In Lieu of Lunch

   A funny thing happened while I was in Chicago. As some of you may have known, I was there to attend the Educause conference. There were some professors but mostly the conference was held for IT professionals in higher education.

I attended one session whose title was on the use of Web 2.0 applications in a college class. As I was sitting in the audience before hand, I mentioned to a college that I should really submit to present at this conference in the future since it was a topic that was close to my heart. Almost as soon as I said that, one of the conference organizers came to the podium to tell us that the speaker had not yet checked in and might not be able to present at all.

One brave soul took to the stage and began to talk about the use of del.icio.us in her classes and five minutes later, I was on the stage with my own PowerPoint in hand ready to talk about all the different ways tools like del.icio.us, Flickr, and blogs could be used through a Ning site. Of course, I walked everybody through our DC trip website.

The impromptu talk went over very well in the audience was most impressed with the work that you put in to the website. They have never seen del.icio.us tags being used in that manner, some of them had never heard of Voicethread before, and most did not know that you could put a photo stream directly from Flickr onto a website like this.

The audience appeared to learn something and I think they were delighted that it was an unscheduled talk. Because it was unscheduled we were all relaxed and at ease.

Immediately after the talk, I received invitations to speak in Wisconsin and Illinois at small colleges in those states. So I guess the moral is that you should always be prepared.