Conference 2009 CESImeet
Friday 13th February 2009, in the Maldron Hotel Tallaght, saw a new departure for CESI. For two reasons – a perceived need for a social side to the CESI agm, and the switch to a one-day conference – we decided to hold an event loosely styled on the popular TeachMeet formula.
60 people gathered at round tables for a lively two hours mixture of presentation and audience participation. For starters we had mini-presentations (7 minutes), followed by some thought provoking Soap Box dissertations (15 mins) and finished with a series of nano-presentations (2 mins).
The opening mini-presentation was a short summary of the results of the North Tymon Futures Exchange held at CESI 2008 (view our slidecast ->).
We had input from within and outside CESI including organisations Camara and Amalwele; conference organiser Tom Kendall gave us the world premiere of his newly-coined Schooglicious; and in the final nano-presentation our Secretary Adrienne Webb brought us on a whirlwind history tour of our educational techno-lives, complete with iconic brick mobile phone!
Audience participation took an up-to-date technical turn with an electronic voting session á la Ask The Audience. The use of an online fruit machine for randomising the order of the presenters, coupled with the audience taking responsibility for time-keeping, lent an air of organised chaos and fun to the proceedings. John Heffernan presided over a Twitter sidestream, and Fear ‘s Bean a’ Tí Conor Galvin agus Mags Amond kept the evening ticking apace.
At 9pm we repaired en masse to the hotel lounge for refreshments and chatter. Definitely a multimedia event which CESI will repeat in the future!
Visit our delicious site for a list of (and links to) CESImeet 2009 presentations and resources at http://delicious.com/cesimeet