Stephanie Booth has written up her account of what she calls the "Lee Bryant experiment", wherein we attempted to test the limits of multi-modal attention among conference attendees at Blogtalk.

As Stephanie points out, I was concerned that I had too much detail to convey in too little time in my presentation, so we played with the idea of cutting my slides down and supplying slightly longer versions in text format using SubEthaEdit, in parallel with the presentation. We did this by pasting in pre-prepared notes a slide at a time, so as not to distract the audience with the full text at once. The idea was that people could simply add their own notes and comments rather than frantically re-typing my slide text. We had been having fun with SubEthaEdit and thought it would be interesting to see how people reacted to the presenter streaming their own notes in (pseudo) real-time.

You should read Stephanie's longer and more interesting reflections on this for an unbiased account, but here are my lessons:

Negatives:

• Listening to a presentation whilst reading two version of its text is hard for many people


• Note-takers can't compete with pre-prepared notes, which means they don't try


• Tends to suppress debate

Positives:

• Note-takers don't need to race to follow a quick and wordy presentation with lots of onscreen info


• They can instead focus on annotating the presenter's text in real-time


• Tends to suppress debate ;-)

Upon reflection, this is probably the kind of perception management technique that the UK New Labour party would engage in if they were to use SubEthaEdit.

For me, the most important lesson is one we know already: taking notes helps transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory, as Stephanie says:

"Is note-taking important, if you get a transcript or detailed paper of the talk afterwards? I think it is. I think that note-taking as a process is important. I know I listen differently whether I am taking notes or not. There is something to be said for reformulating what you�re listening to on the fly. To me, it clearly aids the integration of what is being said. Now, to what extent does collaborative note-taking defeat that? Open question."