Saturday Scholarship

Go ahead: click it.

The first sentence is meta. The second sentence tells us that the rest of the paragraph will be somewhat meta as well, and that “the good part” of this post will be coming later. I got the idea for this post from an excellent Friday Thirsty posed by Beaker Ben. I was about to answer the thirsty, but then realized that I was going in a new direction. It was BB himself who made me more aware that sometimes, things in the comments go off in a direction that could merit a whole new post. Now, it being Saturday, I’m not going to do another Thirsty; that would be insane. I could be telling you again what I’m not going to do, but I’m not doing that, because I couldn't possibly pull that off. Instead, I’m telling you how this post does not pose a question per se; rather, it invites a response. That’s completely different. Also, I’m a compleat n00b to Blogger, so I’m trying out this jump thingie, which should appear in the next line when this post is on the home page...
...but not when you’re looking at the post by itself.

So, now, here is the call for your scholarly response, should you choose to heed it:

1 - Go to Beaker Ben’s Friday Thirsty and add your contribution.

2 - Come back here and submit an abstract to be published in the conference proceedings.

I'm in a STEM field, so I've done mine in that manner.

Session 5. Alternative Pedagogical Edutainment: Scholarly Heuristics In Teaching

A-201. A super-flipped workshop promotes learning without facilitator intervention.
Hep, O.P., Bryndza, G., Panquehue, S.V., and Stilton, A.
Background: Ever since the printing press was invented, content delivery in the classroom has undergone radical transformation. Just as the book rendered the lecture obsolete, and the videocassette in turn rendered the book obsolete, even newer modalities have led to ever-improving learning outcomes. Yet the typical professional educational society meeting itself remains mired in the centuries-old lecture format. Some presentations don’t even employ overheads or carousel slides, and/or merely comprise readings from prepared scripts; others feature a panel of experts arguing with each other before a passive audience.
Hypothesis: A super-flipped conference workshop, with participant as presenter, will increase both facilitator satisfaction and repeat attendance.
Methods: Workshop facilitators were self-selected and transported to the conference location. For each workshop, the venue was determined ad-hoc by ambulatory reconnaissance and facilitator consensus that sounds good are by this one. Workshop participants were then allowed to interact with one another while study meta-data were recorded by the facilitators in silico and on absorbent papers provided by the venue. Data were also collected regarding availability of micro-brew and single-malt. These steps were repeated multiple times during the conference. All data were subjected to multi-variant post-hoc analysis for anecdotal significance.
Results: The workshop facilitators reported with high confidence that this type of workshop was better than any others they’d facilitated, and that they’d like to do it this way again; this is consistent with our hypothesis. Intriguingly, the facilitators noted that despite their lack of prompting, the participants were able to reproduce outcomes of other workshops, e.g., Autumn Sweater, Bitchin Camaro, Comfort Eagle, and Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume, which led to significant positive response from other occupants of the workshop venue.
Conclusion: Significant learning had occurred by the participants, clearly due to their desire to garner facilitator approval, with facilitators having provided minimal intervention.
Disclosures: One author wishes to disclose a financial conflict, in that when the department credit card is discovered missing, study funding will be cut.


Now it's your turn. Don't feel you have to do a whole big thing like mine, unless you want to.