us” (a section exclusively for the in-house wiki as a summary of major outcomes – internal L&D audience)
- “Longer narrative/explanation of the day’s sessions” (full details of events for anyone who happens to want to read it or has their interest piqued by 2/3).
This seemed to work okay for the first try with GOSHLIC:
Don’s tweet leading to one of the busiest days of this blog’s life which, combined with the very popular LinkedIn post, has seen a lot more traffic come this way than normal.
For anyone who has subscribed to the RSS feed as a result, thank you and do let me know what you think of the event report approach.
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 