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Which is worse...

...trying to do something fun and interactive and having it fall flat, or not trying at all and sticking with the boring old PowerPoint talking-head lecture that doesn't do much in terms of helping people actually learn something new?

I got to thinking about this after reading Rich's blog on playing George in an Apprentice takeoff at IAEM in December--which definitely sounds like a fun to get people thinking, doing, and learning.

But what about when interactivity falls flat, as it did at a meeting I attended (not participated in) this weekend? They kept promising that "this will be different from last year--it'll be interactive and fun." But the interactivity consisted of the presenter presenting, then allowing Q&A, for the most part. What's fun about that? And this was a meeting for adult educators. The content was fantastic, and kept my butt in an incredibly uncomfortable convention center seat all day, but the way they kept hyping how the next session was going to really shake things up format-wise, then didn't, raised expectations then didn't fulfill them.

Honestly, I would have been happier just knowing it was going to be the same old same old, instead of getting built up then disappointed. I don't know why I felt I had to share this, but there you go.

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