I learnt a really valuable lesson about the value of having your presentations uploaded to an online presentation site, such as Slideshare, recently. I have had occasion to upload three presentations recently, one of my own and two that I have been given permission to host from a recent CILIPKent training day that I organised. The one that I uploaded was called A Guerrilla Librarian, and it was the slideshow from the presentation that I gave recently at the Renaissance Learning conference in Birmingham, which arose from the blog post of the same name which you will find earlier in this blog. The other two were about developing libraries – one a university, and some public, – to incorporate social spaces. What this exercise has taught me is the numbers of people that you can reach with the simple (and free) exercise of hosting the presentation online. 26 people came to our training day; however, I advertised the slideshows on my Twitter feed, by email to the other members of the CILIPKent committee who could not make the training day, and to the members of a librarians online group to which I belong. One week after posting the links to these slideshows, this is the result: The Kent Libraries modernisation programme slideshow has had 280 views, and the Imperial College refurbishment programme has had 194 views! Now considering that there were only 26 people in the room at the time, this shows the value of online networking. Many more people have been helped by the excellent ideas in these two slideshows, than if I had not bothered to upload them and left it to the more traditional handouts to delegates. I think I have learned a valuable lesson about online presence – and I hope that CILIP learns from this too.
Filed under: Collaborative education, Web 2.0
Good stuff! It does seem that these online presentations may be the way to go, particularly when libraries have staffing problems and can’t release staff to go to these seminars. Still good to network in the flesh though!