Since I teach about how to use social media, I look at the agendas of seminars on social media to see if I might learn any social media tricks du jour. I don’t often attend, more from lack of time than interest.
What struck me about this particular seminar, A Social Media Learning Conference Call, presented by Chris Brogan and Peter Shankman, was neither the content nor the presenters, but that it was billed as a conference call and offered by Conference Call University.
The word that jumped into my mind when I saw this was “pain”: too many years of conference calls without a headphone and the resulting aching shoulder(s) and ear(s). My next thought was that the word “university” is becoming increasingly diluted. And that “Conference Call” doesn’t have much panache as a name.
I looked around the site. They use a variety of technologies including text chat, streaming audio – wait, there aren’t any offered that way. As I looked around the site, there wasn’t much in most of the categories, either for delivery technologies or topics. There was little information about the university itself, other than an address in Sandy, Utah.
They are looking for presenters – or do they call them professors? The site asks, “Are you an author, speaker or expert? (No matter who you are, you can at least answer YES to ‘expert.’ EVERYONE is an expert in SOMETHING!)”
I haven’t decided if I will attend the seminar that originally brought me to the site. But if I do, I’m curious to see if and how “Conference Call University” is promoted.