Preparing to Present

This is one of those days where I am glad that presentation deadlines are not like school assignment deadlines. Part of presenting (for the conference where I am presenting) is creating a handout for the attendees to reference. This particular conference offers presenters the opportunity to submit up to a four-page handout to be included in the conference notebook. This is a good idea for a number of reasons:

1. Presenters do not have to worry about taking copies (or making copies) to hand out.
2. Attendees have a better chance to gauge whether or not they will get something out of a particular presentation.
3. For those who have to decide between attending two sessions that are being offered at the same time, the information provided can still be referenced when the conference has ended.
4. All the handouts go into the conference binder rather than being handed out as loose-leaf pages; this is better for organizational purposes because people will have all the supplementary materials for all the sessions in one location.

Well, the handouts are also due before the conference starts so that the organizers have time to print them all up and stick them in the conference notebook.

So far, this summer for me has been busy. I have been training two new student workers, and I have had to pick up the slack due to their inexperience. Not that I mind. But this has limited some of my ability to work on things such as my conference handout. I had been thinking about it, but had not put anything together. Well, the deadline for turning in the handout was yesterday, and yup, I’m a slacker. Because of all the other things I had to do yesterday, I was not going to be able to finish a handout, so I had decided not to worry about it and maybe just bring some copies of something with me to the conference.

This morning in my email at just after 7am, there was a note from the presentations coordinator RE: Last call for handouts!

The deadline was extended until 5pm this evening. Because a grace period was extended, I quickly did some research and managed to create a bibliography for my presentation; complete with examples, articles, and web resources.

As I turned in my handouts, I sent a note of thanks to the coordinator for extending the deadline. Now my attendees will have some extra resources to reference if they feel so inclined.

I do wish this conference would consider having people post these kinds of things to the conference website, and maybe they will and I just do not know it yet.

Presentations

We have been studying blogs and blogging in my social software in libraries class. It has been a thought-provoking topic for me.

The blog discussion led me to explore some ideas this morning about presenting. I have to create a presentation for a conference I’m attending in May. It will be rather boring, I’m afraid, so I have been looking into trying to spice up the content with a good graphical presentation. I have been looking into alternative methods of presenting other than using powerpoint. I found an interesting idea about using Dreamweaver instead.

By using dreamweaver, the presentation becomes less linear and more visual. My problem is that I need to start thinking about how to represent my content in a more visual context, and really think about how I’m going to make this presentation interesting.

We have been talking in class about how to make blogs more engaging and interesting, and I find that there is a high degree of cross-over between making content interesting in both blogs and presentations.

I might give Dreamweaver a chance this afternoon.