CONFERENCE ENLIGHTENMENT

I attended an educational conference this week and I must say that it left me quite excited and brimming full of ideas. I participated both as a speaker and as a member of a panel that stimulated an interactive discussion with the attendees. However, I also enjoyed my function as an engaged audience member, who contributed to the general discussion. The group was relatively small, but this perhaps contributed to the success of the conference as there was active engagement of all participants.
 

The conference was an excellent opportunity for networking, for contributing to an ideas fest and for also being made aware of developments in our sector across Australia and the rest of the world. Overall, if chosen well, such conference activities can revitalise an academic’s stagnant mental marshes and will serve as a powerful creator of currents of intellectual activity.
 

The reason conferences are such a good scholarly activity is that they bring under the one roof people that share similar ideas, interests, jobs, contacts. Attendees are in a receptive frame of mind and at the right time and place. The bringing together of so many people under the same roof where they actively engage with one another and exchange ideas is conducive to active thinking, generation of new ideas, learning and exploration of brave new territory. They are safe environments for discourse, thinking out loud and provoking people with some left field concepts and intellectual challenges. It is a good environment for oneself to be challenged and provoked!
 

The theme the conference was Teaching and Learning Innovation in the Tertiary Sector and how we can utilise the technology to ensure that we achieve better training and teaching outcomes. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much good work is being done in Australia at the present time by some very passionate and dedicated academics, teachers and technology support personnel. The speakers were Australian  and knowledgeable, experienced and engaging.
 

The challenge for all such conference attendees is to go back and try to process all the information they have been exposed to, sort through what is interesting, relevant and do-able in one’s own institution and then gather up enough momentum in order to implement the new ideas in a format that is of direct relevance to them and their institution. The crystallisation of an idea for a project often comes to someone after such conferences and it is a chance for achieving some positive change within the organisation so as to achieve better educational outcomes. This new idea will be incubated and if the time is right and the right people are around, a project will be hatched.
 

In cases like these, one needs a leader but much more importantly passionate followers. Good leaders cannot act in isolation, they need followers who will be stimulated to carry forward the leader’s vision and realise it in actual terms. Good followers will gather up enough critical mass in order to move the new ideas from the realm of the notional into the corral of the tangible.
 

People are prepared to follow leaders that can inspire and create a comfortable atmosphere where creativity can flourish, where the change can come about in the most positive manner. Followers need to be treated as equals by the leader and will reject intimidation or manipulation. They will want to be recognised as an important part of the project that the team is involved in. The first follower who embraces what the leader proposes also shows leadership and can act as a powerful ally for the leader so as to involve more of the team into forming a cohesive group that shares a vision and aims at the same goal. It is such an environment that will generate innovative thinking and original solutions to problems that have vexed everyone for some time.
 

The leader will be able to contextualise the project and direct the team’s efforts into effecting the change that the project is engaged in. The purpose of leadership is to create and promote change. Leaders are the driving force of this change and need to be able to support the need for change with a good story. Followers will have questions and a leader must have logical, cogent, sensible answers that satisfy the followers.
 

The leader empowers the followers by providing information, advice, inspiration, acknowledgement and the mapping out of the journey ahead. The followers will then understand the need for change, share the vision and begin to innovate and function as an interdependent team. Such followers develop judgment and initiative, becoming better contributors. They are able to succeed even without continuous supervision and leadership, while gaining independence and become good leaders themselves.