Sarah and I attended the official OER 3 programme meeting, at Maple House in Birmingham yesterday. We had been set a challenge by David Kernohan, the programme manager, of presenting our project in two minutes, without using Powerpoint – and we had to make it “interesting and memorable.” Thanks, David…
After various discussions with the LLAS team, we abandoned mime, drama and poetry and settled on Twitter: a live Twitter presentation which would form a 3-way conversation about the project between myself, Sarah and Laurence (remotely at LLAS Southampton). This put Sarah and me right out of our comfort zone and into the fire, but after a practice session involving us being on skype, Twitter, Googlechat and SMS simultaneously, we felt ‘confident’ we could do it. Oh, and we also decided to play ‘La Mer’ by Charles Trenet in the background (thanks to Youtube). And Laurence decided to Tweet in French.
Simple. Oh, and since we didn’t know when we were presenting, we had to send time markers via Twitter and SMS out to our remote compatriots to join us at the right moment. Were we nervous? Just a bit.
I wish I could tell you that the whole thing went brilliantly and was applauded to the skies…but I can’t. We had to abandon due to a slow network connection on the presentation screen – so the audience couldn’t see our Tweets, and the default option had to be deployed (I stood up and spoke, boringly, for 2 mins instead).
At least we tried – and we know what to do to make it work next time – so watch this space for our next attempt!
Anyway, the meeting was great – we heard about lots of excellent projects and found a buddy (the Sesame project, at Oxford) to work with on our evaluation. I’m already looking forward to finding more out about their project over the next year.
Kate B
