Yesterday several dozen librarians from throughout Nebraska joined NLC staff and about a dozen library vendors at the Cornhusker Marriott in Lincoln, NE for the second annual NLC Vendor Day.
Overall I’d say it was a success. All of the sessions were well attended and many great questions were asked of the vendors about their products. Both of my sessions, Second Life and Hot Topics in Technology” were also well attended.
More specifically to me, my use of YouTube as presentation platform seemed to go over very well. All of the feedback I received indicated that it worked well and gave everyone an idea of what it was like to be in Second Life without actually going there. (That, and I didn’t use PowerPoint at all so that’s a guaranteed plus.)
From the presenter’s persepctive YouTube did leave a bit to be desired. Due to the fact that all YouTube video pages force you to scroll to see the whole video window and each time you move to the next video in a playlist you have to re-scroll, I decided to use the playlist that I embedded in my blog the previous day. This way I could scroll down once, click play, and let it run, pausing when I needed to address something specific. Unfortunately, I didn’t test this plan fully in advance. It seems that embedded playlists will play the first four videos and then force you to click over to the YouTube site to play the rest. (For purposes of ad revenue I’m sure.) So, due to this I was back in YouTube, scrolling to align future videos on the screen. It wasn’t a complete breakdown of the plan but it did catch me off guard, something I try to avoid during a presentation.
The only other comment I would make about this method of presenting is not to go over the 30 minute mark when showing video. I pretty much kept to exactly 30 but I started to get the feeling at the end that if I’d gone any longer I would have started to loose some of the attendees.
Overall I’d give the day a 9 out of 10 and my YouTube experiment an 8 out of 10. (My photos from the day can be found by clicking on the photo in this post.)
