Category Archives: Presentations

Conference vs. Unconference

Posted on by David
16

I’ve been thinking lately about how an unconference style event for an association could work. I’ll be posting some ideas on that later on. I thought it would be good to start by comparing the characteristics of conferences and unconferences. So, in no particular or meaningful order, here is my initial list:

Conference Unconference
Attendees Participants
Exhibitors Participants
Recruiting speakers Recruiting participants
Content planning Content facilitation
Direct marketing Word of mouth marketing
Handouts Wikis
12 month planning cycle 12 week planning cycle
Sponsorships Donations
Once a year As often as needed and desired
Large budgets Shoe-string budgets
Maximize value for organizers Maximize value for participants
Best practices Innovation
Top down Bottom up
Wisdom of experts Wisdom of crowds
Magazine coverage 2 months later Live blogging/podcasting
Slides Stories
Panels Conversations
Best practices Practicing
Hierarchy Networks
Directive methods participatory methods
Participants Contributors/creators
Speakers Conversation starters
Sharing information Learning collaboratively
Instruction Discovery
Best learning in the hallway It’s all hallway!

I’m sure a lot more can be added to this but it’s a start.

I also just created a Wikipedia entry for unconference. I was surprised it didn’t exist yet.

Update: Added a couple more items suggested by Rich Westerfield. (I changed Powerpoint to Slides.)

Update 2: Added several more contributed in the comments by Nancy White and Jeff De Cagna. Thanks Nancy and Jeff!

My First Podcast

Posted on by David
1

Jeff De Cagna and I are partnering up on a presentation for ASAE’s Great Ideas conferences where we will introduce podcasting and discuss its possible use by associations. The fun part is that we will actually record and assemble a podcast during the session by recording interviews with some of the attendees.

The Distance Learning Coalition was kind enough to invite Jeff and I to present to their group on Thursday, which was a wonderful opportunity for us to make a dry run through our material and the process of recording with a live group. Here is the podcast if you would like to listen to it. Two of the attendees decided to hijack our podcast and record their own mini show within ours, which was a lot of fun.

Jeff and I pre-recorded some sections of the podcast via a Skype call. As you can tell, I need to get a much better microphone for these things.

Presentation Zen gets all Zenny

Posted on by David
1

I mentioned the Presentation Zen blog earlier this week. Love this zen-like line I just read in a recent post about Larry Lessig’s presentation method:

The number is not important. To be concerned with the number of slides shows that our head is in the wrong place. Because…it is the wrong question to ask.

And what is the right question? You’ll have to read the post to find out.

Presentation Zen and eHub

Posted on by David
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Here are two new blogs I started reading recently that I would recommend adding to your subscription lists:

eHub

eHub is a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing.

Presentation Zen

Garr Reynolds blog on issues related to professional presentation design.

eHub is great for keeping tabs on the latest web applications and services that are fully 2005 buzzword compliant. Presentation Zen is wonderful source of ideas on how to create presentations that won’t put people to sleep.

Flying Home

Posted on by David
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I’m on my way home from the ASAE Annual meeting in Nashville after a busy week. Overall, I think the conference was a big success for ASAE and the Center and was pretty good for me as well.

I’ll post a bit more about it once I’m home and have slept for 12 hours. In the mean time, check out the conference blog that I and a bunch of other volunteers contributed to.

Blogging for Educational Associations

Posted on by David
8

I am speaking to a lunch meeting of the Consortium of Educational Association Publishers today, along with Franklin Bradley who works for the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. I will be introducing the concept of blogging and how it might be used by associations. Bradley will be doing a case study on how his association recently used an event blog tied to their annual meeting.

I am going to ask the attendees to post their feedback on the session here after we are done.

Here are a set of links for some of the sites and services I will mention during the session.

I would also like to offer a big thank you to FeedBurner, SixApart, Ranchero, and NewsGator for contributing discounts and freebies for me to give away at the session.

Update: Here is the handout from today’s session. I moved it into HTML since the PDF ended up being rather large.

Steve is a Showman

Posted on by David
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So, yesterday Steve Jobs announced that Apple will be switching to using Intel processors in their computers (abandoning the PPC chip). What I loved about how Steve announced it was that after showing several product demos and announcing the switch, he said that all the software he had shown were running on an Intel chip. I’m sure that built some confidence about how far along they are on the conversion. Nicely done!

Content Garden Hoses

Posted on by David
2

Photo by Nikolaus Büttner.
Photo by Nikolaus Büttner.

In the past I have always described the task of coherently organizing the flood of content that ASHA produces as trying to sip from a full blast fire hose. However, as I kicked around the idea with some folks at work as I prepared for a presentation, I realized that ASHA doesn’t have a single content fire hose. ASHA, which has dozens of decentralized content producing groups, actually has the equivalent of several hundred content garden hoses. Taken individually or in small groups, they are easy to manage. However, when you have 100 garden hoses pointed at you, you get just as wet as getting hit by a fire hose.

So there you have my deep thought of the day. I mainly wanted to share the photo above that I found on Flickr. I’ll be using it in my presentation. Very apt.

s5 for Web Demo

Posted on by David
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I gave a demo of our intranet yesterday. I had a few slides of background material I wanted to cover first and then jump into the site for the rest of the presentation. So, I grabbed the S5 presentation template and created an HTML-based slideshow and linked to the intranet on the last slide. The beauty of this is that I didn’t have to do any awkward application switching between powerpoint and the browser. It really made the presentation much smoother by running the whole thing through the browser.