Have you ever taken a walk on the wildside?

For some reason I always seem to get some perverse thrill out of presenting to audiences where the pear-shaped potential quotient is extremely high.

I haven’t done one in a number of years, and on Tuesday this week I gave a 1 hour PD session to our School of Nursing, Midwifery and Post-Graduate Medicine.

I had been asked to talk about “innovative” new technologies and of course the obvious out there at the moment was the old Web 2.0 stuff.

Getting the credibility

In order to get the “cred” I invited Sarah Stewart to guest facilitate with me. Sarah has a background of being a health practitioner in nursing and midwife along with working as an educator and researcher in higher education (in New Zealand).

The pitch relevance

The angle we took was about lifelong learning, extending professional networks through “non-traditional” means, and use these networks to create connections and relationships there by staying on the cutting edge of industry practice.

Source: Lynetter

The method

Given Sarah was now in Queensland (a smaller time lag than NZ thankfully), we went with plan C (plans A and B came a cropper at point of testing – Elluminate and Ustream – for one reason or another), Skype by video.

Note: you can NEVER NEVER test too much with this kind of presentation prior to the event

The development

Sarah and I both used Mindmeister, a free collaborative online mapping tool to plan this session. It can be used both synchronously and asynchronously to develop a data set / picture.

You may need to open this image further to see the complexity of the planning. Mindmeister allowed us to make notes and also add links out to sites we thought may be of value to the audience during the presentation.  It was invaluable in getting a sense of where we were going to go with this presentation and what we might possibly cover.

The testing and planning

Having been caught short at venues before – ie turning up and having tech failure / internet failure etc, I made it a mission to visit the Perth Entertainment Centre a week before to trial the connection, speed, bandwidth etc etc and work out what was and wasn’t going to work.

Glad I did. Elluminate bombed out. I have NEVER seen such issues with Elluminate ANYWHERE on ANY connection as I did there. We just could not get through the file wall with it (but could with everything else – go figure).  IT came down and spent 90 minutes with me testing. They even took me off the conference network where clients pay, and put me on the staff network with still no joy. Finally they (not a clue how they did this) made my OWN network with still no love. We tried every config setting in Elluminate and the lappy but nadda. Interestingly I STILL say it was them. How can you NOT  have port numbers to open up when it was so obviously looking for open ports /sigh….bygones…

What I insisted on for the day was cat 5 cabling. I knew I was going to be loading up the connection and wanted to ensure real stability (been there caught with that previously).  I was promised such, and happily I thought it was going to be smooth(ish) sailing.

Presentation day [Pre-delivery]

….the good…..

I arrived 2 hours early. Yes…..paranoia of technical failure is a big motivator.

It took nearly half an hour to get the IT guy to come get me sorted (we had arranged a pre-time for setup outside of the room). I was set up on a bar (unfortunately empty), but that wasn’t an issue.

Everything ran like a dream – connections, opened all my tabs on browser, the presentation was working fantastic – I could hear and see Sarah.

Unfortunately I hadn’t used the wireless headset in a while and had forgotten to load the drivers. Never mind I had a back up plug in one.

….the bad…..

The room broke at 10 am for morning tea. I had a 30 min window to unplug the computer, move to the room, plug it in and pop the ethernet cable in for my “stable” connectivity.

It appears IT hadn’t patched through the cat 5 cable to the port.  At 10.27 am (3 mins before kickoff), there was a room full of people, sweat pouring off my brow; me hovering anxiously to the IT dude (who wasn’t looking happy either); I hadn’t connected to Sarah in the room;

I was still wanting the wireless headset, but was now doomed to be confined to the laptop on the podium, but, we go there at 10.35 – only 5 minutes late.

….the best laid plans of mice and men hey?

The delivery

Well, I think it went ok – all things considered – here is a summary of my reflections.

a) they could at least hear Sarah clearly (we canned video early in – bandwidth obviously created issues)

b) it generated a lot of questions and internal group discussion around wellness, network support of wellness, educational value, organisational restrictions and limitations on technology, use & issues as a health practitioner, networking

c) there were still groups of conversations going when I left (always a good thing in my opinion)

d) Sarah was amazing. She is articulate, funny, intelligent, keen mind and the perfect person for this audience with her experience and industry background

e) I would have liked more time to look at some of the tools out there (waylaid by questioning – but that’s a good thing)

f) To me most of the room was engaged with session (although this might not be the case)

g) I need to get that damn wireless headset driver sorted – its caught me out before. I like to work the room and walk miles in a presentation – being stuck at a podium kinda sucked

h) the network issue from 10 am – 10.35 am pretty much had my brain frying and running out my ears. Although I planned for every single contingency I could – having 100% of an presentation running via an “unknown” connection is kind of scary (and a rush….and scary again). I did feel rattled at the beginning and had major dry mouth – weird, because public speaking doesn’t worry me – i think it was the tech probs that rattled me

The outcomes?

Well, not sure really. I feel that as long as we opened the minds and exposed people to new thoughts and new ideas / ways of working then it can only be a positive outcome.

It will be interesting to see if we get anyone from this particular School participate in our 23 Things @ ECU: Learning 2.0 program later in the semester

Source: Lynetter

…and Sarah?

Sarah has reflected on the experience from her perspective if you would like to read it!

Thank you Sarah