Got A Minute? 60-second activities that increase retention

The first session I attended at ASTD 2007 was on 60-second activities (Presented by Sharon Bowman). This was a crazy session that mostly involved audience participation. My inital thoughts: this is going to be a wacky conference that annoys me because it is too cheesy. However, it ended up being very interesting and useful. She believes that handouts should not be given for the class to look at during the sessions since they will then not be engaged - good point but I think our people would revolt because they are so used to having the PP slides in front of them.
The real take home message: TV has conditioned the American people (I wonder how our European counterparts fare) to take information in 10 minute intervals. ie: the average television show consists of an 8-12 minute segment followed by a 3 minute commercial break. So whether we like it or not, our audiences are conditioned for this. So we need to keep this timing in mind when we create our courses (roughly - 15, 20 minutes is ok also but don't stretch it to 30 or more without some bridge of a 60-sec activity). I immediately thought about our use of Qwizdom in DMPK and Bjorn's experimental design course. I think this use of Qwizdom every 15-20 minutes during DMPK acheives this to a small extent but other tools rather than qwizdom would make it more interesting. Qwizdom hopefully increases retention but may become a predictable activity and start losing its value I suppose.
The presenter insisted that you should not start your class with a title slide - instead place opening instructions on your slide that will begin to engage the audience before the class even starts. This was called a "Quick Start" activity. It uses non-training time, connects learners to each other, and begins to create a "learning community" in the classroom. Caveat: make sure these activities are content related. ie: in this course the slide said: think about 60-sec activities you have seen done in a course and discuss with the person next to you.
Other activities were discussed such as "shout-out" (ask them to shout out answers to a question), "standing survey" (ask them to survey other classmates about a topic), "think and write" (write 3 answers to a question then share with another classmate), as well as others: connections, pair-shares, markups, doodles, micro-macro stretches, action plans, reading aloud, pop-ups, signals, celebrations (ask me if you want more info - I have notes on a few of these, not all were discussed fully). Doodles can be used - have the class draw concepts, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words... she mentioned using the Cornell Notes system to help create handouts (google "cornell notes" - I haven't looked yet). The important thing is to make the activity relevant to the content and make it short: just 60 seconds should be plenty. I buy this concept: I started to notice during the subsequent sessions when presenters did not do this and I could sense myself starting to get bored occasionally - but when they used a 60-sec activity it was interesting. It also definitely created the "learning community" since often the activity involved discussion with the person next to you.
Sharon Bowman's webpage: http://bowperson.com for more resources and references to her books, etc.