Lydgate

the 11:30 - 2 & 11-2 pm slots look the best to me. I'd go for the first one personally, but the the second one is fine. The 12-3 pm slot DOES NOT interest at all. WE also have to take into account if people are missing class or not. That's why I mentiond the first two first, bcause selfishly they maek the most sense for me. We need to figure out who'll speak first and emcee this shindig. What say good folks?

I agree for the 11:30-2:00 or 11:00-2:00 time slots as well. I believe we should not make it too long because we can have more people be able to stay for more of our projects. I think the time set up of the past year was efficient because I think it would go well with the tentative schedule, which I really like.

11:30-2:00 is the best time I think because many people have break during this time, thus more people will be able to come. That time is also long enough. The tentative schedule sounds good.

I'd like to throw my hat in the ring right now and say that I'd like to be the emcee for this thing. Maybe even more. I have a lot of ideas- ideas possibly different than Professor Tougaw's- for this conference that I'd like to see get done.

I have to say a few things at this point in time. (Stick with me here.)

One, isn't this on a Wednesday during free hour? If so shouldn't we aim to begin at free hour? I mean, think about it. If this is a free hour thing we'd be getting a lot of audience coming in at the middle of the show whereas I'd rather have them starting off with us.

Personally, I'd like to see this thing go long. Like four hours long. I have this idea to break the performance into four chunks of an hour-- which would cut down on the boredom factor and give the audience decent chances to leave (should they be so inclined).

Also, I think we all have to know who's taking care of the technical end of this thing. If we want something done (like music, or video) how do we get it up there? What kind of file type do we need and how are we projecting it?

I'm posting on my blog (in a few hours) my detailed outline for this presentation. I'd like you all to read it over and tell me what you think because this is about all of us. I just want to see us put up the best conference possible.

I think that the 11-2 or 11:30-2 time slot is fine. After that, a lot of people will be coming and going (if they come) and that's rather distracting. Tentative schedule sounds good to me too.

It should be during free hour - at about 12 - and end about 2 ... I don't think it should go as long as four hours

I don't know

i agree with startin at free hour, i think itll be easier to get lots of different people involved and inclined to come. four hours sounds horrying... but that's just me. if we want to start before free hour, maybe it can be something self contained and begin out presentations and such at free hour, like we could have our exhibits or whatever multimedia on display or available from 11-12 but from 1215-2 do the parts that require more streams of speaking of presenting, and the questions/interactive part can start towards the end of free hour, so that the people who leave at least get to see a solid peice of the whole project...
i dont have specific content ideas yet, i hope to over the weekend

During free hour does sound better. Four hours is way too long. I think two hours or less is perfect.

Yea, I agree with the last couple of comments. Starting the presentation at free hour will probably be best because we should give the most number of people the time to show up during the introduction. The into, I think, is really important. I also think that it's a good idea to have an "interactive part" or the question and answer part during the time when most people will be leaving for class. I've done large presentations that have lasted within and extended after free hour. It is least distracting to everyone if people aren't walking in and out during the actual discussion. We could start another presentation right after those 10 mins of shuffling around that starts at about 1:30.

This should end at 2 pm people. No one will want to watch us for that long a time. Sorry to burst or bubbles or to sound like a kill joy.

I'm wondering if it's possible to do something like this? Instead of beginning with the free hour, maybe we could end with the free hour - so maybe do a time slot like 10:30-1:30pm or 11-1:30pm? This is just a thought, but it's caused mostly by the fact that I believe the majority of students have afternoon classes and, as a result, I believe we'll have a better chance of getting people to attend this conference if we start at an earlier time (hope that logic made sense and yes, I definitely prefer 2 to 2 1/2 hours over 4 hours).

Then, instead of doing three panels and a roundtable, maybe do 4 panels and no roundtables.

The first two panels will discuss a combination of what Lydgate originally planned for the roundtable and possibly some of Dr. Funkenstein's suggestions (i.e. the dream theories, maybe the films we watched and the books we read during this semester, and maybe our blogs, which I think was a great suggestion to include - with the blogger's agreement, of course). I'm thinking maybe we should start with these topics rather than end with this because it might help to put the projects into better context.

The second two panels of 3 students each will present their projects (so a total of 6 projects will be presented).

These are just some of my initial thoughts and I realize this plan focuses more on our efforts as a group/class rather than on our efforts as individuals (namely the projects), but I believe the possible benefit here is that the conference will be more representative of the work everyone did for this class.

What do you think?

we might need to start a new thread for comments not related to the actual time and length of our conference, but i was thinking that if we have a limited amount of students that can fully present, only 5 people- then it should be one from each group of papers, like one "literary dream" of science oriented one etc... maybe this is completely obvious or mentioned already... but if we do want to do something like that we should make sure we like the current breakdown of the topics and then people in each groups.

also- i don't know how much we have in the way of a printing budget but maybe we can give out a couple of blog dream accounts... just 2 or three that stand out as very fruedian, very jungian or just very funny or interesting.- it could be used to spearhead some sort of disscussion or just additional material for people to take with them

I feel like everyone should present (for about 2 mins each) - since we worked so hard on our projects - and then have a 1-2 min question and answer session after each project instead of having panels...i mean this sounds more like a tour, but at least it will be different...

