The first of the two conferences went quite well. I only ran into a couple of problems and these could perhaps be solved for the next conference.
It was held at Wentworth-by-the-Sea in Newcastle NH, right next to Rye and Hampton Beach... the place was gorgeous! And the facilities were awesome, the AV folks there were very helpful in getting the equipment all connected and very accomodating.
However the costs were pricey, an internet live connect went for $150. A live AV support person was $500 for the day... I didn't need an AV person but even so, they were helpful anyway... no charge for getting the connectors and making sure I was ok to start the presentation, they were very helpful indeed and very friendly!
All in all I presented on Friday and Saturday and the headcount totals were over 100 educators, school admins and staff from Northern New England area.
The presentation on Wikipedia was well received... the major objection, or should I say concern, is the question that "how can Wikipedia content be accurate without 'experts' writing the articles?"
My response is that the articles could be checked against other online ecyclopedia content and thus one could be reassured of the quality of content. Also that there are safeguards like 'peer editing' and 'npov' which help make the articles both accurate and non-biased, or as much as a npov objective can guarantee.
If there are other good points to counteract this objection I'd be interested in putting this into the next presentation... although for this next one at McAuliffe Center Tech Conference I'll have a fraction of the time I had at the NHAWLT presentation.
One of the problems I ran into was that I lost 'mousage', I lost the mouse pointer, when I projected the laptop screen. I used two different projectors and also tried an attached USB mouse instead of the glidepoint.
But the instance of MediaWiki running on the Linspire laptop was flawless of itself... a really good example of how powerful and yet easy to use and learn to edit the wiki engine is...
OpenOffice was very handy as a presentation tool. I used the suggested presentation from French and edited it and thinned it down for the time I had to work with... I also used the screen shots of the different language Wikipedias (that was done around February)... And I incorporated the Alexa charts to compare with Britannica, Groliers, Ecyclopedia.com and refer.com so as to give some idea of Wikipedia's growth and expansion.
I also briefly explained some of the other sister projects and highlighted why the wiki software lends itself so well to collaborative projects...
The next conference is in December.
With thanks to all who helped get me get MediaWiki running on Linspire and also those that gave me good suggestions on what to say during the presentation!
Best regards, Jay Bowks [[w:en:User:ILVI]]
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 18:42:54 +0200, Ashar Voultoiz hashar@altern.org wrote:
ilooy wrote:
Hi fellow Wikipedians,
I'll be doing a presentation on Wikipedia for the McAuliffe Conference and the NHAWLT Teachers' Conference in the coming weeks and was wondering if anyone else has done a presentation to a large group... what features would be good to highlight... and what seems to work well with a group that has not heard much about the project yet.
If you have some ideas as to what might be good points to bring out please let me know. I appreciate any insights you may offer on this subject.
with sincere regards, Jay B. [[w:en:User:ILVI]]