Review And Reflect – Web2Showcase

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. 

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4 thoughts on “Review And Reflect – Web2Showcase

  1. Christine Haynes

    Graham – you couldn’t see the seriousness on my face, as I was one of the Centra attendees. I found the content really confronting. I use the internet daily — but had no idea of the ways in which others are using the Internet as a platform/network/info retrieval system. I had heard of blogs and RSS, but hadn’t realised the impact of the technology when the information comes to me. I’ve been working away teaching about using computers as tools to support learning. The possibilities are simply mind-boggling. I suspect your audience was pondering the impact and implementation of the ideas presented.

    For next time — I would suggest giving the Centra attendees access to the URLS in the beginning rather than at the end. It would have enabled me to follow along better as I could explore the sites while you were talking.

  2. Graham Wegner

    Thanks Doug, it does look like Mike was slumped on the desk when he took the pic!
    Christine, thank you very much for your feedback. I was really unsure of the way to handle the Centra presentation angle and looking back (hindsight is a wonderful thing) I think Mike did it best by preparing a screencast that he knew everyone could see that could show things in action. I agree that having the URL’s first would be ideal, even in the live audience those with laptops could have used the open edc wireless and checked out sites as we spoke. I think that the TSOF crew did such an excellent job that people like Al and I could just stroll in, mic up and go – but your suggestion about prior URL’s is definitely one to pass on. If your mind has been boggled and you want to explore the possibilities more, then the showcase achieved its aim. Me not showing exactly how to edit a wiki doesn’t really matter on those terms. Maybe we’ll see you at one of the workshops?

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