I read John A. Dreams' suggestions for the conference on his blog site, so I'm gonna respond to both yours and his blog at once here. First, let me adress the time issue. I like the idea that John has about starting the conference at the beginning of free hour, and I also think we should give ourselves 2 and a half to three hours at least to really include all of the things we want to include. I also liked the idea he had on his blog of breaking the conference up into sections and allowing people that need to or want to leave to do so without interrupting us, and playing some dream music and/or some surrealistic film during the breaks. I liked the idea of having an emcee, and i definitely think John should be the emcee (not only for this conference, but as a profession!). However,I agree with True Romance that we should give everybody, at least if they want to, a chance to present the projects that we worked so hard on. I liked some of John's ideas alot, but I think that the variety of the projects themselves already makes for an interesting diversity. However 2 minutes of presentation time is too short. Slotting people into groups of 3 or 4 with related concepts and letting them present consecutively for 5 or 6 minutes would I think be a good idea instead. Then you could have 5 or six minutes at the end of each round of presentations for general questions and answers. This I think might actually generate more interesting questions because the audience would be able to relate people's independent projects to one another. I thought John's idea to have the bloggie awards was great also, and I'm totally down for it, but I agree with with Virtual Light, who commented on his site, that a general audience would be out of the loop of what's going on, and that we should instead do it at the end of class (complete with little fake statuettes and everything, like John wanted). I think we could vote on it, and that it would be really fun coming up with all of the categories and crazy awards and stuff. But as for the panel discussions for the conference, i mean, I dunno. I don't like the idea of panel discussions. I really do think it would be better to let everybody present. At 5 minutes per person, we could handle it in 2 and a half to three hours no problem. However, if the class decides as a whole that we want panels, then let me say this. I see the theatrical merit of what John is going for, but I'm not sure if that's really the direction we should go. Trying to interpret people's dreams, one of his suggestions for the conference sections, might be fun, but it isn't something that we could, and I don't think should, really do, at least not with any claim to authority, or the authority of our sources. We don't know enough about the people or the situations we'd be looking at to really make the attempt to tell people what they "mean", and I don't think even trained psychologists are really qualified to make assumptions about people's dreams. I mean, look at all of the innacuracies we find even in Freud! And that brings me to another one of John's suggestions. I know big pappa Freud is a lot of fun for people, but he's outdated, and often wrong. If one of the panels is going to be centered on Freud, which I'm not entirely sure I would agree with, it should at least include people discussing other theorists who contradict and/or modify Frued, particularly modern ones whose empirical and experimentative data is a little more concrete, and also Jung, who was his contemporary. But to go back to the dream interpretation thing, maybe we could try to do what we think are characteristically Fruedian, Jungian, Hobsonian, etc., readings of dreams, but I am still not convinced that any of us are really qualified to do that. And we should be careful if we're using real people and real dreams, so I really don't know about that. As for the suggestion about movie stars and actors invading our dreams, I think it's OK, but if we're going to do that, we should use movies as a jumping off point and expand the discussion to talk about media and art in all forms, and not only its influence on, but its relationship to dreaming. And I also would like to see something on what we spent a lot of time on in the beginning of the first seminar if we're going to do panels, the relationships of dreams to other altered states of consciousness, particularly drug-induced states, trauma-induced ones, insanity, and reverie. I know some people have projects that would fit this, and we all have some general knowledge about it because of our course readings. Anyway, that is my two (maybe two and a half) cents. We should all discuss these problems further as a group in class on Tuesday, and I know we will, so that's all for now.

On the question of time...excuse my ignorance being mainly a night student... but is free hour 12 to 1 or 1 to 2? I do agree that 'free hour' should be taken into account - that a lot of people will just be there for that hour so we should plan that hour's slot as maybe the most representative / focused and have a beginning and end of something corresponding to the start and end of it, so one of us is not up there in the middle of trying to present while lots of people are walking in and out...I think the consensus overall looks like we want a lenght of 2 1/2 or 3 hours and not 4 so my vote is 11:30 to 2 or 12-3.
Question... what's the difference between a panel and a roundtable - I presume it's more than the shape of the table :) Maybe it would take too long but a debate style discussion may work too ? - on a contemporary topic - like Creativity in Dreams (which is the subject of one of the papers). I like the idea of not dicussing Freud in depth ( I also made an entry about this on John's blog). I think it's a good idea to give Freud a mention and credit for starting the process and then presenting about Contemporary dream theorists and their theories, which I think people would be interested in and not already know about (most of us didn't)...especially info about lucid dreaming...

I like the structure that Prof. Tougaw is putting forth, but I like the mR. MyXLpLX idea about slotting groups of 3 or 4 according to interest instead of the panel. Slotting them according to related ideas would lend the presentations some cohesion.
Was also wondering if our new and exciting web pages can or will play a part in the media presentation. Visuals and sound are always stimulating.
The hours 11:30 til 2 seem to cover most bases. Any longer and it becomes tedius.