Conference Presenting

This week has been yet another busy week. Part One

Virtual International Day of the Midwife

I have been doing a tiny bit of contributing towards helping Sarah Stewart organize this amazing free conference. Sarah does a fabulous job creating and organizing this online 24 hr event held on International Day of the Midwife. My contribution was small and I do wish I could have done more to help.
I decided during this event I would hold a discussion around the subject of student midwives learning in an online environment. This obviously is an area of interest to me as I work developing online content for student midwives at Griffith University in Queensland.
I didn't prepared a PowerPoint presentation for this slot. This I thought was slightly risky. I had a number of anxieties:

1. What if no one showed up?
This was a groundless worry a total of 32-35 people attended the session

2. What if no students showed up? After all the discussion was about their learning and I wanted to let them lead the session.
Another groundless worry the majority of those attending were student midwives

3. I had nothing even vaguely documented as a plan. All I had were vague thoughts in my head would anything flow?
In the end there did seem to be some sort of flow to the session and I seemed able to pick on threads of how students were feeling.

My personal drawbacks

I travelled to Brisbane as I was also presenting at the Passage to Motherhood conference and so I travelled with my iPad 2 and my netbook. The iPad doesn't support java and so couldn't support the Elluminate session. My netbook is small, light and convenient but it does have it's drawbacks for an elluminate session. I couldn't see the text box very well as it is tiny in my screen and so I couldn't keep up with the comments expressed there. Even if I could have kept up with the comments reading and keeping an eye on what is being written on the whiteboard and the text box is a challenge. If I had been at home in the office with my desktop this wouldn't have been a problem.

My highlights

Having Carole as a facilitator. She was brilliant, calm, explained how to use the tools exceptionally well to the audience and drew my attention to comments she felt were important. She was the perfect facilitator for this session. What I should have done (and I would have if I hadn't been so busy) was had a discussion with her in the days leading up to the session so I could have explained my thoughts and plans to her.

Enjoyed

I enjoyed the fact that it felt less didactic in the session, Carole and I seemed to work well together, the audience participated. All in all it felt like the session went how I wanted it to go and the ideas flowed well.

I want to thank everyone for turning up and participating and making it a useful session.
Of course a great big thanks should go to Sarah for putting on the event!



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad