uni week 05

Sometimes I just detest technology. I had allowed for Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C, but did not expect to have to use Plan C. Sigh.

Plan A was to use a borrowed laptop (running Debian Linux) with my presentation created in OpenOffice.org Impress. I got to the venue 1/2 hour earlier to test the laptop with the digital overhead projector, and all was good. I got to give my talk first, but for some reason the laptop would not come out of suspend mode, and when it did, it stuttered through the first three of my slides and stopped.

Plan B was to use the lecturer’s laptop, a Mac. Knowing that the images would not be included and the fonts squiffy, I created a PDF from OpenOffice.org Impress document. Whatever application was displaying the PDF on the Mac was not an Adobe product and I could not figure out how to make it full screen. So I was persuaded to use my own laptop.

I wish I had continued to use the Mac with the menu and thumbnails displayed around my seemingly complete digital presentation.

Plan C = no slides and working from printout of digital presentation. Which would have been ok, but I had not properly rehearsed working without slides so did not feel my talk was one of the best that I have done. For example, I know I spent way too much time on the background and introduction, rather than the body and conclusion of my report.

Fortunately, we are going to be marked on our report, rather than our presentation so I hopefully I can make good with the assignment due next week.

Photo by Gnangarra … commons.wikimedia.org

All this week was mostly spent on this one assignment, including interviewing two core team members of Project Numbat at two different times at Perth Zoo. I appreciate very much the time they gave me to talk about their organisation and project. It also meant that I got two more bike rides in this week in addition to the ride to Piney Lakes on Sunday (which wasn’t open), and to uni today.

Once I got my talk over and done with, it was a relatively easy and interesting afternoon as I listened to the other presentations. Topics included Olay Total Effects, Scitech Roadshow, museum@work, National Drugs Campaign, Beyond the Beaker, Tertiary Alcohol Project (TAP), SARS Public Education in Singapore, and An Inconvenient Truth.

Feedback from my peers that I will take on board is that I should have included more critique. One person mentioned that I should be more interactive and talk less in a monotone. The rest of the group thought the pace and style was natural, fluid and confident. I think my slides would have made it more interesting. Numbats are cute 🙂