Daily Archives: September 21, 2006

I have to agree with Mike. It was great to co-present tonight with such passionate educators eager to open up their experience and expertise to the wider educational community. This was to a f2f audience of nearly 60 and out to 9 venues via Centra. Now I reckon that doing demonstrations of Web 2.0/social software/ read/write web stuff is very hard to do via the videoconferencing medium and I think that being conscious of catering for a group of people I couldn't see interfered with my presentation which I thought was below my own expectations. Luckily, everyone else was brilliant and covered for my not showing how to edit a wiki (conscious that the Centra audience wouldn't see) and not being able to retrieve my links for StartPages from my wiki when I needed to. As always, a workaround is always necessary but it wasn't until I was enthralled by Mike's excellent Mashup that what I already knew dawned on me. If I can't access a link from a previously identified source that I've set up, then my content is re-packaged and re-distributed via RSS in a number of ways that I could have accessed more easily than typing in the URL by hand!! I needed to run my StartPage section from my links page on my wiki but it looked like wikispaces decided to go down right at that moment. (I still maintain that using Internet Explorer was a big factor. Go Firefox! Go Flock!) So, if I was confronted by that in the future, I could have gone straight to my blog or my Bloglines or my PageFlakes feed for my blog and grabbed the links from my StartPages review or gone to Mike's Bloglines feed for my wiki RSS feed.

Anyway, I wasn't sure what to make of the audience response to our presentation. There was quite a bit of joviality and smiles amongst the presenters but the audience was very serious - they were either concentrating hard or concerned about what it all means for them. Love some feedback from anyone who was in the audience - what did you make of it all?

Flickr Image - Mike's view of Vonnie, Al and I.