Experiential learning in action

1. When presenting slides that depend on lots of transitions on mouseclick, don’t place your body between the radio transmitter off stage and your mouse. Took me until slide 10 to work out the problem 🙂

2. If you are organising a conference, check the building for wireless blackspots, or arrange a temporary sponsered wireless hosting for delegates – that covers the entire building. Really not impressed that wireless at $20 for 8 hr doesn’t have coverage in the main theatre.

3. Some seats in auditoria have power outlets under them. If you ask the techie guys looking after the venue, they will point them out.

4. Whipping out a power board attracts a small crowd of bloggers.

All in all a good start to the conference. Really enjoying hanging out with people I see daily online, but haven’t met in person before … and catching up with interstate folk who I haven’t seen for ages.

Andy Powell‘s keynote this morning set a high standard of technical discussion that I read about at overseas events, but not often in Australia. Yes, we should be grappling in general library forums with FRBR (Functional requirements for Bibliographic Records ) and thinking about whether an institutional based repository model allows for a global community of scholars. We should be turning our focus from enabling storage in a repository to designing an architecture that maximises discoverability on the Web.

My presentation went OK. I was happy with it and people seem to like it.

More thoughts about the conference as they gel.