Librarian by Day

I’m in Minnesota this week teaching Reference in the Digital Age at multiple locations and Get Your Game On: Using Video Games as Outreach at one location.

So far Minnesota is beautiful and everyone it super nice!

I’ll be resuming your regularly scheduled and opinionated blog posts next week.

I got into a conversation with Joshua Neff of  Library Society of the World fame (among many other things), about this topic and he said – you should blog about it.  Who am I to ignore a direct order

Here is the jist.  There are a lot of ways to present in libraryland. You can submit to a conference, which may or may not waive the registration fee and depending on the circumstances offer other compensations including but not limited to travel, hotel & meal expenses.  This ranges widely from conference to conference and person to person.  Ok I accept that situation.  I know there are opinions on which conferences do what, but I’m not addressing that now.

Then there are the other presentations/workshops where you’re asked/invited to come talk/teach/train about something.  Some of these are free to attendees (never mind membership dues) and some are fee based.

Here is my issue – if attendees are charged a fee the presenter should expect to be compensated.  I’m not saying don’t present without compensation.  I agree with Josh, I’m all for sharing information for free.  But you should ask up front if attendees be charged a fee.   If you’re going to be putting hard work into a presentation, not be compensated, and the organization is charging for attendance, you should ask for a good explanation of why not and where the money is going and what it will be used for.  Think about it like this -it’s like working a fundraiser.  You are donating time, you have the right to ask questions such as – what is the cause?  where does the money end up?

If you’ve been presenting for a while you know that Twitter has changed the audience.

• Presenting pre-Twitter – you saw a sea of faces looking at you
• Presenting during the age of Twiter – you see a sea of heads looking at laptops or smart phones

It can be disconcerting if you’re not used to it.  Pistachio has a great article on How to Present While People are Twittering covering topics such as

Benefits of the back channel to the audience- As a presenter, the idea of presenting while people are talking about you is disconcerting. But to balance that, there are huge benefits to the individual members of the audience and to the overall output of a conference or meeting

What about the speaker? Yes, presenting with the back-channel is challenging. Prepare yourself for what it will be like. We’re used to having eye contact with our audience and using that eye contact and audience reaction to measure how well we’re engaging the audience. Now when you say something brilliant, instead of nods of appreciation, there will be a flurry of tapping.

Managing the back channel – We used to suffer in silence through bad presentations. Today, the audience is now connected. They get to know that others are suffering too – and that changes the way they react.

When someone first mentioned this post about presenting – Too Much Presentation Pressure during last weeks T is for Training, my first reaction was that writer is wrong, that there isn’t enough presentation pressure.  But now I’m not so sure.  On the one hand as someone who as sat through more than her fair share of flat out bad presentations – presenter reading the PowerPoint slides, which have too much information on them,  to the audience, mediocre presentations, some good and very few great presentations, I would really love for presentation skills to improve over all.  On the other hand, am I there to be entertained or to get information?  Sure, I think it’s more likely I”ll absorb the information if I’m engaged by the presenter.  But if my true aim is to access the information and knowledge of the presenter I’m doing that even in a mediocre presentation ( I can’t say bad because I’m sure there are some examples of presentations so bad you do miss the point).  I’ve seen some brilliant people that I highly respect speak and not give a great presentation, it happens.

So do I think there should be more pressure for good presentation skills?  In a perfect world where we all had all the time we need to do all the things we want to – yes.  But in the world we have where, we’re all doing too much and struggle to keep up – my answer is no.  If I have to choose, I’ll choose that brilliant, innovative, and forward thinking people keep doing the brilliant, innovate, forward thinking things they are presenting about,  rather than spend their time polishing their presentation skills.

Of course if you would like to improve your presenting skills :

• Presentation Zen
• Talking Good : Giving Effective Presentations
• How to Give a Good Presentation
• The Public Speaking Blog
• Public Speaking Do’s and Don’ts from Lifehaker
• Consider join your local Toastmasters

My second and last presentation at the Missouri Library Association Conference.  It was initially scheduled to be in a very small room, luckily I was able to get it moved.

I’m at the Missouri Library Association Conference this week and today was the first of my two presentations.  Originally Robin & I were going to co-present (we each write half the lessons) but because she’s so crazy busy and I felt bad for bailing on her for the MaintianIT Webinar, I offered to do this one on my own.

Library Learning 2.1

Library Learning 2.0

On Friday I finished the last day of the four day Becoming 2.0 workshop.  I’m not used to spending that much time talking to people, some days I don’t talk to anyone.  So at the end I was pretty tired, but that’s passed and now I’m just excited.  There were 17 “students” and everyone of them has at least one thing they were planning to start when they got back to their library and each one was different.  The great part of Web2.0 (or the Social Web) is that you can take what works for you and your patrons, and they are doing just that.  As part of the class we had them create blogs and I really hope they keep blogging so we can follow what they are doing. 

I have to say that this was a great group of people they were all willing to share tips and tricks and suggestions with us and each other.  So thank you to all of them.  I’d also like to say thank you to MOREnet who never fails to to be a wonderful host! They really go out of their way to make everything run smoothly!