Interactive Conference Sessions

Kathy Sierra has a great post entitled Creating Passionate Users: Interactions vs. one way communication. She compares some active learning vs. site and listen conference experiences, and comments on how odd some people find the active learning model.

She writes:

So why does this happen? Why aren't sessions more interactive? Three main reasons:

1) It's just not the way it's done.
2) The speaker doesn't have the kind of classroom-management skills needed to pull of group exercises, especially in a large room.
3) The session is really more of a briefing than an actual learning experience or tutorial, so it's not really appropriate.

Take a look, she makes some excellent points.