And we’re back from the annual Alliance meeting, where the majority of private conversations dealt with the recently-leaked love letter that Derek wrote to Family Ties co-star Tina Yothers when he turned 14. If you haven’t already read it, I warn you that it’s quite spicy. Something about how “I love you more than the ColecoVision I got for Christmas last year, more than Joanie loves Chachi, more than my dad loves butter pecan ice cream.” Hand it to the man – he knows how to woo the ladies.
Anyway, after folks got through besmirching Derek’s character (what’s left of it), they turned to the next hot CMEpalooza-related topic: “How do I submit an abstract for CMEpalooza Spring?”
While I went over this a few weeks ago when we first made our splashy announcements about this year’s Paloozas, I understand that some of you may either have forgotten or missed it. So here is the information once again:
For this spring, we have come up with 6 session categories — Accreditation, Industry, Off-the-Wall/Potpourri, Outcomes, Educational Design, and Case-Based Formats — and are in the process of working with some of our most loyal fans to come up with ideas for sessions in each of those categories.
Our hope is that on Monday, February 6, we’ll be able to present to you, our “adoring” public, a slate of options to vote on in each category. These will only be titles and descriptions of the focus of the sessions themselves – there will be no pre-determined faculty, so no one will waste time recruiting folks for sessions that may hit the scrap heap.
The voting process will work in a similar fashion to previous years, except that you will only be able to vote for 1 session in each category. The winning session in each category gets added to the agenda, and the process of recruiting faculty then begins (our interns will be busy).
This approach, we hope, will give us a more balanced agenda with a greater variety of topics. While there is nothing necessarily wrong about having, say, 4 sessions focused on Outcomes, we are going to be moving away from that possibility. We understand if you will shed some tears, but we promise that, in the end, we’ll have a better, brighter program for everyone.
Now let’s say you have been sitting on an idea for a CMEpalooza session for months, just waiting for your chance to unleash it on the world. Never fear — we won’t let your idea go to waste! Simply come up with a title and a brief yet pithy description of your proposed session, fire off an email with all that information to either myself or Derek, and we’ll include your idea in the voting process. We’ll even present it anonymously in case you are embarrassed of public ridicule.
Here is an example of what a session title and description can look like (this would be appropriate for the Outcomes category, which is sort of obvious):
Incorporating Cost-Effective Creativity into Outcomes Design
Sometimes, it may seem like designing innovative approaches to outcomes measurement is like squeezing an orange. You squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until you figure out how to extract every last piece of “juice” from your data. But what if all you need is a new juicer from that late-night infomercial instead of that team of expensive experts in juice (or data) extraction? This session will look at less expensive yet effective ways to approach outcomes measurement for your educational initiatives.
Nothing too fancy or elaborate – just an idea with some fundamental details.
The deadline for sending something to us is Friday, February 3, which is, uh, pretty soon. Rest assured that if your submission somehow loops in Tina Yothers, it will get a prime location on our ballot.
I’ve had to stop and restart this post a bunch of times already because it keeps devolving into a long-winded political rant that makes me sound like an old-man-yells-at-cloud blowhard and no one wants to read political rants from old-man-yells-at-cloud blowhards [insert joke about Scott here]. So, let me try this one more time.
CMEPALOOZA 