by Karen Tkaczyk
As the Newcastle ITI conference approaches, I find myself with “conference envy”. I attended the 2011 and 2013 ITI conferences. They were both fun and instructive, and I had hoped to do attend again in 2015. However, I found myself unable to justify the cost and time of making two transatlantic trips this year: to attend the conference in the spring as well as to visit family in the summer.
So for all of us in this situation of wishing we were there, how might we make the most of the conference from the comfort of our home offices? What can we get out of attending a conference “remotely” or “virtually”? First of all, if you don’t have a professional Twitter or Facebook account, you’ll need them. Enthusiastic attendees will be posting throughout the entire event. Most of the action is via social media. Other tools such as SlideShare and Instagram may also be helpful. Much of the activity will be the “Isn’t this wonderful!” type-comment accompanied by cute photos of our esteemed friends and colleagues. However, among the entertainment, we can glean rich sources of instruction, tips and resources for our businesses.
If you intend to learn methodically, I suggest that you use MS OneNote, Evernote or your preferred note-collection tool as a place to “dump” anything that you might want to review later. Create an ITI15 file and leave it open on your desktop.
On Facebook, it’s a matter of paying attention to your friends’ posts and copying resources or titbits that they pass along into the note file. Twitter makes it a bit easier: start by following #ITIConf15. If you’re online at the right time of day and can make the time, then follow it live and interact. However, a more practical solution that I have used for conferences in the past is to export and save the feed for viewing later. I do this even if I attend a conference. When I have paid to attend, I want to be engage with people at that time. Later I go back to review the feed and see things that other people observed. Usually after the fact some kind soul will produce a link of the entire Twitter feed using one of the many available tools. Regardless, you can search for the # and paste links and other useful things into the “dump” location.
Keep in mind all the types of information that people post. I’m not just talking about the content of presentations, although many generous presenters make entire slide decks available on their websites and make the link freely available. Not all are visuals useful without the accompanying talk, but some are very valuable, and many can contain links to resources. When I follow a conference virtually I discover people I’d like to meet at future T&I events, and I get bucket-loads of ideas: from ideas for new tools or training I’d like to get, to topics I’d love to read more on, to great presenters, to good places to eat in the city where the conference is being held.
So join me, April 23-25, in your comfy office chair.
Karen Tkaczyk CT MITI works as a French into English freelance translator. Her translation work is highly specialised, being entirely focused on chemistry and its industrial applications. She holds an MChem in Chemistry with French (University of Manchester), a Diploma in French and a PhD in Organic Chemistry (University of Cambridge). She worked in the pharmaceutical industry in Europe, then, after relocating in 1999, in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics in the USA. In 2005 she set up her translation practice. She lives in Colorado with her husband and three children. She tweets as .
This post was also published in the ITI blog The Pillar Box
