Flickr presentation for Five Weeks to a Social Library
Tue 6 Mar 2007, 10:25 pm
Michael “Libraryman” Porter and I did our presentation on Flickr for the Five Weeks to a Social Library. It is archived in no fewer than five files on the OPAL site (streaming whole shebang, WMA, MP3, slides, and text of the chat), so you can still catch it if you missed it.
I have been following the course blogs all along, and it is obvious to me that course participants are taking advantage of the class to learn about social software and think it through “out loud” on the blogs.
But another, perhaps overlooked, benefit of the course is to the presenters. I hadn’t presented online before tonight, nor had I ever presented with Michael. It was a great benefit for me to do both of those things, though I hope that paticipants didn’t pay any price for my inexperience.
As we were preparing, I told Michael that I wished we were just doing the presentation in person, as I knew that we could both talk about Flickr and show our slides and it would all be OK. I wasn’t so sure that the technology would work, and that was the main thing that had me nervous going in.
I did need to trade my Mac for a Windows box (which we figured out in our practice session a few hours before the talk–be sure and do that if you are presenting online) and had a bit of a scare when my headset wasn’t working properly with the OPAL software right before the talk. Tom Peters of OPAL advised a quick log out and back in, which was enough to fix that problem. A bit of handholding from Tom today made me feel much more confident that everything would work.
And presenting with Michael was a breeze. Check him out if you ever get the chance.
This isn’t meant to be a big pat on the back for myself: I’m sure that my part of the talk was too basic for some people and too fast for others. And I probably skated over some really interesting issues around Flickr. I’ll be watching the class blogs for questions that come up.
Mostly I just think that Five Weeks to a Social Library is a cool thing, and I’m pleased to have been part of it. I have even more respect now for the organizers, many of whom were already my blogging heroines going into all this. My thanks to them, and to Tom, too.
- License:
- File under: Presentations,Social software
- Comments? 3
Ahh! I might be getting a mac soon – tell us why Macs and OPAL don’t like each other! Egad…
Comment by david lee king — March 7, 2007 @ 6:00 am
David, YMMV but when I got into the “room,” the browser pane wasn’t showing the slides, but instead shows a message about how the site is designed for current versions of IE, but if I wanted to live dangerously, I could click “here” to go ahead.
When I clicked, the first slide loaded, but it didn’t seem like the co-browsing was working. After a short time, it seemed much easier to move to one of the many Windows boxes in my library than try to get it to work in Mac OS X.
But if you are getting a new Mac, you’ll get an Intel-based Mac that can run Windows, so when something like this happens you can hold your nose and boot up XP. I have a G4 PowerBook with the old chips, so I don’t have that option.
Comment by Steve Lawson — March 7, 2007 @ 6:48 am
Ah – makes sense. Thanks for the tips!
Comment by david lee king — March 7, 2007 @ 8:50 am