Tag: Keynote

Wordle-like Twitter screens for conference keynote presenters?

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

I’ve been at the PELeCON conference this week. After her keynote, Keri Facer mentioned in a couple of tweets that the Twitter wall being visible to the audience but not the speaker can be problematic. Everything was positive in Keri’s session, but this isn’t necessarily the case for everyone (see danah boyd example).

So it got me thinking about what I’d like, as a presenter, when doing a keynote. There’s lots of different reasons tweet about a session using the conference hashtag. For example:

To let those who aren’t there know what’s being said
To give a voice to the livestream audience (if applicable)
To provide links to what’s being discussed
For banter/puns/general merrymaking
For agreement, disagreement and questions

…and many more.

Whilst you’re presenting there’s no way you can keep up with the stream in the same way that you (potentially) can when in the audience. But it would be nice to know the gist of what people are saying in the backchannel.

Thinking about it, I casually remarked that some kind of Twitter screen in front of presenters would be useful. And if those tweets that had been retweeted (RT’d) several times could appear bigger, so much the better.

Chris Atherton mentioned this sounded a lot like Wordle and Pat Parslow riffed on the idea talking about the potential for sentiment analysis.

That idea look something like this with traffic light colours for sentiment:

The trouble is, that’s still too much to take in whilst you’re presenting. So, thinking some more, I reckon all that’s needed is the top three most RT’d tweets. Which would look something like this:

What do you think? Would this be useful?

How hard would it be to make it a reality?

A response to Donald Clark’s #altc2010 keynote

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

I’ve put this here just in case Donald doesn’t approve my comment over at his blog.

Donald, I was there in the audience at #altc2010 and, to be fair, was one of the ones giving you some stick. I was bitterly disappointed with both the content and condescending manner of the keynote. Having followed your work over the last few years I thought this was a real shame.

To respond to the points you make in your post:

1. You don’t create a ‘sense of urgency’ by criticising something and not pointing to any solutions. You were asked twice in the Q&A to do so yet merely said that it was ‘obvious’ there were a range of options. Well ‘obviously’ not!

2. Evidence to most people, including me, involves more than sticking up a few book covers and a graph. I felt, along with many people in the backchannel, that you were presenting opinion as fact. I’ll cite two examples: your criticism of the Socratic method and Maslow.

3. You don’t have to ‘cut out’ to tweet whilst listening to a keynote. I, along with everyone else there, was perfectly capable of forming an opinion in 140 characters whilst listening to you. It’s not rocket science.

4. People were annoyed by your swearing because it seemed a desperate attempt at some kind of credibility. As one tweeter put it: ‘serious dad tries to impress hipster audience’

5. You criticised *all* Physics lecturers based on your own, narrow, experiences. You did likewise with schoolteachers because you’re a school governor. Having worked in schools up until this year, I found your undifferentiated criticism and lack of nuance unjustifiable.

As you well know, the opening keynote sets the tone for the conference. I’m not sure it was the best tone to set.

Embedding a live Twitter search in Keynote 09

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

Sometimes a simple idea strikes you whilst planning a presentation. This time it was:

Why can’t I embed a live Twitter search in my slides?

Although I never used the functionality, it turns out it was entirely possible to do this in versions of Keynote before Keynote 09 using ‘Web View’.

Gah.

Typical.

Undeterred, I came across this post which provides a Keynote 08 file consisting of a single Web View-enabled slide which, happily, works in Keynote 09.

This means that during my ALT-C 2010 presentation for JISC Advance I can show tweets using the hashtags #altc10 #ja in order to get some live feedback. Note that you if you embed a search from the Twitter homepage you’ll have to replace the %23 with # and %20 with a space in the URL that’s pasted into the Keynote Inspector box.

Here’s the result:

Questions? Ask away in the comments below! 😀