Preview of my ESA 2012 poster promoting the Evolution of Sustainable Use activity

This year I am proud to be returning to the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. I missed last year’s meeting and I am excited to be overwhelmed by all the amazing scholarship that is on display at these meetings.

I generally present talks at meetings, but this year I decided to do a poster for the first time. Part of my rationale for this choice is specific to the work I will present, and part of it stems from a general shift in my valuation of meeting talks. My poster will be showing off the Evolution of Sustainable Use classroom activity, and my assessment was that it would be a lot more interesting and valuable to teachers interested in this activity to speak to me personally at a leisurely pace rather than have me force-feed them what I consider relevant about the interface through a twelve-minute talk. And increasingly I am questioning the value of these talks, especially when a lot of information can be creatively displayed on a large poster (mine is 0.9 m x 2.3 m!). Often talks feel empty: you stand up in front of an audience (maybe large, maybe very small) and shotgun information to people who by-and-large have little means of interacting with what you present (I have never found the questions asked in these sessions to be all that valuable, even when there is still time left for them). My hope is that presenting a poster will allow me to have quality interactions with the people who really are interested in what I am presenting; we shall see how this hope pans out.

In addition to presenting this poster, I am also launching a new website to support The Evolution of Sustainable Use, which can be found here:

http://evosususe.christopherxjjensen.com

If you are interested in seeing what I will present, you can click on the image below to download a PDF of my presentation:

I also have a brief handout that I will be distributing, also downloadable by clicking the PDF below:

To chat with me about The Evolution of Sustainable Use, please come by Poster #62 on Tuesday, August 7th in Exhibit Hall DE of the Oregon Convention Center; I look forward to meeting you.