Category: presentation

My first webinar

webinar.jpgThis ———->
is how I imagined all of you faithful readers must have looked as you tuned in to my very first webinar, held earlier today and sponsored by Higher Ed Experts. Look at you all, hanging on every bullet point of the presentation and soaking up the wisdom I doled out like candy at a holiday parade. I can’t wait to read the evaluations.

Now that I can add “webinar presenter” to my resume, I must tell you that presenting a webinar is a rather surreal experience for someone who draws energy from a live, physically present audience. With a webinar, there are no visual cues, no way of knowing how the audience is reacting. (That’s why having an image like this one to focus on helps.) Still, webinars are the wave of the future — affordable methods of offering training and professional development — and I was happy to have an opportunity to deliver a session. It was fun.

I presented as part of Crisis Communications 2.0 Week, a series of three, one-hour presentations. I was the second presenter. Joe Hice of the University of Florida did a nice job with his overview of crisis communications. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s session: “From the Inside Out: Lessons Learned in Crisis Web Communications after the Virginia Tech Tragedy.” Michael Dame, director of web communications at Virginia Tech, is the presenter. I hope you’ll tune in, too.

Friday Five, Wednesday edition

Today was Staff Recognition Day at UMR. In keeping with the theme for the day, I dressed like a pirate and called my place of employment “UMRrrrrrr.” (I also took a camera-phone self-portrait of me in bandanna and eyepatch, which Facebookers can find on my profile there. I won’t be posting it here. So Facebook me if you dare. Arrrrr!)

Anyway, the day was filled with all manner of officially sanctioned falderal. Which means tomorrow is nose-to-the-grindstone day. That means little to no blogging here tomorrow, and then on Friday I’ll be in a meeting for most of the day. Thankfully, I’ve been plucking tidbits from the web and stashing them away like a rabid squirrel hoarding acorns. So here is an early harvest for you, a Wednesday edition of the Friday Five.

  1. Two takes on Twitter. Is the microblogging tool-of-the-moment merely a stage for self-indulgent blather (kind of like some blogs, present company excluded) or a welcome addition to the digital lifestyle? CNET brings you two views.
  2. The model commencement speaker. An English prof opines on graduation speeches. The worst commencement speakers? Politicians. The author’s favorite? Mr. Rogers. Via Arts & Letters Daily.
  3. 100 Ways to Kill a Concept. “So, you’ve got an idea. A big idea. But will your idea take flight? Not if you let your concept be killed by all the usual excuses you hear from your managers, your bosses, your spouses—excuses motivated by fear or possessiveness.” A manifesto in PDF by Michael Iva. The list of excuses is worthy of posting on a door, a la Martin Luther, and I confess that as a manager, I’ve made more than my share of them. Via Change This.
  4. Speaking of killing a concept … or in this case a sacred cow: Presentation Zen ponders, Who says we need our logo on every slide? Plus more about the good and bad of PowerPoint.
  5. Pundits are (nearly) always wrong. More wisdom from Seth Godin. Pundits miss the mark, he says, “Because they measure ‘presentation.’ Not just the PPT presentation, but the way an idea feels. How does it present. Is it catchy? Clever? Familiar? We measure whether or not it agrees with our worldview and our sense of the way the world is.”