Upcoming conferences: feed your mind

Time to take advantage of the start of the new academic year to learn something new at several upcoming events taking place here in Shanghai.

Kicking off the fall season on August 30 is Pecha Kucha, a night of creative talks guaranteed to pack a punch by sticking to a limit of "20 slides for 20 seconds each". This month's session takes place at the Shanghai Sculpture Space, with a pre-show by Spanish artist Angel de la Peña serving a "free Spanish cocktail" to each attendee. The short-list already includes talks on overlooked issues in Chinese urban planning, finding the best street food in Shanghai, making documentaries in the DPRK, and Australian rules rugby.

Next up is barCamp, a one-day free-spirited digital lifestyle un-conference, taking place on September 8. The schedule is drawn up on the day of, and usually consists of talks on topics like coding, setting up a tech business, digital photography... with a heavy emphasis on discussion and audience participation. The location is the same as last year's, the Tudou offices just off the Suzhou Creek, and if the Xinjiang lunch provided by Gulistan is as good as it was last year then the food alone will justify attending.

Batting clean-up hitter is the Learning 2.0 conference, a meeting of teachers from September 14 to 16 to discuss the reshaping of school to meet the needs of today's increasingly visually-oriented, technologically saavy, communicative and collaborative students. Featuring an impressive list of experienced speakers, talks will focus on topics like using Skype and podcasting to organize distributed learning projects, taking advantage of Web 2.0 tools to teach and learn, and teaching media literacy in an age of wikis, online video and photoshopping. The proceedings will take place at Concordia International School, and registration is a whopping USD 300.

On Upcoming:
Pecha Kucha Night Volume 7 at Shanghai Sculpture Space
BarCamp Shanghai 2007 at Tudou Offices
Learning 2.0 Conference at Concordia International School

Photo by keso.