Perhaps the more critical question is should there be this distinction? Can a conference, where the main objective is to get a lot of information out to the masses, as opposed to a training, where the objective is to teach a specific skill set to a group of people, be one and the same? Kevin Cheng, a usability guy that focuses upon Human-Computer Interactions, and artist of web-comic Ok/Cancel, dealt with this topic a while ago in his post about presenting a paper at an academic conference. Pretty basic post about how to be an engaging presenter, but can this be taken further? In my mind, at trainings, you have the luxury of lots of time to really delve into topics (i.e. at last weeks training we spent hours with the participants practicing a feedback cycle, facilitating, and leading people through experiential learning cycles).