I “gave a talk” at the Biobrick foundation technical standards workshop last weekend. Gave a talk is in quotes since I had a previous commitment and couldn’t be there in person. Instead I made a screencast/video presentation that was sent out to the BBF mailing list before the conference and then replayed during the presentations at the conference. The talk was about a simple measurement kit for BioBrick promoters and RBSs and about the need for physical reference standards in biological engineering. The video is below, and probably gets things across more clearly then I could in a post – so take a look if you are interested in the topic.

Wanted to make a quick rant, but before that I should say that the BBF workshop had breakout sessions, lots of pre- and post-conference email discussion, and sounds like it made good use of dragging people to the same locale.

With that out of the way, I personally think the whole get 100 people in a room and have them sit in silence listening to a talk is an enormous waste of time. If you are trying to get people to collaborate by being in physical proximity there are better formats (foo camp / unconferences come to mind). It’s also a bad deal for the busy presenting scientist who has to take a couple days out of her schedule to travel to the talk location.

A better approach might be to mail out a video presentation from a scientist to an email list (say the MIT bioengineering dept list), and then have the presenter on the hook to reply to the first 20 emails received from the talk viewers. The presenter would replace 2 travel days with a 2 hour email session and the talk viewers would get much more detailed Q&A and could watch the talk at their leisure. The Q&A could even be compiled and emailed to the mailing list afterwards, what a helpful resource that would be!

In addition, talks would be higher quality as they could be clipped, edited, and retaken. My talk might not be a great example as I cranked it out the night before heading out on a trip, but I did do a retake of the second half and clipped it in. (try to do that during an in-person talk!)

Overall, I liked the experience of the video talk, and it seems like it wouldn’t be hard to make this standard operating procedure for many talks. Would love to hear your thoughts on this (or on physical ref standards for BE) in the comments.

p.s. I used camtasia studio to make the talk, in case you want to make your own. There are probably free options out there too.

Posted: March 8th, 2008 under Scientific Communication, Synthetic Biology.
Comments: none