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Survey results:

Conference Attendee Feedback

48.4% of attendees heard about it from the e news. 22.6% heard about it from a friend.

52.2% liked the mini-talks best, with the rest spread evenly over the other talks.

14 different workshops were named as favorites.

We received many comments and suggestions. These Included:

More student involvement and presentations.

People loved the Whova app

Some people were frustrated about having to make a choice with many interesting things going on at once.

Many people liked the conference the way it was but wished more people had a chance to experience it.

One suggested the conference run as a zero waste event.

One person liked that everything ran on time and loved the books in the bookstore.

Several potential conference sites were mentioned with a request that they be near airports and public transportation.

Some wanted more specific networking events.

Some wanted more hands-on workshops and events.

One person wrote.” I liked the schedule. I liked the cost. I liked staying on campus. I liked all the different types of presentations….mini-talks…breakouts….keynotes….documentaries….well done! I like that we got to meet with others and talk about what we do individually during breaks.”

96% scored the conference average to strongly believe they would recommend the conference to others.

33% gave it the highest possible rating

96% scored average to strongest about returning to future AERO conferences.

Live Stream Viewers

90% of those who received links to the live stream of the conference were able to successfully view it.

All respondents said the quality was overage to good.

90  said it was worth their investment.

22% said their favorites were the mini talks. The rest were spread evenly over many talks.

40% of the viewers were sustaining members (we received free access)

66.7% thought the networking was the most important aspect of the conference

People were fascinated with the above title of Lisa Harris’ workshop. As she said in her description, “In traditional schools, when they have a student they don’t know what to do with, they like to put a label on them, not realizing that it might hurt that student. In my case, I was thought to be a slow learner. So, to me, I thought that I was stupid. I felt this all my life and into adulthood. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that I was dyslexic. I think that if I was in an alternative school, maybe they would have looked further into the problem or given me the time to work through it.”

In the workshop they looked at labeling in schools, did some role-playing, and examined how people could find their strengths.

After the workshop, Lisa said, “one of the participants came up to her at lunch and thanked her. He said he no longer felt alone. His son’s school had labeled him as inferior because he was dyslexic and laughed when he said he wanted to be a doctor. Now he understood what had happened.”

Lisa said that when she was school age she made friends in other schools with an elite group who thought she was very intelligent. So finally, when she was a senior she insisted that the school test her intelligence. When the results showed a very high IQ the school panicked and tried to conceal the results so they couldn’t be blamed for the “injustice of my education.”

“Eventually I gave up trying in my high school. I think that many young people who have a hard time learning in traditional schools would do well in learner-centered alternatives. In fact, I met many people at the conference who felt they had dyslexia or some other challenge that hadn’t been addressed in school and this was one reason they were involved with educational alternatives.”

“For myself, I didn’t give up on myself. Eventually, I graduated from the New York Institute of Technology and have had a long career in teaching, writing, and photography.”

We hope you all enjoyed the live stream of this year’s AERO Conference. It went pretty smoothly, aside from a couple of camera focus issues. I’m super glad it worked because it almost didn’t.

Two weeks before the conference, I had assembled the gear I would need for running the live stream and ran a test at my house, which had worked perfectly. The audio and video synced up perfectly, the audio sounded great, and the video feed was crystal clear. So I decided to run a test at the university to be sure their system would work with mine. I loaded my gaming computer, the screen, the camera, tripod, and capture card (a USB adapter that takes the camera’s HDMI signal and converts it into a usable video feed for the computer), and Mbox 2 into the car. I drove to the theater at LIU Post, and unloaded it into the theater. I plugged everything in and fired up my computer.

All hell broke loose.

After booting up, my computer decided it needed to reinstall every device driver, my Mbox, my mouse, my keyboard, the capture card, everything. This took a while, and afterward, my Mbox, the device I was using to hook the theater’s audio up to my computer, wouldn’t work. It was constantly shutting itself off and turning back on every few seconds. To make matters worse, the capture card also refused to accept input and my computer wouldn’t even recognize that it was there.

I spent an infuriating four hours before giving up because I had another place to be. It took me an additional 2 hours at my house the next day uninstalling the wrong drivers and reinstalling the right ones to get my computer up and running again.

So two days later I was back, testing my equipment again in the theater. I encountered the same problem, drivers reinstalling, the Mbox turning and off, and the capture card not working. What the heck was happening?

It took me another hour to figure it out. My keyboard, mouse, and Mbox all HAD to use USB 2.0 slots, and I had plugged them into USB 3.0 slots to make room for the capture card. Once I got that sorted and reinstalled the drivers AGAIN, everything was working but the capture card. So, I did the reasonable thing, I called the company who made it. They informed me that it was incompatible with windows 7 (which I use) and only worked with windows 10 to which my immediate response was “you made your device incompatible with literally half the Windows market”?

The tech support guy told me he didn’t know what to tell me and he was baffled that I had gotten it to work before because that was supposed to be totally impossible.

So I was forced to run to Microcenter, return the old capture card, and buy a new one that was windows 7 compatible. After installing it and plugging up the camera, I finally had video feed coming into my broadcast software (OBS). So now I had sound and video, so I crossed my fingers and pressed the “Start Streaming” button.

My youtube live stream dashboard immediately lit up green and the stream, audio and all, broadcast to my private youtube channel. I was so stoked. One last problem, the audio was out of sync with the video. However, that was a matter of simply offsetting the incoming audio by what I figured out to be around 630 milliseconds. Finally, everything worked, and to keep it that way I literally took a picture of the back of my computer before unplugging everything, so I could plug it up the exact same way come conference time.

You cannot even begin to imagine how nervous I was on Friday June 29th as I set my computer up for the third time. This time for the actual live stream. I tested it and everything worked again, no driver problems, the audio, and video came back in perfectly, and the stream went out to my channel. So I switched the stream information over to broadcast on the AERO Youtube channel and pressed “Start Streaming”. Everything seemed to be working fine, so I brought the stream up on my laptop to make sure.

It was working. Thank god.

You can buy the archives of the live stream here.

1.  Support for AERO and its work.
2.  Facilitating workshops regarding self-direction.
3.  Meeting others interested in self-directed learning.
4. Having access to a relaxed setting to think and talk with people.
5.  Going for walks in the area.
6. Seeing what’s new in books about self direction.
7. Attending keynotes.
8. Attending sessions related to self-direction.
9.  Checking out the various exhibitors.
10.  Buying some of the recordings.

1. For the interesting speakers
2. To meet people and learn about what people are doing that is different or new or cutting edge.
3.  To browse the books
4. To encounter new exhibitors
5. to meet people and talk about “stuff”
6. to visit NYC
7. to visit LI beaches
8. attend sessions
9. to relax and think
10. It’s a shot in the arm to be with thinkers and creative types after being in the ed trenches.

This will be my first AERO conference. I’m coming…

1. To hear about other ways of doing self-directed education
2. To talk and think about self-directed ed with others who are deep into it
3. To meet people and hear their stories
4. To support the important work of AERO and the amazing resource that is Jerry Mintz
5. To experience an AERO conference, after decades of wondering about it
6. To reconnect with people I know in other self-directed democratic schools
7. To relax and enjoy not being in charge