I first experienced the format at a legal-technology conference in Jacksonville Florida a few years ago, it is called Rapid-Fire and it is 10 speakers, in a one hour plenary, each with a strictly enforced 5-minute time limit, charged with "Wowing" the audience. At the technology conference the power points were automatically set to advance to the next slide every 20 seconds, if the speaker didn't move the slides faster than that. The speakers talked on an eclectic range of topics, at least roughly connected to the subject of the conference. Some of them were brilliant, some were funny, none of them were boring, they didn't have time to be boring in just five minutes, with the moderator standing up and saying 'TIME IS UP" at the end of the allotted time. Some of the topics inspired me to want to know or do more, some reinforced my belief that not all ideas are good ideas - I was very glad I had not committed to listening to 75 minutes on this second kind of topic.
At 8:30 AM Eastern time, I will begin the Rapid-Fire Plenary at the National Aging and Law Conference. I am talking about preliminary results of a study of how health care decisions are made in critical care settings. Glad I only have minutes, I can't bore them in five minutes - can I?
This is a good idea...most people take more than 5 minutes to nod off during a lecture.
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-Andy
Five minutes is a very short period of time. Wow.
ReplyDeleteIt worked and people asked me to do it again next year!
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ReplyDeleteInteresting idea. I've been to a number of conferences in my life where I wished the speakers had a time limit!
ReplyDeleteFascinating concept, this.
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