Redhaired Future Librarian

PP Again, in Response

Stephen Cohen of Library Stuff posted a response to those who responded to his earlier post about Power Point. He does have a good point about trying blogs and wikis for presentations, and in some situations, I think I would be willing to try. It would be helpful if presentation software had web browsing capabilities built in, although a creative designer could make a “slide show” on a website and get the best of both worlds. But with a presentation like mine, which is essentially about library weblogs within a specific time span, a blog-based presentation actually adds an extra, unnecessary layer of technology. I have no reason in this particular presentation to have live websites. I am discussing design of certain weblogs, but not navigation, since as I mentioned before, a majority of the blogs are on blogspot and use standard blogspot navigation. All I really need at this stage is a reliable screenshot. (If I continue my research on these blogs and add more, there might be a time when I analyze the design and navigation more closely, and will need the ability to show that in a presentation. Also, if I do a presentation about setting up a blog, that would need internet access as well.)

As for the upcoming presentation, we don’t even know for sure whether we’ll have internet access in the presentation area. It would be a major bummer to get there and not be able to access the presentation at all. Then there are issues of display websites changing URLs, redesigning (Census Factfinder, I’m looking at you!) or simply being temporarily unavailable because of Internet gremlins. These are factors that need to be more stable before online presentation aids become widespread.

Some of the professors we support at the university use web sites quite a lot in their lectures. I think it’s a great idea for the right presentation, but I also think it introduces too much chaos at this point for people to rely on it when they don’t need it.

It’s important to bring up these issues, though. Just because people might disagree doesn’t mean that there aren’t important points to be made. We constantly have to reevaluate our methods and make sure they still work.