Dan, Thanks so much for your post, so chock-full of good ideas and suggestions. I think it's great advice to have people think carefully about how much technology they actually need in their presentations. I gave three presentations within 10 days (one at AJL and two the previous week at a different conference). One paper was "straight" with no visuals or technology at all (unless you count a verbal reference to J.K. Rowling's website), one was the Powerpoint presentation I gave at AJL, and the third was a different Powerpoint presentation for a panel about teaching with technology. Just to give some perspective on this situation--on that last panel, where I gave a Ppt. presentation, I was the lowest-tech person there. The rest were talking about teaching classes online and giving students in humanities courses assignments that involved making webpages.
I bring this up to demonstrate that our notions of what is high-tech and what is low-tech are apt to change quite a bit over the next few years. While it's true that some of us overuse Powerpoint (my husband is a physicist and says that everyone in his field uses Powerpoint when giving a talk--whether it's necessary or not), it's also true that sooner rather than later we will conceive of our presentations as audiovisual not just audio events. And the generation right on our heels--our college students and young adult patrons--already see such audiovisual deliveries as normal. Libraries, in particular, are being more and more associated with and sought out for technology. Thus I would lean toward advice that brings technology issues into focus rather than cautions people not to use it all (although that is always a safe bet, unless you, the presenter, gets sick or stuck in an airport!). I appreciated Sara's post yesterday that explained how she and her co-presenter had their presentation saved in different formats (I myself brought in my own laptop as well as my presentation on a CD--in addition to the paper hard copies of the slides--and I ended up using the CD on a hotel laptop due to the missing adapter I didn't know I had to bring.) I hadn't known about the Powerpoint feature "Pack and Go" that Sara described. Saving to the web is also a good idea, but does the web allow you to do the animation you might have on individual Powerpoint slides? I think this is a healthy discussion and very important to have during this time of transition. For the immediate future of this particular group, I reiterate my advice of having a "tech person" in charge of coordinating the presenters' needs with the hotel's capabilities. Steven explained that when he was the tech liaison the hotel was not forthcoming with information about what they could do. Seems like now or the very near future is a good time to start working with next year's hotel to help smooth some of the tech issues for the next conference. June C. ________________________________________ June Cummins, Assistant Professor Department of English and Comparative Literature San Diego State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the AJL =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: Hasafran @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
